Sometimes it is hard to know what to focus on. In this training, I give you three keys to growing your funeral home business in 2024.
Transcript generated by AI (please excuse any typos)Hi, this is John Callaghan. Welcome to 2024. My goal this year is simply to help great funeral home businesses win more calls and serve more families.
This year I’m gonna switch a lot more to video content instead of writing long newsletters. The reason is simple, a picture’s worth a thousand words, and I have a lot to show you this year. So, rather than writing long, long newsletters, quick videos is the way to go.
Today I want to focus on some key things that can help you grow in 2024.
There are three items I’m gonna cover. One, my 2024 master plan. Two, the keys to growing, and three, I’m going to share with you how I plan on helping you grow this year.
I’ll keep this short and to the point. First, the master plan.
I’ve written master plans before. This is the one that I created in 2020.
As a matter of fact, right before Covid hit, things have changed. So I’m creating a new master plan this year.
But with every master plan, there’s a high level image and then there’s the detail. Here’s the detail from that one from last, like I said, three or four years ago, there’s a lot of detail in that high level plan that I really keep to myself and I only show keep clients as we’re going through projects.
Now this year, I’m creating a new master plan. Eventually I’ll create a new image, new graphic for the top. My graphics person will take care of that for me, but I’m working through the process of creating that detailed plan again and all the details that there’s a lot to it.
I start out with what I call a mind map, and I take that mind map and turn it into a roadmap for my clients.
And there are two sides to this year’s mind map. There’s the inside reality and outside perception. And I’ll describe more on that in a moment. Now, there’s already a tremendous amount of detail in this mind map. I’ve got a lot of material already in here.
Basically, every video newsletter I put out this year will come from this mind map. It’s all in here. I’m just not gonna overwhelm you by giving it all at once. All the materials are here already.
Here’s three keys to growing in 2024. First, pick your market. It used to be that the funeral home market was one market. Everybody did a funeral and they were all basically the same. That is not even remotely the case anymore. If you try to serve everybody, you will serve nobody.
Pick your market. Who are you going to go after? Is it the direct cremation market?
Is it the traditional funeral market? Is it the celebration of life market? Is it a particular ethnic niche? Who is your target market? That is a critical first step, and frankly, it’s one that very few funeral homes get, right? You’ve got to pick your market. You cannot serve everybody.
It used to be that you would serve just people within your community, but now that’s fragmented, too. Plus, you’ve got discount firms serving your community from two counties away saying that you’re only going to look at every single death call in your market. Probably not gonna happen. You’ve gotta subdivide and pick your market. Who are you going to serve?
Next, be unique. And this is something that a lot of funeral homes have really struggled with, where everybody wants to basically be the same sort of business that doesn’t work anymore. There’s a phrase I want you to remember. When all things are equal, the deciding criteria is always price.
If you are perceived as being the exact same as every other funeral home in town, the deciding criteria is price. If you have price shoppers, it’s because from the outside looking in, they think you’re the same. If they didn’t think you’re the same, they wouldn’t be calling and asking about price. You’ve got to be unique in order to grow in 2024.
Next point, you have to worry and pay attention to your inside reality, which is your experience. What are you providing inside your, your business and inside your business? Your inside reality and your outside perception must match. It is a huge mistake to let them not match. You’ve got to have those match up.
For example, if you have an outside perception that you’ve created through your marketing that you are by far the best funeral home in town, you provide the best care level, the best service in town, and yet you don’t guess what happens, you’re gonna get nothing but negative reviews. You’re gonna have dissatisfied families all over the place.
If you make promises in that outside perception that you don’t actually deliver, you’re going to create problems for yourself. Conversely, if your inside reality is that you are extremely good and you do things that nobody else does, and you do them better.
And yet your marketing says that you’re the exact same as everybody else. You will never reach your full potential this year or any year. Your inside reality and outside perception perception must match the goal. The name of the game is to get that inside reality up as high as possible and then build an outside perception that matches it.
That’s how you grow your funeral home business or frankly any business. But that’s how you grow. Increase your inside reality, increase your up upside perception, you’ll grow every time.
Here’s how I plan on helping great funeral homeowners this year in 2024. On the inside reality side, your experience that you provide people, it’s training programs. I have trademark packages that I’m gonna make available this year, and in some cases actually consulting on the experience that you provide.
Most of the people who watch this video series and read my newsletters already provide a great experience. What they really struggle with is communicating that to the world. But for those who need help on the experience, I have some things that I can offer in that area.
And the outside perception. It’s strategy consulting to help pick that market. What are we really gonna be known for? What are we going to serve this year? And then marketing campaigns and services to address that market. Then, marketing tools are used to make that possible.
And the marketing tools is something that we really haven’t gotten into in the past. We’ve really been counting on the current vendors in the industry to provide us good tools, and frankly, I’m disappointed with what they’re providing. I need some marketing tools. We’ve started creating some in-house, and I plan to roll those out for customers this year. Those will be more at a lower price point and might be a good starting point for a lot of people who watch this newsletter series.
2024 promises to be another turbulent year in society. There’ll be a lot of noise, there’ll be a lot of distractions, but people will pass away and families will need your help.
My goal for this year, again, is simple: to help great funeral home businesses win more calls and serve more families. But not all funeral businesses are great. There are roughly 12,000 independent funeral homes in the country. In my experience, less than 10% of them actually want to grow.
More of them will say they want to grow, but they’re not willing to put in the work to actually grow. So there’s roughly 10% who actually have the potential to grow, to grow. That’s roughly 1200 funeral homeowners who might need my help.
That also happens to be roughly how many subscribers are on my email series. I’m not trying to grow 12,000 funeral homes. I’m trying to grow the top 10%, and there’s a good chance that you’re in that group.
I’ll be back next week with another tip to help you grow your business.
