Last week I referred to Andrew Grove's comments relative to the reinvention of Intel in which he referred to the process as the "Valley of Death." Strategic Inflection Points: what happens to a business when a major change takes place in its competitive environment... what is key is that they require a fundamental change in [...]
Reinvention will soon become the latest catchword in the DeathCare professions. I agree! Reinvention has been a long time coming. But I fear that many have already mistaken cosmetic touchups to our traditional practices as reinvention thus fooling themselves into continued complacency. There are many shades of reinvention and the magnitude of the one called [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I feel like maybe I have backed myself into a corner. Price-Led-Costing A simple concept; but for an industry steeped in generations of pricing from exactly the opposite perspective and whose most respected financial advisors continue to advocate cost-led-pricing this is bound to be a real challenge. To enable you, dear reader, to flip the [...]
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times add hardship to heartache: More families ask for help paying for funerals underscoring the problem created by our outdated pricing strategy and causing me to wonder if maybe we won't need to eventually [...]
I know you are busy but YOU HAVE TO READ THIS! If you want to know what our future is about then I want to share a key example. Something that began just a few years ago and is now starting to pop up with a frequency that makes it into a trend. A trend [...]
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 [...]
It was between sessions at an NFDA convention and busy in the bathroom. An older gentleman approached me and asked brusquely, "Are you Alan Creedy?" Given his demeanour, for a moment, I wasn't sure whether to say yes or run. I finally said yes. What he said next made me wish he had chosen [...]
