I came across this article titled, “It’s funeral homes’ busy season, here’s what to be careful for”. Seeing that title I didn’t really know what to expect so I looked into the article. It’s a short article with some good thoughts — one of those thoughts was entitled, “The Myth of Holiday Suicides”. Now, over my career I dealt with budgets based on what my banking friends tell me is the “Law of Large Numbers”. I’ve always taken that to […]
Thursday night into Friday morning brought Minnesota’s first snowfall of the 2021-2022 winter season. It was light, but created slippery conditions outside that forced me onto an indoor treadmill run on Friday morning. My 2 1/2 mile daily run is punctuated by the fact that I have a lot of stamina. . . just not a lot of speed. On an indoor run, the result of that fact is I get about 25 minutes to catch up with the morning […]
It’s Friday. How about we take a couple of minutes to think about how death, dying, grief, and funerals deal with what is always termed as “Closure”. Are you aware of how often we use the term? What does it mean? Do our client families desire this? I bring up the subject because this past Monday was November 1 — “All Saints’ Day. In my Lutheran church we celebrate all who have died before us on the Sunday following All […]
The funeral profession has long had its critics. Those of us in the profession have to understand that and know that from time to time we are going to be broadsided by those critics’ calls for change. Recently this article entitled “How ‘Big Funeral’ made the afterlife so expensive” was published in Wired. It’s a good, if not one-sided, article that starts off by saying this, “You can’t die these days because it’s too expensive“. It goes on to say […]
A relatively new death tech app, Empathy, recently raised $30 million in Series A funding according to this article from Tech Crunch. The product is designed to help bereaving families navigate the choppy waters that result when a family member or someone close to them dies. “Empathy is a customer-centric company with compassion at our core. We aim not only to help families who are dealing with loss but also to act as a catalyst for change in the industry […]
It’s an age old debate that is carried on even in MBA classes at major colleges. . . . . .Where are your advertising dollars spent best — on Customer Acquisition or on Customer Retention? A local issue in a concern outside of the death care industry had my friends and I debating it over coffee this weekend. You hear a lot in the public markets about companies adding customers. However, very seldom do we hear about “Net New Customers”. […]
This is the week that Congress should act on the Biden Administration’s key piece of legislation, the $3.5 trillion “Human Infrastructure” bill. Regardless of what happens or how you feel about that bill, I thought it would be interesting to look back on how death care has fared from the other two large social bills passed in American history — the New Deal and the Great Society. The New Deal was passed by Congress under the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency […]
Arlington National Cemetery, our nation’s national cemetery, is somewhat between a rock and a hard place as they plan the future of the cemetery. I don’t think anybody disagrees with Karen Durham-Aguilera, the cemetery’s executive director when she states, “We want to be open. We want to have that opportunity for that 5-year-old who’s going to raise their hand one day to serve this great nation. So to be able to do that, we need to plan for our future.” […]
Every once in a while I come across an article which reminds me how much the actual inner workings of a funeral business has changed. And sometimes paradoxically, the same article or articles can point out that what I’m looking at is not so much a change as it is an evolution. Today I will highlight two articles on female funeral directors. The first one, about a group of female funeral directors at Singapore’s Serenity Casket & Funerals seems to […]
I read this interesting short article (and video news story) authored by Myles Udland at Yahoo Finance the other day. In the article, he surmises about “the role that demand is playing in the economic recovery.” According to Udland, you can “throw a dart at just about anywhere in the economy and you’ll find unmet demand held back by some version of a supply bottleneck.” And, it is happening in funeral service as I discovered when reading this article from Massachusetts. […]
