January 17, 2017
Published by 
Dan Isard on January 17, 2017
Dan Isard on January 17, 2017Your funeral home having an informative, customer-focused, strong online presence is no longer a choice. It’s a matter of survival. For those of us old enough to remember, The Jetsons, a 1960s cartoon we watched on Saturday mornings before going out to play, was about a family living in a futuristic utopia. Robots, holograms and other wild inventions provided a whimsical glimpse of life in the future. Fast-forward to 2017 and some of those contraptions have been made manifest in our daily living. Now, there are still those funeral professionals who scoff at the insertion of technology into our business. However, as more and more of the families we serve rely on technology for gathering information than ever before and are outpacing our adoption of “newfangled ideas,” we might just be positioning our business toward extinction. How can the funeral […]
January 15, 2017
Published by 
Stephanie Ramsey on January 15, 2017
Stephanie Ramsey on January 15, 2017Determining if or when to give an employee a raise is a question funeral business owners/managers frequently struggle to answer. This year funeral business owners/managers are challenged to address this issue in a very direct and specific manner as a result of the impending new overtime rules. Currently, due to a Texas Judge issuing an injunction, the implementation of this rule is on hold and may or may not ever be put into effect. This leaves owners and managers uncertain about how they should or if they should address raises for their employees. Given the complexity of the overtime rules and the current focus on retaining quality employees in the funeral industry it is wise to consider the four following components when addressing raises: Company Budget/Profitability Market Rate of Position Employee’s Job Performance Future Expectations of Employee and the Business […]
January 15, 2017
Published by Dan Isard on January 15, 2017
Dan Isard on January 15, 2017What can a third-generation funeral director in his 60s do about having his dementia-stricken father sign over the business to him? Dear Dan, I am a big fan, but I never thought I’d write to you. Many of the questions you field are humorous, but this is not. I am 60 years old and the third-generation operator of our family business. Dad and Mom are in their late 80s. Dad has dementia and maybe Alzheimer’s. Mom has no idea of any business issues, denies Dad’s illness and won’t make any family or business decisions. On good days, Dad is in the funeral home but often causes fiascoes. He ordered a truckload of caskets from some phone seller and we wound up paying $30,000 for damaged and inferior products. I found out he fired the accountant a year ago and no […]
January 14, 2017
Published by Dan Isard on January 14, 2017
Dan Isard on January 14, 2017Dear Cemetery Impossible, I own four funeral homes and two cemeteries. The cemeteries are each in the same town as one of my funeral homes. In those towns, I have made the funeral home manager the cemetery manager.Every cemeterian I speak to tells me that having this“combo” is great, but I get very few advance sales at the cemeteries. Most of my cemetery sales are at need. What am I doing wrong? Sincerely, Confused Combo Dear Confused Combo, In the eyes of the public, a funeral business and a cemetery are aligned. They both deal with providing solutions when a death occurs. One large brokerage firm in the 1980’s even gave an all-inclusive name to the two businesses, referring to it as the “death-care”profession. While the public and Wall Street think funeral homes and cemeteries are related, in reality they […]
January 14, 2017
Published by Dan Isard on January 14, 2017
Dan Isard on January 14, 2017Imagine a business exists where the owners and managers universally keep doing things the same way the previous generations did. That is funeral service. In the last 20 years, society has changed to a degree greater than in the last hundred years. Do you remember your first cellphone? Do you remember how much you paid for it as well as how much you paid per minute? We didn’t give out the number, as we didn’t want people calling us. A wrong number could cost $3! Today, many people don’t have a landline. We use our cellphone to surf the internet as much as we use it to chat. Yet, so many of us in funeral service still don’t realize we have to change the way we market our businesses. There are five new things we have to employ. These new […]