Articles

How to assess your current status and plan for success in the final stretch of 2024. As we wrap up summer and head into the final stretch of 2024, it’s time to pause to take inventory of what the first two-thirds of the year brought and assess both what has gone well and the things that haven’t met expectations. In March, this column explored how planning and execution lead to business success. Here, I’m refocusing on that subject to help you position yourself for a successful finish to 2024.  Assess Your Current Status As the challenges in your small business and profession mount, it’s critical to have real information and awareness of your business and the market around you. You need good, consistent data; having little or no information is even more reason to recalibrate for a better finish to the […]

Check Your Bottom Line, It Could Be a Staffing Issue Jack Spratt operates the McLean Funeral Home which does about 150 calls a year. Yes, the names are fictitious, but the funeral home is real. Most of his calls are still traditional funerals including casket, visitation, funeral service, and cemetery burial, but his cremation rate is about 40%. His prices are in line with his competition and the rest of his service area. He is still purchasing the business from his father-in-law, but the payments are reasonable for the size of business. His collections are reasonably good. He said his staff is hardworking, if not overworked, and yet he said he isn’t making money and he wants to know what to do. A quick glance at his profit and loss statement reveals his problem. While you would expect a funeral […]

The number one reason to make a single change to your website. Funeral home websites are surprisingly similar. Pick one at random, check the pull-down tabs and you’ll probably find pictures of the lobby, chapel and grounds; current and past obituaries; and a virtual register book. You will likely also find an “About Us” tab that might include a short history of the firm and pictures of the staff. Elsewhere, you’ll find informational pages on funerals, burial and cremation, and possibly some on caskets and urns. You will most likely also find information on preneed, including a form consumers can fill out if they wish to be contacted about making prearrangements. In most cases, however, the information most critical to funeral planning – pricing – is conspicuously absent. In 2021, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) conducted research and found that […]

In order to lead well, you must first grow yourself, as any meaningful and lasting change begins within you. “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” – JACK WELCH, AMERICAN BUSINESS EXECUTIVE AND FORMER GENERAL ELECTRIC CHAIRMAN AND CEO Let’s go over some of the challenges and hurdles staring leaders in the face in 2024 (and possibly beyond): Rapidly changing consumer wants and needs (client families are a consumer subset) ✔ Consumer demand for more convenience and greater transparency and use of technology ✔ Finding and retaining qualified talent and staff is increasingly more difficult ✔ Funeral home environments becoming more multigenerational among staff ✔ It’s an inflationary environment in which not only money/cost of capital but everything else is more expensive. ✔ There is […]

Three Things You Can Do Right Now to Future Proof Your Business According to a recent article published by the University of Kansas School of Education & Human Sciences1, the U.S. education system “has been struggling to keep up with other countries in terms of educational performance … The consequences of this educational gap are far-reaching … The USA is now the worst-educated workforce in the industrialized world.” Based on the results of our 2024 Funeral & Cemetery Consumer Behavior Study (FCCBS) , the U.S. funeral and cemetery profession may just be in a similar position when it comes to educating consumers about both its products and services … and itself. And that’s not all. Other data from recent studies highlight another key challenge facing the funeral and cemetery industry: an impending avalanche of customers who live their lives online […]