December 19, 2022
Published by 
Gabriel Ngo on December 19, 2022
Gabriel Ngo on December 19, 2022Scenario: Laura Laney is a third-generation owner-operator of Laney Funeral Home & Crematory in mid-Eastern Texas. Her family’s business has seen its share of trials and tribulations but has weathered them all and continues to thrive and grow. Laura’s business is just close enough to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex to benefit from the bustling growth yet far enough away to have experienced a comparatively slower rise in cremation rates – which has allowed Laura (and her father, Lynn, before her) to educate the community and families she serves on the value and importance of services and gatherings being no different than burial when families select cremation as an option. Throughout COVID, Laney Funeral Home & Crematory found legal ways around restrictions in order to provide full burial and cremation services to appreciative families as often as they could. Over the […]
November 21, 2022
Published by Gabriel Ngo on November 21, 2022
Gabriel Ngo on November 21, 2022Pricing is always a hot topic. When it comes to vendors setting pricing for items such as caskets, do you have to accept their price structure, or can you make changes as you see fit? Gabe Ngo provides his insights on this important topic. Question: Do I have to accept the prices the casket vendor set? Gabe Ngo: The short answer is no, you do not have to accept the casket vendor’s pricing they set. There are so very many angles in answering this question, but I will keep it grounded and simple. Often times historically, owner-operators have not always made pricing changes to reflect the “October 1st” pricing changes that have typically come from Batesville or Matthews annually. However, over the past fifteen to eighteen months or so, funeral home owner-operators have seen a variety of “temporary surcharges” (which […]
July 24, 2022
Published by Gabriel Ngo on July 24, 2022
Gabriel Ngo on July 24, 2022EI, the biggest workplace performance predictor and strongest driver of leadership and personal excellence, begins with you. “Let us all be the leaders we wish we had.”– Simon Sinek, Author and Inspirational Speaker While there is no “I” in TEAM, the winning team you build (or currently have) must start somewhere, and that somewhere begins with you, Mr./Ms. Owner-Operator. By default, and regardless of whether you wanted to be a leader or not, your team looks to you to be captain of your ship. Throughout my career, I have worked for others and found myself wishing that this leader was more “this way” and that leader more “that way.” However, none of us is ever complete and perfect. I have always found myself learning what I should do under past managers and leaders, but just as importantly, I have learned […]
July 24, 2022
Published by Gabriel Ngo on July 24, 2022
Gabriel Ngo on July 24, 2022E-commerce Is What Families Are Expecting Serve future customers. Is that not what all businesses set out to do? Substitute “customers” with “families” and replace “stores” with “funeral homes” and the quote below from the CEO of Walmart could have easily come from Tom Ryan (SCI), Mel Payne (Carriage), Brad Green (Park Lawn), or any other CEO for companies in the funeral, cemetery, and cremation profession. Or replace “customers” with “patients” and “stores” with “hospitals” and this quote can easily apply to hospitals/healthcare as well (and make no mistake about it folks, hospitals are businesses, with the majority of them being for profit). However, the part of the quote that I would like to focus on is “e-commerce” (before tying it all back to the rest of the quote and what it all means to you). So, what is e-commerce? […]
June 26, 2022
Published by Gabriel Ngo on June 26, 2022
Gabriel Ngo on June 26, 2022Scenario: Rico Funeral Home & Cremations has been successfully growing market share since it first started serving the community in southern Ohio over six years ago. Owner/operator Bernardo (“Bernie”) Rico had primarily focused on serving at-need calls because of his operational growth strategy and because of its immediate impact on cash flow. However, Bernie’s families had been inquiring more and more about preplanning and preneed, so Bernie partnered with a third-party preneed insurance provider a little less than two years ago. Bernie’s strategy was to actively sell preneed to areas of town or zip codes where his business was not already drawing at-need business and more passively to parts of the community where the at-need business was already coming from. Results have been pretty good, with Rico Funeral Home & Cremations building up a solid backlog of its preneed book […]
December 21, 2021
Published by Gabriel Ngo on December 21, 2021
Gabriel Ngo on December 21, 2021Scenario: Ibanez Family Funerals & Cremations has been a successful family-owned funeral home business in Texas for the past 17 years. Due to the continued rising cremation rates in his market, Richard Ibanez decided to build out and expand his prep room space along with having a cremation area and retort installed about three years ago. Along with being licensed funeral directors, Richard’s two sons, Bill and Ricky, are also responsible for managing the prep room and the crematory, respectively. The Ibanez family has continued to serve their community extremely well with both their funeral and cremation service offerings. Unfortunately, Ibanez Family Funerals & Cremations has been dealing with two very angry families who might threaten to bring lawsuits against them. Both families have the last name of Smith. Adam Smith was a 28-year-old male who died in the line […]
July 21, 2021
Published by Gabriel Ngo on July 21, 2021
Gabriel Ngo on July 21, 2021“Windows of opportunity open then close. By staying in the present, handling what’s in front of us, and riding the wave of opportunity when it comes, we follow the natural order of things.” – Dan Millman (American author and lecturer in personal development) Would you rather pay a 20% tax or be taxed almost double that at 39.6%? This is by no means a trick question as most of us would very quickly choose to pay a 20% tax as opposed to a 39.6% tax. However, the rhetorical question posed above is one that many funeral, cemetery, and crematory owners will have to practically answer or have this question answered for them when selling their business…because the window of time for those wanting to “ride the wave of opportunity” and not have to pay the higher tax is closing. And […]
July 20, 2021
Published by Gabriel Ngo on July 20, 2021
Gabriel Ngo on July 20, 2021Strategy for building a winning one for your firm. “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” – MICHAEL JORDAN As this quote suggests, talent alone does not guarantee that you will win in the long term. Still, you might wonder why I chose a sports quote to relate to funeral service. Both sports and funeral service are zero-sum games when it comes to competition. Someone wins, another loses. In funeral service, we have no control over the death rate in our community in any given year – we can only control how many calls we can secure and serve. One death call for you means one less death call for me as your competitor. Zero sum. The same can be said about competing for and retaining human resources in the funeral service profession. While the pandemic forced all […]
June 23, 2021
Published by Gabriel Ngo on June 23, 2021
Gabriel Ngo on June 23, 2021Scenario: Kramer Funeral Home is an established firm that has been serving its community for over 35 years in the Northeast. The original owner, Gary, recently retired after a few years of gradually stepping back and grooming his successor, Dennis, who now owns and operates Kramer Funeral Home. While Dennis has less than 10 years of experience in the profession, he had proved to Gary that he is a very good lead funeral director and business-minded. Plus, the younger, less-experienced funeral staff, who brought many great ideas to serving cremation families, connect with and look up to Dennis. While the cremation rate had been increasing, Kramer Funeral Home is able to still serve a good number of burial families a year. Under Dennis, Kramer Funeral Home is poised to continue serving its community with a superb reputation and excellent service. […]
June 23, 2021
Published by Gabriel Ngo on June 23, 2021
Gabriel Ngo on June 23, 2021“When used right, technology becomes an accelerator of momentum, not a creator of it” — Jim Collins, Good to Great The COVID-19 pandemic has forced all of us in the profession—client families, guests, funeral homes, crematories, and cemeteries—into having to adopt new ways of doing things. And once we are open to doing things in a new way, we can never really go back to doing things exactly how they were done before. It is human nature. We have been forced to lean on technology in order to serve families—virtual meetings online (via Zoom, WebEx, etc.) for arrangement conferences, DocuSign to obtain signatures for contracts and approvals, online streaming of services, etc. However, this article is not about pioneering technology in deathcare services, nor is it about technology for tech’s sake. Internet, virtual meetings, and streaming services are no longer […]
May 24, 2021
Published by Gabriel Ngo on May 24, 2021
Gabriel Ngo on May 24, 2021“You may delay, but time will not.” – Benjamin Franklin (Founding Father and polymath) As the aforementioned quote suggests, this writing will focus on potential timelines as well as reasonable expectations of the time it takes to either buy or sell a funeral or cemetery business—when performed correctly. And just as how I had written about Succession Planning a few months ago, and how like funerals, it just doesn’t happen on its own—that it requires leadership of people active in the process and management of schedules and time. The buying and selling process is a resulting culmination of your succession planning, and it too requires time management because it simply does not happen overnight. However, before we discuss what the time costs of buying and selling businesses entail, let’s quickly review what the processes for buying and selling a business […]
March 22, 2021
Published by Gabriel Ngo on March 22, 2021
Gabriel Ngo on March 22, 2021“Funerals just don’t happen by themselves.” – said every Funeral Director ever No, funerals simply do not happen by themselves. They require expertise, planning, coordination, teamwork, management, and leadership in order to successfully serve a family and perform a funeral service—not to mention the consistency to do this over and over again at the highest level of performance. So why is it then, that the same typically does not occur in succession planning for most funeral home owners? In a November 2020 Funeral Business Planning Survey published by an outside research firm in partnership with the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), nearly three out of four (73%) respondents do not currently have an exit strategy or succession plan, despite more than one-third planning on retiring within the next five-years. Now, I won’t get into the reasons why this typically is […]