Articles

EI, 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 […]

Spoiler alert! There is no Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, and please don’t make me talk about Sasquatch. I am the person who has been saying for four decades, preneed is not an asset. I am not reversing my stance on this. You can’t argue against the existence of gravity and that pre-need is a liability. You can put cushions on the ground so when gravity takes your body from the tree limb you have a chance to walk away. By the same token, you can make good decisions in the administration of your preneed program to protect this liability from being too large of a liability. I will explain in this article. However, the theme of this article is that pre-need can add value to your business. I will explain that as well. Math Doesn’t Lie In the worlds of […]

Get Cohesive, Get Practical, Get Going! Generally speaking, when someone tells you to “have fun,” one cannot help but wonder if that is a genuine expression or some type of passive-aggressive warning. Think of when a woman says it to her boyfriend or spouse when he wants to have a “guy’s night” or a day of golf with his buddies. Yes, ladies, we have all been there! But I am here to tell you wholeheartedly that when it comes to marketing your funeral home or cemetery business, I want you to have F.U.N.— Functional, Unique, and Neat marketing elements. F for Functional Marketing Every business, regardless of its industry and vertical, needs a cohesive marketing strategy to engage with its audience enough so that they will buy the product or services offered. This is where functional marketing comes into play. […]

Scenario: 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 […]