Rob Heppell: Welcome back to the Funeral X Podcast. I am Rob Heppell and I’m joined with my Funeral Results Marketing business partner, JJ. Hey there, Jake.

JJ: Hey, Rob.

Rob Heppell: How’s it going?

JJ: Living the dream, as they say, right?

Rob Heppell: Yes.

JJ: Every day.

Rob Heppell: Good stuff.

JJ: Or fighting the fight.

Rob Heppell: Yes. I think you have to do both, to fight the fight, to live the dream, right?

JJ: Well, right, and we all need to know that nightmares are dreams too. You just got to pick your battles.

Rob Heppell: Yes, for sure. Hey, today I think what would be neat is to dive into some of the marketing strategies that we’ve used in Funeral Results Marketing. In particular, how we’ve used some of those strategies and philosophies in our online cremation offering.

I think, to help this example, one of our clients, or actually, unfortunately, former client, but only because he sold his business after it became so successful, is Jeff Murphy from Tennessee.

I was speaking with him the other day and I thought, “Hey, you know, do you mind if I share some of the information? We won’t go into all the details,” but he said, “Oh Yes, Yes. That’s fine.”

I think before we get going though, just so folks listening know some of my approaches to marketing, instead of … I see this just so often, Jake is, funeral home owner or cremation provider owner will say, “Oh, we should start using Facebook, or we should use this,” and they jump to the channel. They don’t think of, what’s the overall … If we step back, what’s the overall objective?

JJ: I think it’s a good point, you know. Yes. I mean, I think about it within our consulting practice. Used to call it the Baskin Robbins concept, where you come back with 31 ideas or flavors of the month.

The problem was, it’s confusing, it’s disruptive and it doesn’t accomplish the whole picture. The best thing to do is more strategically plan it out. It falls along the same line with you’re talking about.

Rob Heppell: Yes. Yes. I like to ask, “Okay, so who do want, to do what? What’s it going to benefit you?” It’s a little bit of a clunky question, but it has the right part.

If someone says, “Well, I want to be on Facebook,” I’m like, “Okay. Well, who do you want to interact with and what do you want them to do?” If they say, “Well, how about like our page?” I’m like, “Well, okay. If that’s your objective, is to get likes on the page, it may help down the road for a little bit of online reputation and top-of-mind awareness, but there’s no value there.”

On the flip side, I think the ultimate objective for most funeral homes would be to secure another call, to get more first calls. If that’s the objective, then okay. So, who are we trying to attract? How are we going to attract them? Then, what do we want them to do?

There is a marketer, a guy named Dan Kennedy, kind of a gruff old guy. He’s a direct response marketer. They would send out letters and get a response, and they would test. It’s part of the scientific side of marketing. He came up with this triangle with arrows going both ways, and he calls it the message to market match.

Who’s your market and what message are you going to use? What’s missing out of that is, just in words only, is what medium or media or channel are you going to use it for? In online cremation arrangements, it would be, we’d be looking at … The who would be people looking for low-cost cremation. The message would be, “We offer online, low-cost cremation.” Then the medium or the channel would be Google AdWords.

Then that fits that triangle, that message to market match. I try to apply these different … We’ll come up with some others… I’ll share some other strategies as well, and give attribution to where I learned them from. I find it that we need to always step back and see the bigger picture before going after the shiny objects

I think with Jeff’s story, we’ll go through that because he’s just a very personable guy. He questioned, “Are you sure, Rob? I don’t know if that doesn’t really work based on the number of years I’ve been in funeral service.” We’d have to explain it because we’re now talking about a different medium.

JJ: Well, it’s quite a success story. I think about my father as a great marketing person himself, and the companies he worked for. I always thought about it, it came to me that it was like there was brand awareness, and so we wanted that. Then there was also the call to action, where you’re then asking for the sale.

Then the phrase you hear more nowadays is, the TAM, or what’s your total addressable market? Within that, as you mentioned, who are the people you’re going after and what’s that messaging need to be? There’s really a strategy to it, right? You really got to think it through. When it’s done right, as you’re probably going to explain here in this story is, you see the success of it.

Rob Heppell: Yes. You can’t be all things to all people, right?

JJ: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Heppell: Now, you could try to serve as many people as you can, but there are going to be different groups within that, within your TAM. You can’t just say, “We serve all faiths.” I’ve seen that so often in funeral home ads, and back, where you’d see ads in the yellow pages.

When someone’s receiving the message, they’re receiving it as one person, just like when I try to present a presentation from the stage … Even, Jake, with our podcast, we hope there are thousands of people listening, but it’s being received one person at a time.

Just even instead of, “Hey, all you out there,” you’d be just saying you. Another little marketing strategy, because you’re talking … Even though you’re talking to thousands of people, you’re talking to them individually, one at a time, a 1,000 times. Right?

JJ: Right.

Rob Heppell: Yes. With the Murphys, it was Jeff and his brother, Steve. They’re partners, but mainly I was dealing with Jeff. They had this mortuary services business, but they want to do … They were serving some funeral homes, but they wanted to also go after this online cremation business.

Met them at one of the conventions. I was presenting one of my marketing presentations. Then they came to my booth. This is a very funny side story. You know, Jake, when I was starting out, I had to be a little scrappier, a little frugal with my money. Instead of paying $1,000 for all the furniture in my booth, I’d rent a car, I’d go to the discount furniture place. I bought this table in fake granite. Kind of a higher table, almost like a cocktail table, but it was higher, and four high chairs. I just put that in my booth.

Then I just thought, “Oh, you know what? I’ll just leave it here when I go. I’m not hauling it back across the border.”

JJ: Love it.

Rob Heppell: Anyway, Jeff says, “Hey, I like this table,” when he’s there. I’m like, “You can have it. Do you want to …” It actually went to the funeral home, or his cremation business and it was in the arrangement office. It’s hilarious. Anyway, little side story there.

When I was talking with Jeff and Steve, they said, “Well, what’s the best way of doing this? We don’t want to spend a lot of money, but we need to spend the money that we need to, to make it work.” I said, “Well, first of all, your best one to punch is a cremation arrangement website, and then to drive people there is a cremation-focused Google Ads campaign.” At the time, Google AdWords.

During the course of, as we were building this up, I would, as I said, have to sell them on some of these strategies because they’re not … You just can’t do what you do at the funeral home and then just apply it online. It just doesn’t work that way.

One of the strategies and I believe I’ve shared this before but was the flipping of the arrangement process online. In the past it used to be, when they come into the funeral home, you’d sit down with them, you’d get the vital stats information. You get them to sign some forms and then go into the selection room. Then at the very end, pay.

I just thought, from … I tried to picture what that person, sometimes it’s on the other side of the desk or on the other side of the phone. In this case, on the other side of the computer, what are they doing?

I believe my hypothesis is that the online cremation arrangement consumer is, they’re going to have a little bit of knowledge of buying from Amazon and other places. If you go to buy that from Amazon, you’re not going to put you through a ton of hoops and get you to fill out 80 fields for, what’s your full name, and residence, and mother’s maiden name, and occupation, and military history and all that. That just isn’t going to happen for a successful online transaction.

What I would say is, let’s move it around. Get them to choose what services they want, and pay for them. Then they can fill out the stats and then they can sign the forms, because I believe that getting the credit card is the best sign of making a commitment. I’d much rather chase a family for vital stats info than chase them for a credit card number.

Jeff even said this. He said, “You know, when we try to do it the traditional way, we’d send them and they’d fill out a form, but then they’d never pay. We didn’t really know if we had the call or not.” That’s why, if you have that credit card and the money is already on its way to your bank account, it’s a pretty good indication that they’re going to do business with you.

JJ: Yes. I always like that indication as a business owner.

Rob Heppell: Well, and it solves … There are no accounts receivable issues. There are no cash flow issues when you get paid upfront. Then they finally got that and they’re, “Okay. Yes. That’s good. Great.” The nice thing about Murphys is, they’re great students too, right?

They’d ask questions and then they’d go, “Okay. Yes. Okay, let’s try it,” or, “Oh, okay. Yes, I get it now. That makes sense.”

Then the next one is when we got into this. The site’s built, and now we need to drive traffic to it. If we go back to that example of who are we trying to target, how are we going to get them there, and what message are we going to use to get them to what we want them to do. In this case, is to purchase an online cremation.

Using Google Ads is the right thing. I think the best thing to do especially when they need a funeral home. Pre-need’s totally different because it’s a longer life. The sales cycle is a lot longer. I explained to them, “What we’re going to do. The first few months, we just need to get a feel of the market. How we do that is we’re going to get the parameters, the location, the geography, the geolocation. We’re going to then dial in the keywords.”

Some places in the country use funeral homes. Some people use mortuary. Some people, sometimes you even see funeral parlor up there, but not too much. There are different terminologies. Then we were dialing in the negative keywords too. We’re going to find out what Google, and Google’s getting worse and worse at this, is they call them close variants.

We actually, in a cremation arrangement campaign, we actually use the word funeral as a negative keyword for that campaign, and we only want people searching for cremation to see that. Now we can flip that and have a funeral campaign where we’re wanting funeral searches, and maybe even have cremation as a negative keyword for that.

This is just so, I guess, dishonest is the best term I can use. If I put funeral as a negative keyword, and they misspell funeral, they’ll let it go through because Google thinks that cremation, funeral, cemetery, and obituaries are all synonymous with each other. You have to really rely, not only on the negative keywords but on the misspellings of the negative keywords.

Then the last part of that is … Well, sorry. Then there’s the, we fine-tune the bidding and then we test the ads. We want to pay the least amount as we have to, and we tweak the ads so that the ads are getting clicked on to increase our click-through rate.

Once we have that done and we’re watching the sales, we want to establish a baseline for the ROAS. It’s not a term that many funeral homes would know, but online cremation people should know. They should know what their ROAS is. ROAS is a return on advertising spend. What we want to get is-

JJ: Well, you know, just as a pause, the biggest thing for me is that, is the expectation of whether it’s a campaign itself, or you’re building in a website, or you’re hiring a marketing agency or whatever, there is a strong need to have that.

I never used the word ROAS because I didn’t know what it meant, but that’s exactly right. It’s very much, a pay-for-performance type of function that you’re asking for. I think a lot of people just, plug it in and check it off the list and they don’t follow up on it, you know? Sorry, I just heard that and it just-

Rob Heppell: No. Yes. For sure. ROAS is a smaller component of your ROI. You have your return on investment. Investment could be money, it could be time, but this gets really specific. This ROAS doesn’t really work from the funeral home’s side because it’s so much harder to track where did that new funeral first call come from.

There could have been a number of factors. People could have still gone through Google Ads and found the funeral home, but maybe they’ve seen the online reviews and they know that you’ve been around for a long time. Then they got to the website and they liked the information on the website. Then they picked up the phone.

Much harder to track than someone landing on a cremation arrangement website, reading it. Wanting, then to go through the next step and then click, click, click, add it to the cart, checkout, and then on to the vital stats.

10 to 15% is my target, but even up to 20% is acceptable. It’s really the owner of the business, of what they’re willing to spend. There’s this great strategy marketer named Dean Jackson, came up with or shared. He likes to compare a slot machine versus a vending machine.

A slot machine, you put your money in, you pull the lever. You don’t know if it works or not, and then all of a sudden, oh, then you get a payoff, but you don’t really know, “Well, what did I do to get that?” It’s the John Wanamaker quote where 50% of my advertising works. I just don’t know which 50%.

Then the vending machine theory is, if there’s a vending machine with a bunch of cremation calls, let’s put a value on them that, they’re all worth $1,000 and there’s a vending machine there. If you put in $150 if we’re at the 15% ROAS. You put in $150 and you take out 1,000. That makes pretty good sense, hey Jake?

JJ: It does. When I listen to you, these are the reasons that, as you went through and we first met and you were explaining all this, I’m like, “Yes, I just need to hire Rob, and he’ll do all this for me.”

Rob Heppell: Well, it takes a little bit of … It’s not perfect. We’re always working it and we’re always … It’s not then just on autopilot, especially with Google, the way they change things, but if we can get within that sweet spot.

I said to Jeff, “Okay, so you’re okay spending 100 to $150. I said, “Okay, so how many calls do you want, a month?” He said, “Well Yes, I’d like to have 30 calls. That would be good. 30, 35 calls.” I said, “Okay. Well, then let’s start with a budget of $4,000.”

He’s like, “What, 4,000? That’s a lot of money.” I’m like, “Well, Yes, it’s a lot of money, but you know what, Jeff, $40,000 is way more money that you’d be bringing in, less the $4,000 and our-“

JJ: I think that’s a good point you bring up because to me, if somebody said it’s going to cost you 500,000 a month, let’s say that. Something ridiculous. This is where it’s the difference between seeing something from the outside, and just making a quick decision and then saying, “Well, hold on. How can I make sense of this?”

To me, it’s like, “You want to charge me that much a month. If you can bring in, whatever, 750,000 each month and I don’t have to do anything, well then, maybe it actually makes sense.”

You have to dig deep on that, and you can end up being penny wise and pound foolish, sometimes because you feel like the spend is this. I’m sure, as we’ll get to this because I can add my two cents on just the enterprise value this creates over the 4,000. That’s extraordinary. So, anyway.

Rob Heppell: I am looking forward to your part on that, and you can really fill in when we get towards the end. In speaking with Vince on your business consulting side of the services, just to keep up to date I’m like, “Hey Vince, what’s the average budgeted value for advertising?” He said, “Yes, three to 5%.” Kind of, standard. It’s been that way for a long time.

I like to say though, and again, this is more of this direct response type of marketing is, there shouldn’t be any budget. If it’s working, if we’re within our ROAS, you could put your budget at 10,000, there’s going to be a natural ceiling. There are only going to be so many people in the market searching for cremation in Scottsdale. There’s only going to be so many people, unlike the yellow pages where, if you said, “Oh, Yes. Let’s triple my budget,” they’ll sell you three more full pages.

It doesn’t mean you’re going to get that much business. With the way pay-per-click works, you are going to get that … You should be able to get that much business. Again, there’ll be a natural ceiling to that.

It was really hard. Oh, and regarding … I know that you need to start with a budget, but if you’re able to do this and dial in your ROAS, if you have a budget … I think a budget’s just there to guide you from ineffective marketing, because if you don’t know your marketing works well, okay, at least we’ll just spend 3%.

JJ: Well said. Right.

Rob Heppell: It’s a way to prevent you from spending too much money on crappy marketing. Now if you have good marketing, again, you want to spend-

JJ: Spend away.

Rob Heppell: Yes. Then I said, “Now Jeff, there’s going to be a point though. If you’re too busy, you’re going to have to hire a new person, you’re going to have to get another van. You might be, have to get a new building. There could be natural ceilings that you don’t want to go through.”

You totally get this, Jake. I’ve had clients that will … Some of these are one or two-person shows. If they’re going on vacation, they’ll say, “Hey, pause my Google Ads for a couple of weeks. I’m going away.” So the calls stop, and then we also see this too. Maybe their credit card gets compromised and we let them know, “Hey, we need another credit card.” If they don’t get back to us in two or three days, they’ll then call us and say, “Hey, how come we haven’t gotten any calls for three days.” I’m like, “Yes, we reached out to you three days ago. We need a new credit card.”

Again, it’s the neat side of the business. The other thing, this is a little off-topic. We’re mainly dealing with funeral home owners that have been in the business for a long time. When this starts to work, you can see them like they’re becoming entrepreneurs again. They get excited. Even though they much rather have a 5,000, $10,000-traditional funeral call, but just to see that they didn’t have to pick up the phone, they didn’t have to answer the phone. There’s money in the bank account and things are already in the works. It’s really neat to see them becoming these online entrepreneurs.

JJ: I say this with a smile. What a fresh concept it is, to consider that you actually have a controlled means of, actually growth within a funeral home. I always say, WM Funeral Home where I used to work at the building next to it, they had a reservoir behind it. I always thought that the only way Whitney Murphy could grow is, they’d poisoned the reservoir and that’s how they could get more calls.

We laugh and whatever, but there’s a reason Google and these ads and effective websites work, and why they make so much money doing it, quite honestly. Why didn’t we think of that, right? It’s quite a thing when you can quantitatively see how people are finding or getting that call to action in marketing by the spend.

To your point, also making sure that you can measure it, and there’s that return on the marketing spend and what have you. It’s a real thing. The thing that can be cool for you is if your competitor’s not doing it and you are. The bad thing is if your competitor’s doing it and you aren’t.

Rob Heppell: That’s correct.

JJ: Which side do you want to be on?

Rob Heppell: With Google Ads too, you can be quite stealthy and even get into other markets. That may be because the footprint or the radius that a funeral home will attract people is going to be a lot smaller than what a cremation business could, right? As you would know, with Mackey Funeral Home and then the Arizona Online Cremation, Arizona Online Cremation, even though it’s operated out of the same area, you can reach a lot further.

Because they don’t have to drive, it’s not a five-minute drive compared to a 30-minute drive, they just, “Okay. Yes, they’re in the area. That makes sense. I’m in the right place.” Again, we need to identify what type of person we’re trying to connect with.

JJ: For sure.

Rob Heppell: Then the last strategy that I wanted to highlight in my dealings with Jeff was, what I call a two-step sales strategy. I think this is very unique to the way our cremation arrangement websites are created, our platform compared to others. I’ll need to walk you through this.

You know what it’s like, Jake, sitting in front of a family at the funeral home. I would think, where I worked at McCall’s in Victoria, way back. I’m saying, maybe in the late ’80s or probably the ’90s. It’d be in the summer. There’s no air conditioning in that building because it’s a pretty mild climate up here in the Pacific Northwest.

It’d be a hot day. Some sales guy would come in and say, “Hey, you need to sell these candles with the picture on them.” The owner would say, “Okay, Rob. Make sure you offer these to all the families.” You’re going through the arrangement. I totally remember sweat running down my back, and I’m trying to make this … This arrangement’s going on a little longer than normal. I’m thinking, “Here’s that damn candle.” I can see it on the little side table.

This family, it’s going to be so hard. I’ve got so many things to go through. We’re at 90 minutes. That’s why I always say, “If you’re trying to sell a grieving family some new technology, you need to pre-introduce it before they get in there because they don’t want to be there. They just want to get out of there.”

If you start, “Oh, now before I let you go, I need to show you this,” because the problem is, or just the situation is, they come in one time. You get one chance to offer it, and then that’s it. They’re going to walk out the door, there’s no more upselling.

With online arrangements, it’s a bit different. There’s an issue with online client families, which is that you could just never communicate with them at all. They come online, they order, they sign everything. The funeral home starts going through the logistics. No matter where you are, it’s going to take a few days for that cremation to take place, and maybe even a bit longer.

Sometimes there’s a lack of communication with those families. I encourage our clients of our cremation arrangement website platform to make sure that they are in communication with these families by email. You don’t need to phone. We even have some clients use SMS. They might allow a family to give their cell phone number if they want to be updated, just like with FedEx.

You sign up for, “Oh, Yes. Text me any delivery updates.” The same type of thing. What we have in our system is an email notification. As that cremation order comes into the website, and the funeral home, it would start by saying, processing. It’s come in. Overall, I’m just going to use the word, order because that’s the E-commerce term. The order is processing. It’s not completed yet. The money comes in, and then we’ve customized this process.

Then the next status update would be, deceased transferred. Some clients use it, some don’t. If you then make that status to, deceased transferred, it will shoot out an email to the family or the executor, whoever made the arrangements. “We just want to let you know that your loved one’s in our care.”

This can then go on, too for, another one would be, cremation scheduled, cremation completed. We can even change those. There could be, cremation completed, no urn sale, cremation completed, urn already purchased. Depending on what they did, they’d get two different messages.

The nice thing about our system is, not only do we have the arrangement process, but we also have an à la carte store where we can then send people back. So, took me a while to explain this. Now in Jeff’s scenario, we were talking this through and I said, “Do you offer fingerprint jewelry?” He says, “Yes. Yes, we do.” I said, “Okay.

So in this initial one where we say, transfer complete …” Now we’re not using that term in the email. It’s just how internally we’re talking about it. Part of that, in the messaging though, in the body of the email it would say, “As part of our process, we do take a digital fingerprint of the deceased. We do this and we then offer it to the family, if they would like to keep it and have a record of that, and maybe print it, or even some people will purchase some fingerprint jewelry. If you’d like to see some samples, here’s a link.”

You click on that link, take them to that section of the store. On more than one occasion, Jeff said that they had people buy more jewelry and dollars than they spent on the actual arrangement. Those, I think, five or six little pendants with the fingerprint on it would be more than the price of the entire cremation.

He said, 35% of his families would upgrade, whether they upgrade in the initial process or in this second sale. Again, I don’t think … Marketing doesn’t stop when the first call’s taken. With our funeral home clients, with the Fractional CMO services that I offer, I’ll instruct them to, “Here’s some …” Maybe when they make the first call, they will get their email address and then send them information.

We’re pre, not selling them, but letting them know, “Here’s the agenda of the arrangement. Here are some samples of different … We’re going to ask you some questions about how to memorialize your loved one.” These could be links to fingerprint jewelry, to tribute blankets, or what have you.

Back, if you look at me in the ’90s with sweat running down my back there, with no air conditioning, it would be a lot different if they said to me, “Hey Rob, just before we go, we got that information and we want three of those tribute blankets.” Then I’m just providing a service. I’m not having to sell something that they don’t know.

Marketing doesn’t stop when the first call is taken. I think they are some other opportunities to help increase that funeral average. Again, as all of us, I would hope, would do in a very empathetic and ethical manner, but instead of having to present it when they don’t even know what’s going to be offered to them.

Those are just some of the ways that we’ve done this with a lot of our clients. I thought that this with Jeff was quite interesting. Again, he was happy for me to share this information.

To wrap up his story, he and Steve went from no calls to over 800 calls in five years, four to five years. Then they were approached to sell their business. They got the offer and they said, “Yes. Let’s do it.” This is great. I saw Jeff at the last convention that I was at. I was in one line and he was in another. He said, “Hey, Rob.” He’s waving at me. I go, “Hey,” at him and his wife, Stephanie.

He said, “Oh, great to see you.” He says, “Hey, I just want to thank you so much. You’ve made me a very rich man.” I’m like, “Hey, I’m glad to help.”

JJ: Well, you know, we can’t ignore that, we know that we just have to suspect, I’ll say it that way that, this next generation, or the consumers, if you want to call them consumers. The people that we’re helping solve this problem, want to do everything like everything else they’re doing. That’s, go online, find the answers, make their purchase, make their selections within the comforts of their own home, and without feeling like … Pressure is something, I think, somebody puts on themselves, and rarely does it come from a funeral director. It’s just not in a funeral director’s nature.

Rob Heppell: No.

JJ: They feel it regardless. We do our best to make them comfortable. You give these kind of options, it’s just natural. I think that, quite frankly, you could even, to your story, find that your averages could even be more.

Rob Heppell: Oh, sure.

JJ: To his point about making him rich, having created success out of this, you have to consider the fact that, what we’re seeing right now at Johnson Consulting are $900-average funeral businesses to $1,000-average, which, as a traditional, staunch funeral director, you’d look at that and say, “Huh. That’s not me. I don’t provide that type of service,” and that’s fine. I’m here to tell you that we as a company are selling businesses like that.

These multiples are as big as selling a heritage firm in a market. Eight times, nine times multiples for businesses like them, all being produced out of an online presence, like what you’re talking about. When you take those calls and you take $1,000, and if the infrastructure’s there, outside of the cost. Let’s say you’re getting even $500 falling to the bottom line, probably it’d be more than that, I would say, at some point, then you need to hire more help and whatever.

Let’s say half of it is falling to the bottom line on incremental calls. You take that, times eight-time, these calls are worth 4,000, $5,000 each call. You can go down a big presentation rabbit hole here on just what happens if you’re not getting that call. You’re losing four or 5,000 plus an enterprise value or more, or you’re not getting that opportunity. That’s a lot of money.

What’s always interesting is knowing what, at least we at FRM charge for doing a website and looking at these incremental values. It’s a steal. You’re stealing, really from FRM, to create that enterprise value.

You know what? It’s the market. We understand that, but me as an entrepreneur, that’s certainly why I have my own funeral business and plan to continue to grow it. There’s an incredible amount of value when it’s done right, and it far, far exceeds the cost, for sure. You know?

Rob Heppell: Absolutely. I think too, for anyone who’s thinking of wanting to expand their business. Getting into, if it’s either the option of buying another funeral home or starting an online cremation business, they need to forecast through all the numbers. Then with help from the experts that you have, Jake, at Johnson Consulting, you could see … I’ve had another client say, “You know when I went to thinking of expanding into the online cremation market and my parents were like, “Oh, why don’t you just have another funeral home because the calls are worth a lot more?”

The investment was going to be well more than 10 times, to buy the land with a building or purchase someone versus website-

JJ: Oh, Yes. The barrier to entry is so different. It’s actually, it’s a unique marriage, here with FRM and the consulting side because oftentimes we are presented with projects to help somebody start one of these businesses. How do we, I use bifurcate as an analyst, but how do we separate out the one business from the other? Do we use it under a different name? Is it under a different building, the same building? What does the pricing strategy look like? How to create the packages. Who’s going to run it? Is it going to be my manager or am I going to hire somebody from the outside?

All of that also includes how we’re going to turn that strategy into a website. It’s with no surprise that we’ve been doing this for clients, where it’s the FRM consulting business, start-up an online cremation business program. It’s worked well for me in my own business.

The only thing that I’m missing out on is expanding and growing it more. I think a lot of people who are listening to this, either have already discovered that, or there are those that will be discovering that soon because it really has been a great thing for my business. I know, for others.

I’ve never heard anybody say they started an online cremation business. I’m sure they’re out there because you can never say never, where they’d started an online cremation business to say, “That was the worst thing I ever did.”

I think if it’s done right, it’s really a very … Especially in these times, a very value-added equity contribution to your business.

Rob Heppell: It’s not like you’re going to … If it’s done right, and we go through when we’re creating the packages we have a strategy, so it doesn’t cannibalize the traditional funeral home. Those families will go somewhere else. If you don’t offer that, they’re-

JJ: Oh, Yes. That’s what was happening. That’s exactly what’s happening to me. We’re like, “Enough of this.” I mean, I understand that we can’t service them all, and we don’t want to service them all. In some regard, there was a segment that kept asking, and we didn’t have the offering up to that point.

I know we’re running short on time, but I’m passionate about this because I live in an 80% cremation market, and everybody else listening, either is or will be. You decide where you want to be. You know?

Rob Heppell: Absolutely. Well, hey Jake, thanks for letting me share the story, Jeff’s story, and how Funeral Results works into it. I think down the road, not the next episode, but we’ll even go deeper on the building of the online cremation business and then turning that into the enterprise system. Having a, what could a possible valuation be, for that. I think that’d be a fun one to talk through.

JJ: I agree.

Rob Heppell: Great.

JJ: Well then.

Rob Heppell: Well, thanks. Thank you for spending your time with us today. Our goal is for us to share our experiences and insights in the hope that it will help other funeral professionals like you serve more families.

Rob Heppell: Make sure you check back soon for another episode of the Funeral X Podcast. Until the next one, this has been JJ and Rob Heppell.

 

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