Since the 1st of the year we have been busy telling you what happened with the public companies, where we think the public companies are going, what we think will happen in the industry in 2018, reminiscing about an old lawsuit in the industry, and giving some advice on getting positive public relations for your firm.

While all of this is interesting and worth learning about – as knowing where your industry is going is essential to creating a vision of how you want to run your operation, still it is all ancillary to the core mission of why you operate your funeral home.  That mission should be solely focused on “giving service to the families that call you.”

This is not to say that you should not have a mission to serve your employees, to produce a profit, to operate in a fair manor, to be a good corporate citizen, but it is saying that the core mission of any funeral establishment should be to “serve” its client families.  It has also been my experience that if I served that core mission of serving families in need, then everything else fell into place.  Employees were happier, profits came in, families repeated their use of the funeral home and gave us good references in the community,  and we had the resources to contribute to our community in many ways.

I also always found it easier to provide this core mission if I was not worrying about money at the business and maintained a steady cash balance or used a line of credit to fund daily operations without worry.  Think about it, if you are trying to serve families but are really concerned – and possibly trying to “sell” them for higher margins  with the casket they purchase or the add-ons they will buy for the cremation service – can you really be “serving” their needs?

The end point of this article on service is really about knowing your financial picture for the year.  Make a point to be realistic about your price points and budget out a plan for the year that allows for a solid profit at about 90% of the cases you expect to handle at your average price point.  Some times it takes difficult spending decisions to get to that balanced budget at 90%, but once you reach that point and don’t have to be worried about the year financially my guess is that life will get easier and your emphasis on serving families will bring in more market share – even if you had to slightly raise your prices to get to that 90% case volume balanced budget.  That is how it always worked out for us — service gained us market share and hard, realistic budgeting was what allowed us to pamper with service without worrying about profits.

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