November 21, 2022
Published by 
Dan Isard on November 21, 2022
Dan Isard on November 21, 2022Recently, a new cemetery client asked me to help repurpose a Master Plan. For those of you who are not regular readers, a Master Plan is the long-term plan for your undeveloped areas and maybe any developed areas that have not been sold or interred into yet. Good consultants usually answer a question with a question. My reply was, “If you had a restaurant, would you only have a few items on the menu, or would you try and provide variety?” Most cemeterians are limited in their mindset. Natural Burial is a viable and profitable option that may work. What Is Natural Burial? Well, it is basically a Kosher burial option, where the body is not embalmed with caustic materials. But that is the very limited interpretation. This can be conjugated to include a container holding the body that must […]
November 21, 2022
Published by Dan Isard on November 21, 2022
Dan Isard on November 21, 2022I entered this business when your grandparents were running it. Back then, it was easy to market a funeral home: go to Rotary meetings (or other social organizations) weekly, attend church services each weekend, park your cars in the parking lot each day after washing them, and wait for the phone to ring. Ah, the good old days. There was really very little to call acrimonious about your marketing efforts then (other than that stupid competitor down the road) because the issues that mattered to families were their religion, where their family was buried and which firm had served them in the past. I remember a study we conducted on funeral market share in the late 1980s. We found that a town’s “churched percentage” was the same as the number of people who knew which funeral home they would use. […]
October 24, 2022
Published by Dan Isard on October 24, 2022
Dan Isard on October 24, 2022For most cemeteries that are reliant on cash flow, there is no bigger issue than hiring a salesperson. This is a constant and recurring problem. Salespeople turn over constantly. It seems the only ones who don’t turnover are the bad ones. Hiring, training, compensating, and keeping them productive is a most difficult part of the job for any owner or general manager. While much of this article will be the same for funeral home advance sales sellers, I do not want to try and cover the two different fields of funeral and cemetery. The DNA of the sale itself is different. In a funeral home you are selling a service (albeit there may be some merchandise, but the service of the funeral is what you are selling). In a cemetery you are selling a product (albeit the service is getting […]
October 24, 2022
Published by Dan Isard on October 24, 2022
Dan Isard on October 24, 2022As you might imagine, when planning my scheduled columns so many months in advance, I keep them organized using the Dewey Decimal System and color coding. This allows me to write something in January that will be published in April and read in May, thus making my editor happy. Well, everything was running smoothly until NFDA published its 2022 Cremation and Burial Report, which ruined my nice, orderly life! Now, even though my life is upended, I have no desire to ruin yours. Therefore, before you read another word of this column, stop and get a copy of this report. It’s free for NFDA members. If you’re not an NFDA member, you have two options: Steal a copy from a friend who is a member or pay the nominal fee to get your own. Why? Because I think this NFDA […]
September 28, 2022
Published by Dan Isard on September 28, 2022
Dan Isard on September 28, 2022As this column has been memorializing the key points of knowledge I have acquired and want to pass on to you, here’s another to remember: Nothing prevents problems better than writing things down. I have found that many life-changing matters can occur when business owners, employees or both go on nothing more than a handshake and their memory. President Ronald Reagan summed it up when he repeated an old Russian proverb: “Trust but verify.” Now, I am not an attorney, so I am not giving legal advice here. I have been a business owner for 40 years, however, as well as an employer, expert witness in more than 100 cases and one who has paid for a few points of litigation, so I have learned a few things about the law. In my experience, I tend to see funeral directors […]