I once heard a sermon that now seems appropriate to this last in my series on reinvention. We all know the story of Jesus healing the blind. This sermon wondered not about the healing but THE DAY AFTER. The man's whole life was turned upside down. He had KNOWN HOW to be blind. His livelihood depended on [...]
The Funeral Service Foundation has just released the results of its "Bleeding Edge" research project with world renowned Olson-Zaltman Associates simultaneously revealing both disturbing and encouraging insights. Recognizing that the growth of cremation has more than doubled (leaping from 1% to more than 2% annually in the last several years) The Funeral Service Foundation commissioned the unconventional market [...]
This question and its brother: "How much does a funeral cost?" Are non questions. When we attempt to answer them directly with rational logical explanations we only end up annoying most people. Especially if we weigh them down with a litany of hours, cost of having a building and the time we waste being ready [...]
Peter Drucker was the first to draw a parallel between Leadership and Orchestra Conductors when he observed: "A great orchestra is not composed of great musicians but of adequate ones who produce at their peak. [A great conductor] has to make productive what he has...the players are nearly unchangeable. So it is the conductor's people [...]
In the near future the difference between winning and losing in DeathCare will be a result of one factor: LEADERSHIP. Yet many owners and general managers are confusing supervision with leadership and are in danger of turning themselves into nothing more than shop foremen. Too many funeral home owners blame their staff for the lack of [...]
Last week I addressed our broken pricing model referred to as Cost-Led-Pricing. Apropos of everything this article came to my attention Tough times add hardship to heartache: More families ask for help paying for funerals underscoring the problem created by our outdated pricing strategy and causing me to wonder if maybe we won't need to eventually [...]
This image illustrates so well the folly of our more than century old pricing model. All was good until the market changed about 30 years ago. Because we didn't know anything else (and neither did our advisors) our response to the growth in cremation has been to beef up our burial prices and focus [...]
My friend, Ed Mazur of Kapinos-Mazur Funeral Home, ran a very successful PR / Public Service program in his local community. The campaign featured this poster and newspaper ads. Weekends were set aside to encourage parents to clean out unused medication from their medicine cabinets and bring them to the funeral home. On the first [...]
One of my favorite bloggers is Caleb Wilde who writes "Confessions of A Funeral Director." He recently Posted this photo. Texting while Driving: A Great Way to Support Your Local Funeral Director For those of you that don’t know, Batesville, Indiana is the Mecca of the Funeral Industry as it houses the great Batesville Casket [...]
Funeral Directors are increasingly distressed about being treated rudely by families. This rudeness often causes practitioners to lose control of vital conversations at critical moments. Industry vendors know that Funeral Directors can be very rude as well. In my opinion the reasons both are rude is fundamentally the same. And Yes! Funeral Directors can [...]
This category contains articles about how to get and keep customers