Thought Leadership

What 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 […]

Imagine 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 […]

Figuring out how to price merchandise and interment, entombment and inurnment rights in your cemetery involves doing the math, knowing your market and getting feedback from you salespeople. Dear Cemetery Impossible, My cemetery is not priced right and I can’t figure out a method to create a solid pricing schematic. Can you help me? Puzzled About Pricing Dear Pricing, Nothing is tougher in cemetery management than determining the price of interment rights. Merchandise is very simple. Let me walk you through both. However, before I do, I must reiterate the basic mantra of pricing. For every item being sold, there should be a model showing: Good Better Best We use this good-better-best (GBB) analysis for merchandise and for interment rights. For merchandise, we know that we have different markers, vases, benches and flowers. For interment or inurnment, we can do […]

Not necessarily! Before building another facility to attract new business, first consider cost, revenue and cannibalization. Dear Dan, I own and actively run a one-location, 150-call funeral business. My firm has a 40 percent non-casketed rate that is increasing. I am the largest operator in my town; my competitor does about 100 calls. He advertises that his services are cheaper than mine, although our market share has not changed for 20 years. A town 10 miles away, surprisingly, does not have a funeral home. The prison is the largest employer in that town of about 6,000 non-incarcerated residents. I am thinking about building a funeral home in that town. I estimate there are about 50 calls. My competitor and I get about 25 of them and the rest go to a funeral business 10 miles on the west side of […]