Facil­i­ties are a huge deal as you lay the ground­work for your pub­lic launch.  Here are some things to con­sider in this area.

Stay portable/stay nim­ble — Obvi­ously you want to do things with excel­lence but as you look for a facil­ity the more portable and nim­ble you are the more options you will have.  As we looked at poten­tial rental facil­i­ties, our expe­ri­ence was that places were very reluc­tant to give us access to any­thing more than very basic meet­ing room usage.  Access to things like equip­ment, stor­age space, addi­tional rooms, etc was usu­ally very lim­ited or com­pletely unavail­able but because we were flex­i­ble with how much space we needed, we were able to con­sider more options.

Start look­ing early - The process for secur­ing a meet­ing space will most likely take A LOT longer than you expect.  At LPC, we looked at 36 dif­fer­ent loca­tions before we were able to find some­thing that we felt best met our needs.  Nego­ti­a­tions and con­tracts also take a lot of time to put in place so give your­self plenty of mar­gin.  It is much bet­ter to find some­thing early and set a start date sev­eral months down the road than it is to be under the pres­sure of try­ing to find some­thing a few weeks before your sched­uled launch date.

Be patient with your launch — Start slow and spend as much time as you need to build a good foun­da­tion in the core build­ing phase.  Slower is a lit­tle frus­trat­ing when you are excited about the vision but our expe­ri­ence is that it is well worth it in the long run.  Once you launch weekly wor­ship gath­er­ings, there are cer­tain things that have to hap­pen every week (ie. mes­sage prep, band rehearsal, set up and tear down, etc) and these are big time and energy drains that can take your focus off of some of the crit­i­cal processes in the begin­ning, espe­cially if you are plant­ing alone or with a very small team.  So be cau­tious not to let excite­ment drive you to run ahead too quickly.

Be cre­ative with where you look for space — Some of the places that we inves­ti­gated and con­sid­ered: schools, com­mu­nity cen­ters, movie the­aters, other churches, out­door pavil­ions, office com­plexes, indus­trial ware­houses and vacant retail stores.  We even­tu­ally landed in a weekly rental agree­ment in a com­mu­nity cen­ter for our first location.