August 28, 2025 – Church Marketing Brady Sticker and Motivational Publisher Justin Sachs

28 Aug August 28, 2025 – Church Marketing Brady Sticker and Motivational Publisher Justin Sachs

Brady Sticker – Founder of ChurchCandy Marketing – Transcript Here

We take online views and turn them to butts in pews, using social media
ads to make that happen. And so that’s applicable to businesses, churches,
really anyone. You can use the tools we have today to grow your organization.

Brady Sticker is an American author, speaker, and digital marketing strategist best known for his work helping churches grow through targeted online outreach. He is the founder and CEO of ChurchCandy Marketing, a digital agency specializing in Facebook™ and Instagram™ advertising for churches, and the creator of the widely adopted “Plan Your Visit” system – a proven strategy that consistently brings 20–50 new guests per month to churches across the United States. With a background that blends pastoral ministry and professional marketing expertise, Sticker has personally overseen $6M+ in Facebook ad spend, impacting over 350 churches and earning recognition from respected figures like Dennis Yu of BlitzMetrics and industry platforms such as Seven Figure Agency, where he received the “Ninja Hack” award for innovation. Brady began his career as a youth pastor, serving alongside his wife Sara to help launch Vibrant Church in The Woodlands, Texas – a congregation that still welcomes dozens of new guests each month thanks to the strategies he implemented. His unique ability to speak the language of both pastors and marketers stems from a dual academic track: Associate of Practical Theology, Christ for the Nations Institute & Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing, Dallas Baptist University. He later co-managed campaigns for over 1,000 small businesses before launching ChurchCandy in 2021 – transforming it from a side hustle to a full-scale operation within a year.





Justin Sachs – Founder of Motivational Press and Author of Skyrocket: Your Sales, Your Business, Your Success

The only thing that’s kept us alive as a publishing house, against the top publishing houses in the world, is our ability to innovate and change our strategies very quickly. When the big publishers take five years to change their strategies, we move fast.

Justin Sachs published his first book at 18, and now has published several more, 5 of which are best sellers! He owns 8 companies, including Motivational Press which has published 50 authors! His international speaking tour, The Ultimate Success Tour, cemented his position as one of the world’s leading leadership and peak performance speakers. Having advised and trained hundreds of thousands of people internationally, Justin is a highly regarded business expert on effectiveness, peak-performance, and marketing tactics. Justin has produced 3 movies including his best-selling Achieve Your Ultimate Success. He has written on topics ranging from leadership to business growth. He has been featured in hundreds of media outlets throughout the world including MSNBC, CNBC, Fox News, and Yahoo Finance and alongside world-renowned business experts including Brian Tracy, John Assaraf, Mark Victor Hansen, Loral Langemeier and many others.

Transcript

Here is Brady’s transcript …

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Entrepreneurship, small business, church marketing, digital marketing, social media ads, church planters, launch team, retargeting campaigns, coffee with a pastor, interest parties, text message campaigns, revenue generation, church growth, niche marketing, business strategies.

Jim  00:26

hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for startups radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there riding the ride of roller coaster fun of being an entrepreneur. We have a fantastic show for you today, and I am really excited, and I think you will learn a lot. Brady sticker is with us. He is a marketing expert with a niche. And, you know, I love the niches, because that’s where the riches are. He specializes in church marketing, building new churches, getting dying churches to rebound anything in the religion space. Fascinating. How he got into that niche and what he’s doing with it. Now, I think you will be really, really impressed. He has to deal with all of the normal issues, branding, value, competition, all of that resale value, believe it or not, it is just fascinating. After that, Justin sacks is with us as a greatest hits repeat, getting him up on the new server. Justin built a publishing company, I think, starting very young. I don’t remember 21 or something like that, and we filmed this right before his honeymoon. So it was a fun interview. I love what he has to share and his advice on getting books published and all of that. So it’s a great show. We’re gonna get started in just a second with Brady. You

Jim  02:04

we are back and again. Thank you so much for being with us. You know, one of my favorite expressions is that there’s riches in the niches. I just love that. And I love the idea that as entrepreneurs, we should be looking at niches in a very, very special way. My next guest has done that maybe better than anyone else. Please welcome Brady sticker to the show. He is the founder and CEO of a company called church candy marketing that is specializing in building new churches. I think he’s built 1000 churches or something. I saw that number. It also has a new book out called Launch big, the complete Digital Marketing Guide for church planters. Build your launch team. Launch big and get new guests every Sunday. Brady,

Brady  02:49

welcome to the show. How you doing? Jim? I’m doing fantastic.

Jim  02:53

I in a million years, had never thought that there was a church planter, a church marketing guy. It’s never occurred to me?

Brady  03:02

Yeah, man, like you said, there’s riches in the niches. Myself. I was on staff at a church. I helped my church with some social media things. It really blew up, and then my DMs just got flooded with other pastors wanting, wanting help with the same thing. And that’s kind of how our business got started.

03:21

Very cool. Do you have competition?

Brady03:25

Believe it or not, we do. I’ve been very good at marketing myself in the church world, and that has almost stemmed more competition. But yeah, there were a couple of people doing social media and website things for churches before myself, but we’ve, we’ve, unfortunately created some of our competitors.

Jim  03:50

I did that too with my first business, and you still see the the signs of it. You ever driven, and you might be involved, driven past a church so they have Lego camp coming, and all those tech camps that are around now.

Brady  04:06

Yeah, I started that. Wow. You know,

Jim  04:10

I ended up with 89 camps around the country and 15,000 kids every day.

Brady04:15

And you guys would host these in schools and churches and things like that.

Jim  04:19

MIT, Georgetown, UCLA, Stanford, SMU University. So we were at Rice in Houston. You’re in Houston, aren’t you? Yeah, in Houston. We were at Rice there.

04:33

Oh, yeah. So that’s awesome, man,

Jim  04:35

very similar to what you’re doing, just a niche that no one had thought of. So when I think about your business, business,

Brady  04:42

I think about Charles Stanley, you know the name? Yeah, I know the name. He was

Jim  04:51

one of the big time TV guys and had a place here in Atlanta, huge, gorgeous downtown church. And it came. Out that he had not been living with his wife for 20 years or something. He’d been living in the guest house, and his son broke off Andy, and we went with Andy and watched that church grow, and it became 1000 person church almost overnight. And was really interesting. And it was interesting to watch sandy or watch Andy disappear. You know, he used to be very accessible and all around, and now you can’t get within 100 feet of him. Just interesting to watch it grow. It kind of sad though. We don’t go to church there anymore because you can’t get anywhere near him now. It is all political, just so much, so much people involved in God’s business. You know, that’s what I hate about church. Is there so many people involved? You know what? I mean?

Brady  05:47

Yeah, that’s the thing is, you know, I’ve got some friends that have stepped away from faith and stepped away from church, and they blame church hurt, and because of that, they don’t believe in God anymore. And what I tell them is

06:00

hurt church hurt is whenever you’re

Brady  06:03

hurt by the church, you’re you’re upset with the politics, you’re upset with the people, and someone did you wrong? Yeah, yeah. And in what I often tell them is like, look, you know, we serve a perfect God, but the church is ran by imperfect people.

Brady  06:17

Very true. So do you deal with new churches, or do you help grow existing or both?

Brady  06:25

Yeah, so we work with new churches and existing churches. A new church is what you would call, like a church plant. So these are like, think of like tech startups, like new companies, but instead of businesses, they’re churches. And there’s actually a lot of different church planting networks that help start new churches. You know, do you think there’s a lot of little suburbs and developing areas across the country? And you know, these places don’t have churches, and so this is where these church planters will come in and start a church in a city that’s seeing a lot of growth and development. So we work with a lot of those guys, and that’s what the book launch big is all about, is how to use social media and digital to, you know, reach people with a new church. And then we work with some churches that are 1500 years old, those people, you know, those churches need social media too, just as much as the new guys,

Brady  07:21

yep. And

Jim  07:25

it would seem to me, and I don’t mean this is a negative thing, it seems to me, Brady, that everything you’re doing is what we’re talking about. For any entrepreneur you mentioned Silicon Valley tech startups, you are doing the exact same thing, right? Isn’t that true?

07:40

Yeah. Man,

Jim  07:42

100% in helping these churches become entrepreneurs.

Brady  07:47

Yeah. And it’s funny, you say that I get a lot of pushback from people in the church world. They say the church isn’t a business. It shouldn’t be treated like a business, and while I agree with them in some aspects that you know, churches shouldn’t be all about profits and the bottom lines of budgets, while that is an aspect of running any organization, you know, what we focus on is, I tell people we get we take online what is we take online views and turn them to butts and pews, using social media ads to make that happen. And so that’s applicable to businesses, churches, really, anyone. You can use the tools that we have today at our exposal to grow your organization, whether it’s a business or a nonprofit like a church.

Jim  08:31

All right, so do you go in and try to brand the preacher and figure out a stick a unique selling point for him? This guy is so funny, you’re gonna lie. He tells jokes every other minute. Yeah, do you go through what I would go through when I was launching a new product?

Brady  08:50

So we, we typically don’t do that. We try to partner with churches that already have their identity and their brand built. The problem is they just don’t know how to get that in front of people. And so we’ve specialized in social media ad campaigns that will target people that live in their city, that are looking for a church. And so one of the things that we do like to do is do specific retargeting campaigns. So this is like when you go to Amazon and you’re looking for a new laptop, and then you go to Instagram or Facebook and you’re like, oh my goodness, I keep seeing ads for the laptop I was just looking at. Have you seen stuff like that

Jim  09:29

before? Jim, oh yeah, I hate that. I’m convinced that it’s what you said. But also, if you have Alexa in the house and are talking about birthday presents and blah, blah, blah, you start seeing ads because you’re spying on us, and you start seeing ads for that, yeah, exactly you’re pregnant before anyone else

09:49

does Right, right?

Brady  09:52

So we help churches set those up, or we set them up on behalf of churches, ad campaigns targeting people in their city and. And we’ll do a lot of that retargeting, and because we’re working with churches and people will sometimes maybe over spiritualize it and be like, Man, I just feel like God is calling me to this church, because every time I turn around in Instagram, I keep seeing you and

Jim  10:17

Brady, that’s

10:21

how do you feel about that? So

10:23

here’s here’s my perspective on that.

Brady  10:26

Is we are

Brady  10:29

using the tools available to us, and all we’re doing the Bible talks about planting us. Yep, I believe in that, and the Bible talks about planting seeds. And so the thing is, all we’re doing is just putting the word out about the church, and it’s we know that it’s going to be shown to people multiple times, and then we just let Holy Spirit do the rest. And it is crazy that I’ve had people come up to my church and like, I was used to be a pastor on staff, but now I just do this full time, and they’re like, Man pastor, Brady, like, I just knew God was calling me here, and I believe him. I said, Hey, man, bro. Like, I believe God’s calling you here too. Like, I believe God can use social media, just like he can use people, just like he can use anything.

11:14

Yes, I totally agree. I love your honesty.

Jim  11:19

The coolest thing about being an entrepreneur, Brady, in my opinion, is that it uses the gifts, the basket of skills that God gave you, more than anything else. Could absolutely comment on that for me, please. What are your thoughts on godly entrepreneurship, and does God like entrepreneurs? Brady,

Brady  11:41

I would say, Yeah, I definitely think God likes entrepreneurs. In the church world, people will get all mad about people that make money, and they’ll misquote scripture saying, you know, money is the root of all evil. The thing is, you can do way more, make a way bigger impact with money than without. And you even look at Jesus and the disciples. These disciples, these fishermen, were in that time. Those were business owners that left their family business to go and do ministry, and they had money, right? So much so they said that Judas was the bookkeeper. He kept, he kept up with all the their finances right then, right? And so as an entrepreneur, we can, you can do so much for the kingdom, and like, even me, personally, like I’ve given so much back to different mission organizations and even different churches, I’ve done way more of that than what I ever could have done if I was just, you know, a pastor on staff at a church making 50 grand a year, right?

Jim  12:53

All right. Can we go through some of the tricks in the book that you introduce? For example, the coffee with the pastor and the interest parties, etc. Can we go through some Yeah? Content, yeah,

Brady  13:07

man. So one of the things that we found that works really well for churches is coffee with a pastor. Ad. It’s essentially where a church planter or a pastor will just record a video inviting someone to grab coffee, they’ll say like, Hey, my name is Grady. I’m a local pastor in the area. Do you have questions about God, or do you have questions about faith? I would love to sit down and grab coffee with you, hear your story and tell you about the church that we’re at, and tell share my story with you. And we essentially run a lead gen campaign, a lead generation campaign on Facebook and Instagram, running that video as an ad, targeting people in the city, and then people that are interested will fill out a form and they’re able to schedule a meeting, one on one with a pastor. And it’s kind of like what you were saying earlier, like whatever you guys were at at North Point

Jim  14:01

with North dandy good I didn’t say that, but you remembered, oh yeah,

Brady  14:07

I know ball man. So north north point grew so much, the pastors are accessible, and so whenever people see an ad on social media of a pastor inviting them for coffee one on one. That’s that’s really enticing people. People really like that. And that’s been one of the things that’s really helped a lot of the churches we’ve worked with. And that’s one of the things that I had to learn as an entrepreneur. That was not my idea, that was actually one of our clients had the idea to run that campaign, and at first Jim, I told them, I was like, There’s no way that would work. You’re just some guy in a city who would want to go grab coffee with you. Well, Well, luckily we still tried it, because if I, if I was prideful, I’d be like, No, man, we’re not going to do that. That’s not that’s never going to work, which were kind of my thoughts. But I was like, yeah, man, sure. Let’s run it. And what do you know? It worked really, really well. And that sound. One of, like, the main campaigns we run for these guys,

15:03

interest parties.

Brady  15:06

Yeah, man. So these interest parties, it’s basically a pop up event where a new church, before they start meeting on Sundays, once a month, they’ll have an interest party, and they’ll rent out a venue, like a coffee shop or something like that, and we’ll run an event campaign to get a lot of people in the doors and get people to the event, for people that are interested in going to the interest party. And so just focus on getting a lot of people in the room. And the church planter will from their cast vision on what their new church is going to be like, and collect some info from people that are there and follow up with them after that.

Jim  15:51

Off topic, just a second. Where did candy come from in your name, church candy, you also used to run Chiro candy, which I assume is a chiropractic marketing agency, yeah, where does Why is candy

16:07

in everything?

Brady 16:09

Yeah, so my dad started Chiro candy, and I asked him this a few years back, and he said it was a business name generator, like and so there’s no significance to it. My dad used

Jim  16:23

business name, like, like, go

Brady  16:26

to Google and search, yeah, like, go to Google and search. One of those, like, business name generators.com, now you can use chat, okay, yeah, now you can use chat GPT for that. But he was just looking for a name. I think, I think at the time, he was just wanting to name his podcast. My dad used to work for a chiropractor, doing all their marketing, and so he started the Chiro candy podcast, and then to monetize it, he started running ads for chiropractors, and that’s how the Chiro candy agency started. And I helped him with that. And while I was helping him with that, I was on staff at a church. Well, I took what I learned from working with my dad and started helping my church out. And then that’s kind of how church candy was was born. Is for me, just helping my church for free, and then we got a lot of traction there.

Jim  17:17

Back to our list, direct message, outreach,

Brady  17:21

yeah, man, one of the things we found is people like talking to people, and so we’re really intentional with messaging people on one via text. And there’s some different campaigns that churches can do, and then, honestly, anyone, any business, any organization can do to get in contact with people. In fact, back in March, Jim, we signed up 100 new clients in one month. And you’re, I think you’re gonna like the story, because I told my team. Now, for context, we had never signed up more than 60 clients at a time in one month. And so I told my team I was like, Guys, Easter’s in April, so March is going to be a busy month. A lot of churches want to sign up. If you guys can sign up 100 churches in one month, I will let you tattoo whatever you want in my body.

18:12

And you already have tattoos.

Brady  18:15

I have one, and I almost passed out when I got it, because I was I got full of anxiety from the fact that this is on my body forever, and so I have

Jim  18:25

you have a limit of wear on your body. They could put something

Brady 18:29

So Jim, this is where my wife came into play. The the stipulation was, like the team decides, but like my wife can veto it if it’s anything

Brady  18:38

extreme. Okay, so what is

Brady  18:42

and so what ended up happening is the way we were able to get so many clients to sign up is through a messaging campaign. We sent out text messages to old leads we had letting them know like, hey, Easter is around the corner. And that was the like secret key to getting over 100 clients to sign up back in March, and they ended up choosing

Jim  19:03

what was the key saying that Easter is coming, or the tattoo? It

Brady  19:07

was the key was a text message campaign. It was basically just reaching out to old leads. A lot of businesses probably have, like an email list, or even just a list of old clients that aren’t active, or whatever it is. And so churches are the same way. And so we’ll do this for churches of just people that haven’t been in in a while, right? We’ll run a texting campaign just trying to get them re engaged. We did the same thing for our business, and that is what was the secret to getting 100 clients in one month. And now I have a tattoo of Jesus, uh, standing over, basically death, or like, it looks like the Grim Reaper in the there’s a famous Muhammad Ali picture where he’s like, standing over this other guy, just like looking over him intimidated that he like knocked out. And it’s to represent Jesus, defeated death. So it’s like Jesus would block. And gloves. I’ll have to send you the photo, but

Jim  20:03

how big and where? So it is

Brady  20:06

probably three inches tall, and it’s on my my like tricep area. So luckily, when I’m wearing a short sleeve t shirt, it’s covered, okay, so, but, yeah, that was, that was one of the things. Couple lessons there. Come up with a good incentive for your team, and they’re they’re gonna break records, and running a text message reactivation campaign can be really powerful. Engaging old leads in your business. We do that for us, and we do that for churches we work with

20:40

too. That

Jim  20:42

reminds me of a story. I had just sold a business, and I was 32 at the time, and started teaching international entrepreneurship at Georgia State, and I was very egotistical, even more than normal. And this is so easy, anyone could be an entrepreneur. It’s so easy. And my class started pushing back. And I made a bet that I could start a business that semester, make it cash flow positive that semester, repay all the startup capital that semester. And they got to choose the country and the industry that I would start a business in that oh, gosh, right. This is right after 911 so they thought it would be funny to choose a Pakistani company and importing furniture, because I had just done a riff on how furniture is the worst 2% business that there is.

Brady  21:31

And so, excuse me, I had to start a Pakistani furniture company. But

Jim  21:39

if you go on my LinkedIn, everybody, and scroll to the very, very bottom of my experiences, you will see the product. And I dare anyone to say it’s not the most beautiful chair they’ve ever seen.

Brady  21:49

So, and did you, like you made a profit from it, like you ran it successfully, or was this just like a gag?

Jim  21:56

Oh, I totally ran it successfully. Because I, you know, I, I, I rigged it basically, but this is a good rig. It teaches a valuable lesson. Instead of spending $100,000 and having $100,000 to repay, I went out, I think the first order was 17. I bought 17 shares for, I want to say, 400 bucks each, with about $200 each of shipping. And then I would sell them for $2,000 I had sold most of the chairs before they left Pakistan,

Brady  22:27

hmm, so I only had to repay like, $12,000 or something, yeah. So

Brady  22:35

now I did the same thing whenever I was launching our company. I sold before it was like a done for you program, like it is. Now, I tried to sell it like an online course where I could just record some videos and then sell it well. I I sold it to pastors before I’d even built the course, just to see if there was interest exactly because I was getting a lot of pastors DMing me like, messaging me on Instagram and Facebook asking for help with this. And I was like, hey, you know, this is the program. I basically outlined what the program was. And I was like, It’s 500 bucks. And once I actually sold it, I was like, great. It goes live on this date. And then I turned around and I started grinding, and I started actually building the product. I

Brady  23:17

love it. That is beautiful. Beautiful. All right, don’t get a website do this instead from our list, yeah, man.

Brady  23:29

The problem that I’ve seen with a lot of church planters is, and this is really any entrepreneur you want to get started, you want to you want to get things off the ground, and you’ll spend hours on a logo, or hours and days and weeks just getting your website right, and at the end of the day, you’re not doing activity that moves the needle. Like, do you have any friends Jim that maybe they want to be entrepreneurs? And they’re like, Oh, yeah. Like, I’m starting this business. And you ask, okay, what have you done so far? And they’re like, I’ve done this, this, this, this and this, and they’re listing things like, Oh, I worked on a logo and I did this, but they’re not doing anything that’s gonna, like, generate income yet. Like, they haven’t started cold calling. They haven’t started doing anything that’s gonna move the needle and actually, like, generating revenue. Church planters have the same problem, where they will spend hours on a website, or all of this, when really what they need is a simple landing

Brady  24:26

page that has a form

Brady 24:30

on get more info about our church plant. And that’s like the call, the main call to action. And so it’s basically, you know, you want to focus on, for if I was talking to an entrepreneur, revenue generating activity. But for a church planter, your goal is to get people on your what you would call a launch team. So you need to spend time on generating,

24:53

you know,

Brady  24:55

spend time on things that’s going to generate new people for your launch

Brady  24:58

team. Yep. How do you get people to come back? Brady, how

Brady  25:01

do you get people to come back? Man, there’s, there’s a lot to that. Number one is churches. They gotta be friendly. They gotta be welcoming. One of the things that we recommend doing is, if you ever for a church, if they have a grand opening, have another event to point people towards, whether it’s friends and family day or whatever that might look like. So a lot of our churches will have big grand openings, and then they’ll tell everyone that comes like, hey, in two weeks, we’re gonna have this event with bounce houses for the kids and food trucks. So we would love to see you there, right? So that gives give people a reason to come back and so like, if a business owner out there is listening, you can take your grand opening that you do some kind of big event, have your next event already planned and details for that and push people to that so there’s a reason for them to come back again.

Jim  26:05

I always ask the girl out on the second date before the first date was over. There you go, you know, if the first date is going good, I’m gonna go ahead and ask, because she’s, you know, wondering, Is he gonna ask me out again, you know? And what are his intentions? If you go ahead and knock it out, you know, halfway through the first date, makes the second half of the first date go a lot better.

Brady 26:28

Absolutely.

Jim  26:31

Brady, I love what you have done, and I love your story. It is just a great one, and I would love to follow your career. How do we keep in touch? Follow online, get a copy of the book please.

Brady  26:43

Yeah, online, I’m most active on Instagram. It’s just my name at Brady sticker, and then the book is available on Amazon. It’s called Launch big if you search launch big book, it should pop up right there.

Jim  26:56

Fantastic, Brady. Thank you so much for being with us, and we’ll talk to you

again soon. Appreciate you  

Jim  27:03

we will be right back you.