Dan Isard

In my book, “What Every Funeral Director and Cemetery Must Know about Cremation,” I cover the history of cremation. For the past 5,000 years of humanity’s measurable civilized lifetime, we have used cremation to deal with dead human bodies. For the past 140 years we have had commercially functioning crematories. Since 1910, we have seen an increase in businesses buying and marketing their services as public crematories.

In this article, I am going to write about ways to enhance sales of caskets, vaults, grave interment rights and mausoleums. I am going to approach this article this way since the ICCFA has both funeral home and cemetery members. I’m aware of the different mentality of funeral director and cemeterians. Frankly, the funeral directors reading this might be tempted to just speed read the material focused on selling caskets and urns. Don’t do this! Cemeterians, you also should not overlook any part of this essay. This article is about increasing merchandise sales, and you can learn from each other.

Preneed has been around for longer than your career. In my book “The Complete Preneed Perspective,” I chronicled the advent of preneed, showing its origin via the Greek burial societies of thousands of years ago to our sophisticated modern arrangement.

For those of you who are devotees of this column, you’re already aware that I’m doing something different this year – taking readers through the menus and methods of a re-engineering program. I started with revenue issues. In January, I wrote about making sure overhead is properly defined. In February, we looked at how merchandise profit can be used to offset overhead. Now that I have those two points addressed, let me close the discussion on revenue by discussing how to set your General Price List (GPL) prices.

For the 2014 Finance columns, Floodgates we Merchandise will chronicle a concept called “re-engineering,” in which we’ll delve into the financial wholesale jerseys operations of a business and look Start at specific components in addition cheap nfl jerseys to looking at it from a holistic perspective. cheap nfl jerseys The 08’ first (FSU) segment pertains Morning to revenue. Therefore, this Best first column will partner follow through on how funeral home owners/managers can increase revenue.