Blog

By Welton Hong, founder and CEO of Ring Ring Marketing When a family is grieving, patience is thin, and needs are urgent. If your website hesitates, they won’t: They’ll leave your website and choose the next funeral home in the search results. Multiple studies show the cost of a slow site. For instance: 53% of the time, someone will abandon pages that take longer than three seconds to load, according to Google. The chance a visitor bounces jumps 32% as load time grows from 1 to 3 seconds, and 123% from 1 to 10 seconds on mobile, according to Google. Conversion-focused research conducted by HubSpot finds the best conversion rates happen between 0 to two seconds, with sharp declines as seconds pile on. If your pages routinely exceed a few seconds to load, the implications are clear: People feel that […]

How one legacy funeral home chose change over a quick sale—and made payroll boring again. Names, locations, and certain details have been changed to protect client confidentiality. “No stories,” the banker said. “Show me what changed.” Jordan slid a single page across the table—discounts frozen, comp corrected, Tuesday cash huddle, and a date circled in ink: the day the 36% note would die. Payroll hit in six days. Miss it, and a generations-old reputation cracks in one afternoon. Six weeks earlier, the partners at Harborstone Memorial—an East Coast firm serving a tightly knit, heritage-rich community—had considered selling to close out their mortgage. Instead, they tried something harder: change the way they ran the place—fast, in order, and with receipts. This is the ninety-day play that made that choice real. The slide (and the line they wouldn’t cross) It never starts […]

Why lenders only pay for profits they can trust—and how every funeral-home leader, from CEO to apprentice, can keep theirs real A COVID-Era Deal That Didn’t Survive Diligence In 2021, “Cascade Memorial” (Pacific Northwest) signed an LOI a bit over $4M. Lenders’ Quality-of-Earnings (QoE) review knocked nearly 20% for overstated preneed revenue and one-off COVID relief credits. The sellers walked; two years later the home sold closer to $3M. That gap wasn’t a market glitch—it was profits a lender didn’t trust. Why this matters (to everyone) • Public-company CFOs: figures must stand up to board and banker scrutiny. • Independent owners: no surprise haircuts at closing. • New apprentices: numbers tell your story—learn the clean version first. With near-9% rates and shifting service mix, lenders ask not just “How much did you make?” but “How confident are we you’ll make […]