January 17, 2017
Published by 
Dan Isard on January 17, 2017
Dan Isard on January 17, 2017Now that all the new year hub-bub is over and the holidays are in the books, it’s time to buckle down and get to work. From my experience, strategic planning for funeral homes and cemeteries generally boiled down to; do more service calls than last year. This is certainly a worthy notion, however more calls do not translate into financial health. I am going to recommend 3 simple goals to accomplish in 2017 that are attainable: Get a “financial physical” for your business. The majority of us visit a doctor annually for a physical, however few business owners conduct a business physical annually, if ever. The analogy rings true because your business can have serious financial problems that do not manifest or surface, but lurk underneath. Ask yourself a question: do you know someone that rarely went to the doctor […]
January 17, 2017
Published by Dan Isard on January 17, 2017
Dan Isard on January 17, 2017Your funeral home having an informative, customer-focused, strong online presence is no longer a choice. It’s a matter of survival. For those of us old enough to remember, The Jetsons, a 1960s cartoon we watched on Saturday mornings before going out to play, was about a family living in a futuristic utopia. Robots, holograms and other wild inventions provided a whimsical glimpse of life in the future. Fast-forward to 2017 and some of those contraptions have been made manifest in our daily living. Now, there are still those funeral professionals who scoff at the insertion of technology into our business. However, as more and more of the families we serve rely on technology for gathering information than ever before and are outpacing our adoption of “newfangled ideas,” we might just be positioning our business toward extinction. How can the funeral […]
January 15, 2017
Published by Dan Isard on January 15, 2017
Dan Isard on January 15, 2017What can a third-generation funeral director in his 60s do about having his dementia-stricken father sign over the business to him? Dear Dan, I am a big fan, but I never thought I’d write to you. Many of the questions you field are humorous, but this is not. I am 60 years old and the third-generation operator of our family business. Dad and Mom are in their late 80s. Dad has dementia and maybe Alzheimer’s. Mom has no idea of any business issues, denies Dad’s illness and won’t make any family or business decisions. On good days, Dad is in the funeral home but often causes fiascoes. He ordered a truckload of caskets from some phone seller and we wound up paying $30,000 for damaged and inferior products. I found out he fired the accountant a year ago and no […]
January 14, 2017
Published by Dan Isard on January 14, 2017
Dan Isard on January 14, 2017Dear Cemetery Impossible, I own four funeral homes and two cemeteries. The cemeteries are each in the same town as one of my funeral homes. In those towns, I have made the funeral home manager the cemetery manager.Every cemeterian I speak to tells me that having this“combo” is great, but I get very few advance sales at the cemeteries. Most of my cemetery sales are at need. What am I doing wrong? Sincerely, Confused Combo Dear Confused Combo, In the eyes of the public, a funeral business and a cemetery are aligned. They both deal with providing solutions when a death occurs. One large brokerage firm in the 1980’s even gave an all-inclusive name to the two businesses, referring to it as the “death-care”profession. While the public and Wall Street think funeral homes and cemeteries are related, in reality they […]