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HARRY’S TEARDOWN: Ministry Brands is the leading SaaS platform for the U.S. church technology market. The corporate family was spun out of Community Brands in November 2021 and immediately recapitalized by Reverence Capital Partners as a majority investor.

Chris Bacon was named CEO in 2023. The company has been a serial acquirer — assembling a portfolio that includes Shelby Systems, Logos, Faithlife, Amplify, and a separate background screening entity called Shield Screen, LLC, headquartered in Bixby, Oklahoma.

Today the consolidated business serves more than 95,000 customers across four distinct product lines: ChMS (church management software), payments, digital engagement tools (apps, streaming, communications), and background screening.

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About the Market: U.S. religious organizations received $146.5 billion in donations in 2024 — the single largest recipient category of all U.S. charitable giving at 23 percent of every dollar donated. There are approximately 370,000 religious congregations in the U.S., of which roughly 332,000 are Protestant and other Christian congregations.

Eighty-six percent of those churches now use some form of ChMS, sixty-seven percent use a mobile app, and forty-five percent currently use AI in ministry operations. This is not an emerging market. This is a mature, multi-billion-dollar vertical software market in a structural displacement and consolidation phase — and Ministry Brands is the broadest-stack platform in it.

The Customer: The published JD describes the audience as “faith-based, non-profit and for-profit organizations.” That is true the way “we sell beverages” is true of Coca-Cola. The overwhelming majority of revenue comes from churches — the public resource center on MinistryBrands.com is almost entirely church-focused (sermon series, giving, volunteer management, small groups).

The fastest-growing and highest-LTV segment is large multi-site churches with 1,000+ attendees, which look more like mid-market enterprise software buyers than small nonprofits. The median U.S. congregation averages 65–70 adults. Ministry Brands’ ICP skews substantially larger than the median — and a candidate who walks into the interview without grasping that segmentation reality will get exposed quickly.

From a career standpoint, there’s a lot to love about this opportunity. Namely …

First, the title says SVP but the scope is CMO. The role reports to the Chief Revenue Officer, sits on the Senior Leadership Team, and owns the full marketing P&L: brand, product marketing, demand generation, lifecycle marketing, digital growth, ABM, and brand architecture across the acquired portfolio. There is no CMO title above this position. The winner walks in functioning as the de facto CMO and earns the title within 18 months.

Second, this is a value-creation playbook ahead of an exit event. The combination of a 2021 spin-out, a PE recap, a new CEO appointed in 2023, and a sitting SVP of M&A Strategy on the leadership team is the exact corporate signature of a company being repositioned for a sale or growth-equity transaction. The candidate who understands PE value-creation metrics — pipeline velocity, CAC payback, NRR, Rule of 40 — will have an enormous advantage over the candidate who thinks this is a brand-awareness job.

Third, the platform consolidation thesis is the marketing job of a lifetime. With 86 percent of U.S. churches already using ChMS, this is not a category-creation play. The marketing motion that wins is platform displacement and consolidation — making “how many point solutions are you paying for that Ministry Brands replaces in one contract?” the dominant purchase criterion in the buyer’s mind.

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There’s no single competitor that offers the full stack — not Planning Center, not Pushpay, not the merged ACS Technologies / Think Ministry / Higher Ground combination, not Salesforce NPSP. The SVP who reframes the buyer conversation around total cost of stack vs. per-tool selection unlocks the largest single revenue lever in this business. (At least by my reckoning.)

About the Leadership. This is a PE-backed roll-up with a meaningful debt structure — Ares Capital Corp and Silicon Valley Bank both appear on the corporate banking record, which is consistent with a leveraged-buyout capital stack. The CEO is a publicly named operator who took the seat to rebuild the company post-spin.

The Senior Leadership Team includes specialized SVPs across M&A, HR, Support, IT, and Core Solutions. The marketing organization the new SVP will inherit already has a Director of Marketing Automation and a VP of Digital in seat — meaning the role isn’t a build-from-scratch. It’s a sophistication upgrade.

Which leads me to the Napkin Math (I’m ballparking, here):

D&B reports the legal operating entity (Site Organic, L.L.C.) at $19.67M revenue and the Global Ultimate (Ministry Brands Parent, LLC) at $45.04M. Both figures are almost certainly D&B underestimates. D&B systematically under-reports revenue for private PE-backed roll-ups where financials are consolidated at the parent level and the operating entities file thin individual records.

The arithmetic that matters:

95,000 customers × estimated $2,000–$4,000 ARPU per customer (consistent with SMB-weighted vertical SaaS pricing across ChMS, payments, apps, and screening) = $190M–$380M implied consolidated ARR
Revenue per employee at $45M ÷ 700 global employees = $64K, which is implausibly low for a SaaS business at this maturity
Revenue per employee at $200M ÷ 700 global employees = $286K, which is consistent with a mature, profitable vertical SaaS business

Inference: consolidated revenue most likely sits in the $150M–$350M range. Anyone using the D&B legal-entity figure as the true scale of this business will undersell what they’re walking into.

NOTE: This is the first one of these teardowns for which I have taken a yeoman’s swipe at the math. Any world-class marketing candidate will eventually try to unpack the math. If your numbers differ from mine, hit me up. I could always use more education. This math is not Gospel …

Opportunity #1 — Platform Consolidation Math

The dominant marketing thesis. Reposition Ministry Brands from a portfolio of products sold separately into a consolidation play that replaces 3–5 point solutions per customer with one contract.

The arithmetic for that:

95,000 customers × an estimated 20 percent expansion adoption rate × $2,000 incremental ARPU per added product = $38M incremental ARR
At 70 percent SaaS gross margin = ~$26.6M Year 1 incremental gross profit

This single repositioning is the largest revenue lever available to the SVP and the lever most directly tied to the EBITDA-multiple expansion that the PE owner will reward at exit.

Opportunity #2 — Multi-Site Enterprise ABM Math

There are an estimated 5,000–8,000 U.S. churches with 500+ weekly attendees. These accounts behave more like mid-market enterprise software buyers than small nonprofits, and they spend 5–10x more on technology than SMB churches. There is no public evidence of a structured ABM program targeting them today.

The arithmetic best guess:

200 net-new enterprise account conversions per year × $15,000 average annual contract value = $3M incremental ARR
At 70 percent SaaS gross margin = ~$2.1M Year 1 incremental gross profit

A Year-1 base case across all five mapped opportunities (platform consolidation, enterprise ABM, generational re-engagement content, Planning Center displacement, and Shield Screen lifecycle bundle) sums to approximately $31.5M in incremental gross profit. That is the headline number this SVP will be measured against.

Again, all of these numbers are my own best guess from publicly available information. Your own mileage may vary. Stock analysts get it wrong all the time on Wall Street. The same thing applies here. Do your own math.

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About the Role

The SVP of Marketing will lead Ministry Brands’ marketing strategy and execution across brand, product marketing, demand generation, lifecycle marketing, and digital growth. The role reports to the Chief Revenue Officer and serves on the Senior Leadership Team. Your mission will be to:

materially compress CAC and expand NRR through a sharper demand-and-lifecycle engine;
reposition the company around a platform-consolidation thesis that displaces point-solution competitors and lifts per-customer revenue; and
build a brand architecture and governance system across the acquired product portfolio that scales through the next wave of M&A and prepares the marketing organization for an exit event.

THIS IS NOT A TURNAROUND. The platform is at scale, the customer base is large and growing, and the team you will inherit already includes a sitting Director of Marketing Automation and a VP of Digital. From what I could tell, this is not a build-from-scratch role. This is a sophistication upgrade ahead of a value-creation event. The candidate who frames the work that way will out-interview every candidate who frames it as a brand-awareness job.

🟥 JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig.com™

Areas of Oversight

Revenue & Pipeline Marketing

Own marketing’s contribution to pipeline, bookings, and revenue growth, with weekly attribution dashboards that withstand CRO and CFO scrutiny.
Partner with Sales and Revenue Operations to improve funnel performance, segmentation, and named-account coverage; institute pipeline-velocity and CAC-payback as the headline accountability metrics.
Establish marketing-sourced and marketing-influenced revenue as primary scoreboard items reviewed at every Senior Leadership Team meeting.
Build the explicit budget defense for non-pipeline investments (brand architecture, content authority, lifecycle expansion) in Rule-of-40 language that survives quarterly EBITDA-aware budget reviews.

Multi-Brand Product Marketing & Positioning

Define market positioning, messaging, and competitive differentiation across the four product lines (ChMS, payments, digital engagement, background screening).
Own segmentation and persona work with the discipline of a B2B SaaS practitioner — firmographic, behavioral, and qualitative inputs synthesized into ICPs that marketing, sales, and customer success share as a single source of truth.
Architect the platform-consolidation narrative as the dominant master message: replace the per-product features race with the total-cost-of-stack reframe.
Equip the sales organization with displacement-against-incumbent playbooks (specifically against Planning Center on UX-loyal accounts and against Pushpay on payments-led accounts) including switch-cost economics, migration playbooks, and sales-conversation talk tracks.

Demand Generation — Two Tracks, Not One

Architect a dedicated enterprise ABM track for multi-site churches with 500+ weekly attendees: named-account selection, multi-touch buying-group orchestration, executive engagement programs, deal-acceleration plays, and intent-data integration.
Architect a parallel high-velocity, low-touch acquisition track for SMB churches under 200 attendees: inbound-led, content-driven, marketing-automation-heavy, with self-serve buying paths where product fit allows.
Build the integrated demand engine across digital, events, content, and partner channels — with explicit experimentation and kill-criteria discipline so the team optimizes toward incrementality, not impressions.
Implement clean attribution architecture (multi-touch, post-purchase confirmation, holdout-tested incrementality) so the CRO and CFO can confidently allocate additional spend to channels that demonstrably drive pipeline.

Customer Lifecycle, Expansion, Retention

Own lifecycle marketing across acquisition, conversion, expansion, and retention — with NRR as a primary scoreboard metric tied to marketing’s compensation outcomes.
Build the automated expansion engine that triggers cross-product offers (Shield Screen background screening, payments, mobile app) at defined customer milestones without requiring product-team dependencies to ship.
Establish a customer-marketing function that converts the existing 95,000-customer base into the company’s most efficient acquisition channel through advocacy, referrals, and case-study production.

Digital Acquisition & Web-Driven Revenue

Own the strategy for digital acquisition and web-driven revenue growth, including the corporate web property, paid media, SEO, and answer-engine visibility (LLM citations, schema, entity authority).
Partner with Product and Engineering to optimize the digital buying journey — onboarding flows, conversion paths, free-trial and self-serve mechanics where product fit allows.
Establish performance metrics for digital revenue contribution, customer acquisition cost by channel, and lifetime value by acquisition cohort.

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Brand Architecture & Acquisition Integration

Establish scalable brand architecture and governance across the company’s acquired product portfolio: a defensible decision tree across master brand, endorsed brand, and freestanding brand structures, with explicit sunset and migration playbooks for future acquisitions.
Drive market visibility through thought leadership, media engagement, industry partnerships, and executive visibility programs — with an emphasis on becoming the category authority on church growth in the Millennial / Gen Z generational re-engagement window.
Build the integration playbook that absorbs the next acquisition’s brand and customer base into the Ministry Brands master architecture without destroying the equity the acquired brand brings.

Marketing Leadership & AI-Enabled Operating Cadence

Recruit, develop, and lead a high-performing marketing organization built around revenue-squad pods (growth, creative, retention, analytics) with shared KPIs and weekly business reviews.
Build deep partnerships with Sales, Product, Customer Success, Revenue Operations, Finance, and the office of the CEO — the SVP without a CMO above them survives by building peer-level alliances across the C-suite, not just by managing down.
Continuously evaluate emerging technologies — particularly AI-enabled marketing platforms — for compounding capability gains, not point-tool wins. The discipline is to instrument personalization uplift with holdouts, build unified ICP knowledge bases that the entire revenue team queries on demand, and deploy agentic workflows for lifecycle triggers that don’t require additional headcount to scale.

🟥 JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig.com™

Qualifications

Education & Certification

Bachelor’s degree in marketing, business, or a related field; or equivalent demonstrated experience scaling a B2B SaaS marketing organization.

Functional Competencies — Skills, Knowledge & Experience

12+ years of B2B marketing leadership experience, with a meaningful portion of that tenure inside SaaS, fintech, or vertical software companies. Prior experience inside a PE-backed environment — and specifically, marketing through a value-creation cycle ahead of an exit event — is a strong differentiator.
Demonstrated success driving pipeline and revenue growth in close partnership with sales leadership. The candidate must be able to walk through, in a screening conversation, a specific prior example with hard numbers: opening pipeline value, marketing-sourced contribution, conversion rates by stage, average deal size, and the attribution methodology used to defend the math under CFO scrutiny.
Deep operational fluency in B2B demand generation across digital, events, content, partner channels, and ABM. Hands-on experience designing and running both an enterprise ABM motion (named accounts, multi-touch buying-group orchestration, intent-data integration) and a high-velocity SMB motion (marketing-automation-heavy, self-serve where applicable) — and the judgment to know when to apply each.
Strong product marketing experience inside a multi-product or multi-brand organization, including segmentation, persona development, competitive positioning, and brand architecture decisions. Direct experience marketing through an M&A integration cycle is a significant advantage.
Strong analytical orientation with hands-on experience managing marketing performance, attribution methodologies (multi-touch, post-purchase confirmation, incrementality testing), ROI defense in EBITDA-aware budget conversations, and Rule-of-40 fluency at the company level.
Demonstrable AI fluency at the systems-design level, not the tool-list level. The bar: the candidate can articulate how they would use AI to compress the time-from-question-to-decision for a specific marketing problem (ICP refinement, content production, lifecycle trigger design, attribution reconciliation) — and explain how they would instrument and verify the resulting uplift. Tool-name-checking (“we use ChatGPT”) without a system design behind it does not clear this bar. Even Anthropic and OpenAI continue to hire experienced marketers at $300K–$400K+ specifically because the human judgment layer — ICP, narrative, segmentation — cannot be commoditized by their own models.
Experience leading brand strategy within a multi-product or multi-brand organization, including the architectural discipline to make defensible decisions about master-brand vs. endorsed-brand vs. freestanding-brand structures across an acquired portfolio.
Working command of the marketing technology stack typical of mature B2B SaaS: marketing automation platform, CRM (Salesforce expected), ABM platforms (6sense / Demandbase / equivalent), intent-data sources, attribution tooling, and the analytics surface that ties them together.

Leadership & Management / Behavioral Competencies

Proven track record building and leading high-performing marketing organizations of 15+ professionals across functional sub-disciplines (demand gen, product marketing, lifecycle, content, brand, operations).
Ability to lead through influence across Sales, Product, Customer Success, Revenue Operations, and Finance — without formal authority over any of those functions.
Cross-functional decision-making and communication style that earns the trust of a CRO, a CEO, and a CFO simultaneously. The SVP without a CMO above them survives by being the marketing voice every other C-suite member wants in the room.
Comfortable operating with PE-backed budget discipline — defending marketing spend in Rule-of-40 language, killing underperforming programs quickly, and reallocating to proven winners without ego.

Personal Characteristics

High personal integrity, self-directed, and an outstanding written and verbal communicator.
Entrepreneurial orientation, intellectual curiosity, and a genuine appetite for the operational rebuild work that comes with a post-spin, post-recap company on the path to exit.
Resilience and pattern recognition for the political dynamics of a multi-stakeholder PE-backed environment with a sitting SVP of M&A Strategy on the leadership team.
Vertical empathy — a willingness to learn the operating reality of church technology buyers (volunteer coordination, giving cycles, denominational variation, sermon-series workflows) deeply enough to write content and build positioning that resonates with the actual customer, not the abstracted “nonprofit IT buyer.”
Bias for action over analysis-paralysis; comfortable with rapid iteration and ambiguous mandates.
Coachable, non-defensive, and committed to consistent execution as the primary trust-building mechanism with the CEO and the PE board.

To apply for this job please visit ministrybrands.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com.

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