What Funeral Service is Really Selling: A Lesson from HGTV

  I was visiting with a friend the other day and I noticed that she had HGTV on her TV… again. It seems like this cable channel is on almost all the time.  And she wasn’t the first person that I noticed watching this show. In fact, recent ratings show HGTV ahead of the Food […]

What Your Families Want vs. What Funeral Service Offers Them

  I recently wrote a blog about 5 paradigm shifts that would save funeral service. In a nutshell the 5 paradigm shifts were:   1. Evaluate Your Value 2. Listen to Baby Boomers 3. Focus on Grief Support Needs 4. Embrace Technology 5. See Change as an Opportunity In response to the blog, Alex asked […]

Why Isn’t Funeral Personalization Being Driven by Funeral Directors?

  A few weeks ago an article on funeral personalization made the national news about the “King of Beers.” I found it deeply concerning, but not for the reasons you probably think! Here is a quick re-cap: a man from Louisiana requested that he be buried in a casket adorned with the logo of a […]

Funeral Aftercare Debate: Let Families Mourn, or Comfort Them?

“Grief is what you think and feel on the inside after someone you love dies. Mourning is the outward expression of those thoughts and feelings. To mourn is to be an active participant in our grief journeys. We all grieve when someone we love dies, but if we are to heal, we must also mourn” […]

A Funeral Director’s “To-Don’t” List

  Most organized people have a To-Do List, but how many of us actually finish those? According to Peter Bregman, hardly any of us do. This is a huge relief to me because now I can let go of all the guilt that has accumulated with each unfinished To-Do list that I own! One key […]

7 Lessons Funeral Service Can Learn From 50 Shades of Grey

Inspiration can be found in all the wrong places! I was challenged to connect the issues in funeral service with the recent worldwide phenomenon known as 50 Shades of Grey.  50 Shades is a romance novel that narrates the steamy relationship between a recent college grad (Anna Steele) and a young business tycoon (Christian Grey). […]

The Funeral Profession’s Declaration of Independence

In the course of funeral service, it becomes necessary for funeral directors to dissolve the line of thinking which has connected them with their past, and to assume the professional success which the Laws of Nature entitle them.  They should declare the causes which impel them to think differently. We hold these truths to be […]

5 Paradigm Shifts That Will Save Funeral Service

In 1962 Thomas Kuhn wrote about scientific advances where “one conceptual world view is replaced by another.” Think of a paradigm shift as a change from one way of thinking to another. It’s a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis. It doesn’t just happen, but rather it is driven by agents of change. The […]

How to Generate More Opportunities from Your Existing Families

You’ve heard it before. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” When I was just a kid, that saying didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but after years of working with families (and now funeral professionals) l quickly learned the true value of that ‘bird in the hand’. […]

Grief Support: Why Your Families Need It (But Don’t Want It)

Over the years, I have advocated for meeting the aftercare needs of the families we serve. Thomas Lynch said it best: “A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.” I believe he is speaking to the two fundamental needs funeral directors are expected to […]