Running weekly live operations across up to three sites

The shape of the work

A live event every week with a fixed start time, staffed almost entirely by volunteers with day jobs. Everything upstream — planning, scheduling, rehearsal, setup, and a backup plan for the week someone doesn't show — has to hold up against a team that changes constantly.

• Own the weekly production calendar and the scheduling system behind it, for a team ranging from about 12 to 50 people.
• Own a ~$10,000 budget covering subscriptions, equipment and event costs, with influence over roughly $16,000 across two departments.
• Coordinate with 10–12 of a 20-person staff.
• Build the documentation and training that lets non-technical volunteers run technical systems without me there.

The part worth asking about

I was hired to cover two sites. When a colleague changed roles, all three fell to me. I ran it, coordinating volunteer leaders at each location and rotating to wherever the gap was widest that week.

It worked, and it wasn't sustainable. I said so with the operating data rather than as a complaint: the model depended on thin volunteer benches staying healthy, which isn't something you can plan around. Then I argued for reducing my own scope. It came down in two hiring steps — a part-time worship leader for one site, then a hire who took the satellite campuses entirely — and I made the case for both.

Scale, for context

Combined attendance ran roughly 800–900 while I covered all three sites; the organization is around 1,300 now. My current site runs about 150 on a Sunday with roughly 7 volunteers. These are small-team numbers, which is exactly where one person owns planning, budget, procurement and delivery at once.