Do You Hate Losing Price Shoppers
to Your Competition?
Does It Make Your “Stomach Turn” When You See Your Average Funeral Values…And Your Profits…Get Smaller And Smaller?
Are You Bitter When Families Have
$10,000 Receptions At The Golf Course
And You Have To Fight Over A
$1,000 Immediate Cremation?
If you answered YES to one or more of these questions,
and if you want to be able to remain profitable…
or become more profitable…in these challenging times in
funeral service, you need to continue reading this letter…
Dear Fellow Funeral Professional,
I have some important questions for you. Think carefully as you answer…
- Are you getting tired of continually fighting and dreading the increasing cremation rates…and deep down you know you can’t change things back to the good old days?
- Do you find it a struggle to keep up with all challenges of the changing trends of society?
- Have you ever thought that it would be great to have a crystal ball for the future?
- Do the words Discounter and Shopper immediately get your back up?
- Are you furious when a third party like Costco or an Internet retailer sells your client families a casket?
- Does it concern you that a new competitor may enter your market…or worse…your lazy competitor sells to a sharp-minded funeral director or aggressive corporation?
- Do you wish your staff could convey…with convidence…what makes your firm better that the competition when they are answering the phone?
- Do you wish you could convey those same attributes on your website, especially with your General Price List…instead of leaving it up to the shopper to figure it out on their own?
- Would the future of your business be brighter if you had a strategic outlook and plan for your continued success?
If you answered “YES” any of these questions, then I have some important news for you…
The news is you are NOT alone.
In fact, that is a list of questions that I have been asked by funeral professionals throughout North America.
It is a fact that the funeral industry has some unique challenges that other industries do not have and that individual markets have their own issues and there are not blanket answers that solve all problems.
Funeral Homes and Cemeteries are
starting to struggle because they…
- Can’t RELY on past experience (or advice from previous generations) for answers to today’s issues and challenges
- Don’t know where to get the ANSWERS to solve these problems
- Even if colleagues have OVERCOME similar struggles, their ideas may not apply to your community or situation
- When you find a STRATEGY to implement, you don’t have a STEP BY STEP process to ensure that you do not miss any critical steps to ensure its success
One of the unique issues about funeral service is there is very limited, formal training on how to take a strategic approach to managing your funeral home or cemetery in today’s environment.
You probably entered the professional by one of two ways. The first is what I will call generational, meaning your parents or other relatives were already involved and directly or indirectly you grew up in the business. It was a natural choice to continue serving the community.
The other entrance is what I would call lateral, meaning that you didn’t have prior (internal) exposure to funeral service and were drawn to it as a desire to serve.
Either way, you probably didn’t expect to be facing the challenges of today.
Unfortunately, the training that funeral directors receive from mortuary school doesn’t teach us to be funeral strategists and how to deal with the business challenges that you face today. Also, you cannot ask the previous generation how to deal with discounters, Internet shoppers, Costco, and hotel chains.
So how do you deal with the challenges
that funeral service faces today?
I had the same question, and especially in my home market where there was no one in the industry that had experience with the issues that we were dealing with.
So I went back to university and received my business degree in Entrepreneurial Management. I knew that I needed to become a strategic thinker and solve the problems on my own. Although the entire program was beneficial and provided many frameworks to apply to all aspects of business management, the greatest skills I learned were from my participation with the University’s Case Competition Team.
A Case Competition is where a team was given a business case study from a university like Harvard, INSEAD, or Ivey, and had 3 hours to read it, analyze it, make a recommendation, and present that recommendation against other teams. With that pressure, you learn to apply the strategic tools to make sound decisions.
At this point I could just tell you hire me to tackle your issues in a one-on-one scenario – and of course for those who wish that personal consultation I will make myself available – but my goal is to elevate the level of thought and I want to teach you how to fish instead of selling you the fish.
That is why I have created a 4 module course titled, “Strategic Thinking – Having a Business Mindset for Funeral Service.”
But instead of just creating a course that I thought you should purchase, I wanted to make sure that this topic was indeed an important issue, so I invited some of my friends in the funeral profession to share their thoughts on the subject.
So that is the reason why I hosted the interview series titled, Having a Business Mindset for Funeral Service, where I interviewed…
- Funeral professionals, Nancy Lohman, Nevin Mann, and Brad Scott
- Funeral consultants, Todd Van Beck, Mike Kubasak, and Bill Bischoff
- And business professors, Dr. Kevin Hindle and Dr. Brent Mainprize
- Over 380 funeral professionals registered for this informative series that spanned 412 minutes
I have also created many helpful videos, plus a “Revenue Per Call” calculator so that you know…and you can demonstrate to your staff…how much losing 1 price shopper hurts the firm, and the more painful impact of losing 1 per month over the course of 1 year!
To receive the calculator plus access to all of the interviews…click here
Funeral Manager Secrets’
Strategic Thinking Program will…