Funeral Words

Great Quotes

The Real Bottom Line

"Do what you love in the service of people who love what you do."

Leadership

"Leadership is the act of transformation. Taking nothing and trning it into something."

Both quotes attributed to Steve Farber of Extreme Leadership, Inc. as taken from Tom Peters' Essentials Series on Leadership.

Pre-Need, The Dark Side

Below you will find the contents of a letter I sent to Doug Hernan at the Funeral Service Insider newsletter. I have not heard back from him as of this moment and do not know if these comments will ever get heard anywhere but here.

Funeral directors hear lots about the power of pre-need as a marketing tool and as a key piece of holding market share. However, pre-need has long term financial implications for the funeral home and those issues deserve analysis and understanding in order to balance the boosterism we see among the pre-need financial institutions. After all, they have a very limited long term risk, whereas the funeral home has to produce the funeral regarless the rise in cost over time.

We need to work this problem and understand it more thoroughly,

BT

****************************************************

Hi Doug, Has anyone out there tried to document or analyze the long-term financial impact on a funeral businesses which run a high volume preneed program? Preneed finance companies (insurance, trust and the like) don't have to worry about the funeral home that produces the contract. If that funeral home goes away, the money can gravitate somewhere else and a funeral of some sort or other will get produced. Financial providers have little risk, they just have to produce a return on the money and they get to set and adjust those returns whenever they need to. Funeral homes on the other hand need to perform the complet documented services many years in the future regardless the increased cost of doing business. If returns on preneed money run at 2.5% - 3% but the cost of doing business rises at a higher rate (and right now it seems to be running higher), it does not take that many years before the margin in the final delivered service disappears. At that point, what IS the point of booking this grand portfolio of unprofitable business???? I also think about the funeral directors who have taken most of the margin out of their products, particularly caskets. It does not take long for a $500 margin on a high end unit to disappear completely so that come at-need time the preneed income is BELOW WHOLESALE! That's costly and something that can sneek up on the unsuspecting. Obviously, Medicaid exemptions are extremely important to protect. Spend-down preneeds make sense 100% of the time. Preneed enhances community awarness and can become an important piece of a marketing plan. No doubt about that. At the same time, too much preneed can undermine the immediate effect of price increases and can lock the family into a labyrinth of legal limitations which can upset their funeral experience and undermine their confidence in funeral service. After all, these are sophisticated, long-term financial agreements with lots of unintended consequences for everyone involved. In addition, there's nothing easy about keeping funeral home cost growth in line with current preneed returns (especially when we have no control over the delivered cost of our caskets and other products). That takes high end cost analysis and constant improvements in productivity. I don't see either of those things happening in funeral service right now. In other words, preneed is a double edged sword and as such needs to be handled sensibly. I would love to see some devil's advocate analysis in your publication as a counter point to the boosterism coming from the preneed companies (who have very little to lose and everything to gain by overlooking preneed challenges). Preneed requires balance and finding that balance requires study and debate. I hope you and your publication will help foster that process. Thanks for listening and have a fantastic day, BT

Developing a Taste for Funerals

Walk into the average Starbucks and you can order coffee in 19,000 combinations. Nineteen Thousand variations of COFFEE in one store. Can you even believe that? What a tremendous advantage, I can walk into one of their stores and order a combination that no one else will think of ordering for days or weeks. For all intents and purposes, that Starbucks is MY exclusive coffee place.

Don’t we need to do that with the remembering experience which happens in relation to a death (I avoided the word funeral on purpose by the way.). And no, 19,000 variations of casket will not get us there. Let’s face it, people do not want their final memories of a dear loved one to revolve around a box which contains lifeless remains. They never knew them as living in a box, how can they possibly start now??? They want and need better ways to connect with the best parts of that relationship now ended and capture those connections in ways that confirm and preserve the best parts of life’s experience.

By the way, how did Starbucks get to 19,000 combinations? Focus groups? Top down corporate decision making? Nope. They responded to the daily requests of customers and learned to fulfill those requests better and better and better. The customer did most of the teaching right in the store. Starbucks listened intently and constantly changed based upon real world experience.

We have the same responsibility and a greater challenge in funeral service. After all our customers don’t want to come in and chew the fat with us while we experiment with the next concoction. We will have to work harder to get those opinions. It will take hard work to help our consumers express the ups and downs of their real emotional experience at the services we organize and run.

In contrast, millions of people thoroughly understand the purpose and fulfillment and outright pleasure that can come from a cup of well brewed coffee. In other words, they have acquired a taste for coffee, for some, a deeply sophisticated taste. A greater challenge exists for us. Fewer and fewer people have a “taste” or appreciation or even a basic understanding about the value and purpose of gathering and remembering after the death of a loved one. And yet, funerals have proved valuable and important to human beings for thousands of years. The form will change but that fundamental need will remain. Maybe with openness on our part and a greater spirit of collaboration (as opposed to the “here’s what we do and that’s all you need” approach) the new and revised menu of choices will become clear. No doubt a few funeral firms have begun some of those experiments but we need to do much more.

This will take listening. This will take determination. This will take change. So what, everything else in this world is changing, why not funerals as well. Just know that the value in funerals (the stuff people will pay a premium to receive) will involve a higher level of expertise (think psychology and heritage retrieval as opposed to better auto detailing) than funeral service has ever required before. The middle, the average funeral, will disappear over time and services will either gravitate up in terms of quality emotional need fulfillment or gravitate down towards low price fulfillment of government requirements (i.e. direct cremation) with the family doing the rest on a self-serve model.

Not a welcome scenario, particularly for those still serving the remainder of that average funeral generation. Just know that they will not come back next time with the same routine expectations. They will have either acquired a taste for something more or they will have lost all taste for routine and this time say “no thank you”. Listen, collaborate and thrive, that’s the only way.

Much to learn.

BT

P.S. Note the terms “heritage retrieval” above. That has never occured to me. What happens if part of what we do is to help people remember and connect with their roots, particularly the roots or heritage of the person who has died? Sounds challenging, sounds fascinating, sounds full of possibility. More on that concept later.

Our '70s Show

I feel stuck in the 1970s. Businesses of all kinds have transformed several times over in the last 30 years and we have stayed all too much the same. We have basically the same products, presented in bascally the same way. The means of providing our services has changed little in that time as well.

So many amazing options have become available in the last several years. Why has none of this come to bear on funeral service?

For instance, the litho books provided by casket companies have not changed for years. Funeral salespeople carrying around boxes of pictures in the trunks of their cars with the need to manage hundreds of binders across their territory.

Why not transform this into a digital process? The possibilities seem endless. Allow the funeral director (with the help of the sales rep if needed) to log on to a central system and order photos as necessary from the casket company and have them delivered over night via FedEx. How about allowing for some customization? Wouldn't it be great to print and re-print these items with the price right on the front where people could easily see it? After all, consumers now expect to have information at their fingertips. They are less and less comfortable with the "expert" who holds all the cards (and keeps all the prices) to him or her self. How about a system that allows for the combining of products on the same sheet such as the pairing of a casket with a particular urn? Cost effective, customized presentation materials for each and every funeral home. Why not? How about a customized litho to help the family remember what they chose?

Will all of that work and make sense? Probably not. Some of it will though so these possibilities deserve exploring. Why hasn't someone worked on this stuff? After-all a local photographer who took pictures at my daughter's dance recital last week now has a website where my wife and I can view all the photos at our leisure (we used to have to flip through notebooks and only during recital hours). We get to choose and purchase the photos whenever we find convenient. If a local photographer can provide that level of sophisitcation, shouldn't our multi-million dollar casket companies have a way to exploit these technologies?

Seems like we should have a million more ideas like this in the works from all quarters. I don't think we are working fast enough. I don't feel like I'm moving fast enough, that's for sure.

BT

Globalization--The End of Funerals?

Have we started to face a world in which personal identity and distiction disappear? This flattened world of 24/7 commerce in which nationional and ethnic boundaries disappear, in which we all become defined by buying rather than being, where electronic entertainments become the "source" of common experience and a search for deeper meaning, perhaps even the perceived need for deeper meaning disappears as a vapor.

Without the search for meaning, funerals become less meaningful. If the sacred becomes debased by comparision with a world of other ideas all held as equal, then society moves to another phase and funerals fade, another relic of a long ago past without meaning in the modern era.

Is this the outcome? I do not know with great certainty. Nevertheless, this loss of spiritual and ethnic and national identity contributes to the disconectedness of the individual and the diminishing need or desire to congregate and remember as groups of similar experience. Certainly that trend weakens the value of funeral gatherings and therefore diminishes the traditional roll of the funeral director.

What does this mean? It means the passing away of traditional funerals held in traditional ways. Just like the U.S. Army talks about the "Army of One", so we as funeral professionals must prepare and prepare and retrain and relearn so as to produce the "Funeral of One". Each service totally tailored to the memory of that particular person and to the time and travel and remembrance needs of the family which survives. A few cookie cutters will not surfice, just focused, detailed, customized service, provided at very moderate rates.

We have our work cut out for us.

BT

Cremation Tipping Point?

Have we reached a tipping point in Southern New England with cremation? Looking at the activity at our business it would seem that cremation has jumped in the last year. Talking with one casket company rep the other day, he seemed to confirm my observations.

Amazing how that will happen with trends. Slow growth and overall stability and then bam, everything shifts at once. Not unlike an earthquake I suppose. Demand builds in a hidden way and all of a sudden appears on the surface.

This shift will change lots of priorities among funeral directors in this region. Of course, change usually represents opportunity and positive outcomes for those that embrace change and work with it instead of against it.

Lots to learn. Should be a fascinating challenge.

BT

Funeral Home Software

Do you think anyone will develop a comprehensive software tool for funeral homes to use in serving families? I see bits and pieces here and there though most of the systems miss the point or don’t connect the pieces sufficiently to make a difference.

Batesville has a great concept with their planner software. Start at the arrangement conference and allow the data to flow into the system at that point. It looks great at first, the family can see the information as it gets gathered and edit as necessary. They have the chance to review the Statement of Goods and Services before it gets printed out. The screen images look beautiful and comforting to the family. Great stuff—and then, YOU HIT A BRICK WALL.

The document solution, based upon Microsoft Word, does not keep up with the need to create beautiful, color document layouts. It’s even hard to maintain basic forms, never mind complex documents or prayer cards or any of the rest.

Just as important, the system has no way to run a report, not even a batch of mailing labels, never mind comparing funerals or following trends or sending out a batch of emails (such as an electronic newsletter).

No one else has done any better. In most cases they start at the office and back shop portion and work down to accounting. That’s okay but it does not make funeral directors any more productive and in the end, as cremation grows and as the value of products drops (eliminating margins along the way) funeral directors must have the ability to accomplish more on any given day than they ever have in the past. That’s an important way to keep the small operators in business doing what they do best, serving families, and it’s a key way to keep quality, experienced staff on hand at the larger firms. Efficiency does not need to be a four letter word in our profession. Efficiency or perhaps better said “time use effectiveness” needs to become our best friend. Otherwise, everyone works more and more hours for less and less income and that’s no way to run a business.

Any one ready to build a comprehensive solution to organizing and running funerals? I’m ready to see it and work on it any day of the week.

BT