Dan Isard

By Daniel M. Isard Every dynamic of your operations can be enhanced by technology, and families appreciate the professionalism and ease it provides. Our business focuses on death and the living. This can be said of the tools of our trade as well, as we mourn the death of those things we felt we could never do without. Funeral service has lamented the death of three great tools of the trade. Can you guess what they are? I think they include: 1. Office chalkboard outlining all the cases This device was wonderful until you spilled water on it or leaned up against it and erased important details of upcoming services. Or perhaps you had employees with short arms, so they couldn’t write on the top half of the board. 2. Black velvet open-face message letter board While there is really […]

When you lose profit by setting your prices incorrectly, your firm loses value as well. Imagine it’s 1984 – prior to the FTC Funeral Rule being instituted – and we’re having a discussion about the method to set prices. It takes all of 12 seconds – the price of your casket times four, five or six, depending on whether you want to be higher or lower than your competitor. It doesn’t require a computer or a consultant. Whew, exhausting! Well, as they say, those were the good old days, and since the FTC required itemized pricing, it has been a tough task to undertake and now requires a computer and a consultant with a computer! Since 1984, funeral home profit has declined from about 15% to about 6% (based on a national accounting firm’s published reports and as computed by […]

“Why have some national companies had problems?” I have gotten this question more than any other one I have been asked in the past the years. I entered the funeral/cemetery world in 1984. There were several small- to medium-sized companies with big ideas. Many were privately owned. One was a public company. By the early 1990s, there were several that had crossed over from the privately-owned world to the public world. Public companies have a duty to inform their shareholders about their business. The business plan they aspired to fulfilling was: 1. Buy multiple businesses 2. Operate multiple businesses in an area 3. Bring in operating synergies to those businesses 4. Acquire merchandise and capital assets at better prices through quantity discounts 5. Maximize staff efficiencies 6. Have a lower cost of capital 7. Make more profit I have seen […]

Mortuary School Education At the Intersection of Change and Inertia To my critics: I’ll start by making your argument for you. I am not a mortuary school graduate. Neither am I a mortuary school dropout. But I have been an observer of this profession for four decades. As an old man who loves this profession, writing every article as if it is my last (because one of them will be), I am compelled to explain my thoughts as to how the mortuary education system can be improved. It’s as clear to me as the liver spots on my hands, which were not present in 1984 when I came across this profession. In simple terms, we have a business with an educational agenda predicated on preparing students not much differently than it did 50 years ago. But to any observer, no […]