Is it possible to grow your funeral home in 2024? In this training, I give you five tips for choosing the best opportunity for your firm.
The following transcript was generated by AI. Please excuse any typos
Hi, this is John Callaghan, and welcome to Five Tips for Finding Your Opportunity for Growth.
To grow your business, you’re going to need to win calls from somewhere. You can’t create them. They have to come from one of your competitors. Where, which competitor are we going to move calls from?
Last week, I introduced you to a mind map that has all the subjects that we’re going to talk about this year. This week, I’m going to start drilling into one of the sections.
There’s two sides inside reality and outside perception. Outside perceptions created by your marketing.
But your marketing is more than a set of ads. There needs to be an underlying strategy.
You need a growth strategy. A growth strategy is basically a game plan. You wouldn’t send a football team out to play and hopefully win a game without a plan. There needs to be a plan for growth or it won’t happen. Hope is not a plan. You need a strategic plan for exactly how you’re going to grow your business.
Big part of that is to pick your market. Where’s the opportunity for growth? Where am I going to win more calls from?
And an important part of that, probably the most important, is saying, what’s the competition like, who can I win some calls from?
Now you have two different kinds of competition, direct and indirect.
Indirect are things like churches, country clubs, other venues, places where people are holding events and not holding them with you. Those are competitors as well, but we’ll deal with them in another video.
This week, I want to specifically look at the other funeral homes in your market. Where are we going to win calls away from these other funeral homes? That’s what we’re talking about this week.
Now, your goal is to find your best opportunity for growth. There are opportunities all over the place, but which one’s the best one and which one are you going to focus on this year?
And it’s a mistake to just try and tackle the entire market. That never works in my experience. You want to take one, one competitor at a time and say, how am I going to compete with that one and win calls away from them?
So here are five tips, finding your opportunity. One, look for weak leadership. In any market, there is always at least one, many times, quite a few funeral homes that have weak leaderships.
This is leaders who maybe they’re going through a divorce and they’re not paying attention to the business. Maybe they’re going through a transition of ownership and the next generation really doesn’t want it, doesn’t really have the passion for the business.
Weak leaders are not going to respond. You’re going to do something in this whole marketing process. You’re going to innovate your business, you’re going to create new campaigns, and they’re not going to respond. And that’s a good thing. So where’s the weak leadership in your market?
Next, look for physical limitations. A big part of what you will be doing in this process is innovating your business to offer something new to families. Is are there competitors that have physical limitations? I mean, of their physical building, the funeral home itself that you can take advantage of?
As an example, one of my clients put in a, an outdoor, um, fire pit area as an offering for families so that they can come in and gather and people can go outside and hang out at the fire pit. It’s gone over extremely well with families. One of the reasons he did it is that he looked at his competition and realized that because of where their funeral homes are located and the amount of space they had, they couldn’t do it.
So don’t put your efforts into creating something that can be easily copied. Put your efforts into something that cannot be copied. Look for their physical limitations. That’s one way of finding those things.
Look for competitors who are stuck in the past. They are still doing things the way they did in 1990. Those are good competitors to take on because they’re not going to change. You can come in, innovate your business, offer something new to families, they’re not going to change, and that’s a good thing for you. It’s not a good thing for them, but it’s a good thing for you.
Tip number four, do not take on the powerhouse until you’re already for the battle.
There’s always a dominant funeral home in town, and maybe that’s you, but if it’s not you, you don’t want to take on the big dog first. Take on some of the other ones.
One of my clients, we went from about 140 calls to almost hit 400 last year, but we didn’t do it by taking on the big dog right away. We do it by taking on smaller players, competing with them, winning calls from them. And then you take on the big one.
If you take on the big one right away, what’s going to happen is they will spend their resources to crush you. You’ve got to build up momentum and then take on the big one. Don’t go after the big guy until you have the resources to win.
Tip number five, avoid a price war unless you know you can win.
The only winner of the price war is the lowest price because you get into a price war that attracts price shoppers and price shoppers want the lowest price.
Don’t go down that path of a price war unless you know you can win, which means you have the lowest prices and nobody else can even touch you on your prices. Otherwise, stay away from price. It’s not a good strategy for growth unless you know you can win.
Those are five tips for finding your opportunity for growth. Growth happens when you find the opportunity and then put all your resources into chasing that opportunity and keep your focus on the one opportunity. And that’s how you can win more calls in the market.
Remember, you’re not going to win them from everybody. Set your targets on somebody, win the calls away from them, and then the next year you might take a different competitor on one at a time and that’s how you grow your business.
I’ll be back next week with more tips. Bye for now.
