But with large conglomerates buying up many funeral businesses that were once owned by families, aspiring funeral directors must ask the question: Is owning a funeral home profitable? 

Is Owning a Funeral Home a Profitable Business?

As with any business, owning a funeral home can be profitable, provided you practice good business habits. Death care is also considered a recession-proof profession, as funeral home spending remains relatively constant even during times of economic downturn. 

To harken back to Benjamin Franklin’s quote, people are always in need of ways to honor the passing of their loved ones. While the exact preferences in the type of memorial may fluctuate over time, the fact remains that people will always need the assistance of funeral professionals to plan services, execute burials, and aid in the grieving process. 

Purchasing or Launching a New Business 

If you’re considering owning a funeral home, then you’ll have two ways to enter the profession: either purchasing an existing funeral home or building a new business from scratch. 

Buying a funeral home is undoubtedly the simpler and quicker option. With this approach, you’ll need to partner with an industry consultant that will help you navigate the process of finding, vetting, and negotiating the sale of the business. The primary downside of purchasing an existing business will be adapting its infrastructure (facilities, employees, and operations) to your vision. 

Building a funeral home from scratch naturally comes with a lot more work and expense, as you’ll need to purchase property, hire employees, and develop an entirely new business strategy. However, for those who are unafraid of the lengthy process, this approach can allow you to create a business that’s completely aligned with your vision. 

Regardless of how you plan to start a business, professionals like those at JCG can guide you through the accompanying strategic decisions. Whether you’re building or purchasing a funeral business, financials, employee management, and marketing can all benefit from some outside help. 

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6 Tips for Improving Funeral Home Profits

1. Create a Business Plan 

At the onset of creating your funeral business—whether you’re building from scratch or purchasing an existing funeral home—you’ll need to create a business plan. Along with drafting a mission and your values, your business plan should also include tangible financial goals and timelines. As your funeral home continues to operate, you can reexamine these goals to better understand how you’re performing. 

2. Marketing

While people continually need the help of funeral homes, your business will likely not be the only option available in a given region. Because of this, you’ll need to develop a marketing strategy—one that incorporates social media, a well-designed website, and SEO practices—to ensure that your ideal families find your services and feel compelled to book. 

3. Customer Service

Quality customer service is arguably the most important component of your business. If a family has a positive experience with your funeral home, then they’re not only likely to return, but they’ll also likely recommend your business to friends. 

Because of this, funeral directors need to implement a strategy to collect and monitor feedback from families. This allows a business to quickly address issues and build upon areas of strength.  

4. Recruit and Retain Talent

To create an exceptional family experience, you’ll need to recruit and retain the best talent available. By networking with local mortuary schools and looking to funeral profession job boards, you can find highly skilled individuals that bring value to your team. 

Once you’ve acquired the right people, you’ll also want to create incentive compensation plans as well as offer career development opportunities to ensure that personnel want to stick around. 

5. Add New Services

While people will always need funeral homes to help them honor the passing of loved ones, the specific ways in which they wish to accomplish this goal are subject to change. Because of this, funeral homes need to remain aware of trends and consider introducing new services into their offerings when appropriate. 

For example, during the pandemic, in-person gatherings were impossible to conduct safely. Many funeral businesses began offering webcasted memorials in which people could remotely attend a service and pay their respects. Now, with in-person gatherings resuming, many funeral homes offer the option of adding a virtual component to a memorial service, which allows those who live far away to still attend. 

Offering new products like these can put extra money in your pocket as well as demonstrate to families that your funeral home is on the cutting edge. 

6. Partner with a Funeral Home Consultant

Whether you’re purchasing a funeral business or building one from scratch, stepping into the role of business ownership is highly challenging. To ensure that you’re adeptly handling every component of the process, it’s often best to get advice from death care experts.

At Johnson Consulting Group (JCG), a leading death care consulting firm, our experts can partner with your team to help with every stage of creating a funeral business. Our Buying and Selling Consultants can help negotiate the sale of a business, our death care accountants can help get your financials in order, and our business consultants can help you build out marketing and employee retention strategies. 

No matter how you plan to start a funeral business, you’ll need to get the right help. At Johnson Consulting Group, our team has the profession-specific expertise that can help your funeral home at any stage.

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The post Is Owning a Funeral Home a Profitable Business? appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.

Tidy bookkeeping requires time and attention to detail, which is why many funeral homes choose to trust a funeral home accounting firm like Johnson Consulting Group to manage the details on their behalf. Here are some actionable strategies and best practices to help you build and refine your funeral home’s financial management.

1. Be Timely

A fundamental component of funeral home accounting is timeliness. The sooner you start your reporting, the sooner you can start building your backlog of financial data. From this data, you can then begin to recognize patterns in revenue and expenditures.

When you have the most up-to-date financial information at your fingertips, you can make more informed decisions. For example, if you hope to make a large purchase––an expansion, perhaps––it’s essential to know exactly where your business stands financially and whether or not you have the necessary budget. 

Timeliness will also help you cut down on errors and omissions. If you wait to document certain financial transactions, then you’ll be more likely to forget specific circumstances and details when you move to document them.

If you have a small team that already wears many hats, timeliness may be a challenge. In order to keep your bookkeeping records on track, it may make sense to invest in an accounting firm that specializes in deathcare to take the task off your hands.

2. Maintain Accurate Deposit Records

In addition to logging all transactions in a timely manner, it is essential for funeral homes to maintain accurate deposit records. You’ll want to get into the habit of preparing a deposit immediately after a transaction is made and ensure these deposits are properly documented. 

Doing so means accounting for every dollar of incoming revenue, where it’s from, and what it was for. 

This is especially important for funeral businesses that work with cash transactions, as it eliminates the chance of misplacing or forgetting to enter a cash transaction. Properly tracking your revenue sources in this manner will also help protect your funeral home from fraud. 

3. Categorize Expenses Consistently

Categorizing expenses correctly is a necessity. When it comes to expenses, take the time to properly document, track, and categorize every transaction. If you haven’t already developed a clear category structure for your expenses (chart of accounts), then you’ll want to do so immediately. Include instructions for your team that help them to distinguish between similar categories. 

This includes tracking all deposits, purchases for goods and services, fees, and any other associated costs. Regularly reviewing your transactions can also help prevent surprises when tax season rolls around. 

4. Don’t Overuse the “Miscellaneous” Category

A common mistake made by many funeral homes is over-utilizing the “miscellaneous” category. While “miscellaneous” can be a helpful utility, depending on it too much can lead to inaccurate bookkeeping and tax filing processes. If you’re labeling everything as miscellaneous, then you’re creating financial opacity for yourself down the road, making it more difficult to analyze your expenditures, not to mention capitalize on tax deductions. 

Instead, you’ll want to create precise and detailed categories for each type of expenses so that you can properly track them. This also eliminates the need to try and guess the details of a specific purchase or transaction if the receipt is lost or otherwise unavailable.

5. Link your POS and Accounting Software

In order to maintain a comprehensive and updated view of your records, it is important to link yourcase management system and accounting software. This way, you can minimize latency between your financial tracking and reporting, saving time and reducing the risk of errors from manual data entry. However, your ability to do this may depend on the technical limitations of your funeral home accounting software.

6. Reconcile Receivables 

Finally, to properly manage your cash flow, it is essential to ensure that all receivables are reconciled. This means that any incoming payments are properly accounted for and recorded in the appropriate place. 

Doing so allows for easy tracking of all receivables and allows your management team to better identify and avoid potential collection issues.

Funeral Home Accounting Support with JCG

While generalized accountants are plentiful in every region of the country, only an accountant with a specialization in the death care industry can help you utilize the best practices of the field. A dedicated funeral home accountant can take the load off your team and ensure accurate and timely records. 

At Johnson Consulting Group, our team of funeral home accountants can help get your funeral business on track when it comes to financials. Through the use of industry-specific accounting practices, regular financial reporting, and full integration with your case management system, our team can help get your finances in order. Contact us today to learn more about our accounting services and other ways we can help your funeral home grow.

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The post 6 Strategies to Keep your Funeral Home Accounting in Order appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.

To ensure the success of the sale, there are a number of factors to consider. From setting realistic expectations to finding the right outside help, selling your funeral business is a difficult act to pull off, but if you do it right, you can guarantee that the sale sets you up for success – whether this means retirement or moving on to your next venture. 

In this guide, we’ll review all the steps an owner must take from start to finish when selling a business. 

Planning is Crucial

Before you start the sale process, it is important to plan ahead. Take the time to understand your business’s current financial health, market position, and future prospects. 

Beyond this, you’ll also want to consider what your goals are with the sale. Are you hoping to exit a lifetime of work and retire in Florida, or are you hoping to sell the business and remain on the team in some capacity?

By planning out what your ultimate aim is, you can begin to figure out when you might sell, for how much, and to whom.

Set Realistic Goals

As you plan, it’s important to outline realistic goals. Naturally, every owner wants to sell their funeral home for the maximum price in the shortest amount of time, but this may not always be possible, depending on the state of your business and the greater market conditions. 

Unlike real estate, in which homes may sell within a day of hitting the market, the death care industry is more specialized. Not just anyone can buy a funeral business, and among those individuals buying, not everyone is qualified.

By being realistic about the timeline of your sale, as well as your business’s asking price, you can prevent settling for less than you’re worth.

Valuation Package or Marketing Package?

Getting a valuation is the best way to internally understand where improvement opportunities exist for creating value. 

A business valuation is an internal product and should not be shared with a potential buyer. Why? A business valuation will have a more conservative review with payroll, marketing, and other expenses that will be adjusted differently and more aggressively under a marketing package. 

The sole purpose of a marketing package is to show the opportunity, minimize the risk, and create value in the business that may not exist today. For this reason, marketing packages are invaluable for business owners who are ready to sell NOW.

Time to Create a Marketing Package

As you begin the process of selling your business, you’ll need to get a professional marketing package created. Not only are marketing packages critical for any qualified buyer to review, but they also can give you an accurate picture of how much money you should ask for.

If the value from the marketing package doesn’t end up where you want it, then it may be best to hold off selling until you can make proper adjustments to your operations. At Johnson Consulting Group, we can help you create a post-valuation plan to improve your enterprise value. 

Understand Tax Implications

When selling a funeral business, it’s essential to understand the entire picture of tax implications. Particularly for those who plan to retire after a sale, it’s imperative that you account for the potentially large taxes that follow a sale. Otherwise, you might have an unpleasant surprise come tax season. 

In most cases, it’s best to seek some outside help. A consultant who specializes in the funeral industry can help your tax accountant and attorney best minimize your tax burden. 

Buyers Matter

Finding the right buyer for your business can be a challenging process, one that will ultimately depend on the current state of the market as well as your ability to leverage your network. In most cases, an ideal buyer will be one already affiliated with the funeral services profession.

The funeral profession is a small network and many of the buyers are known. How you engage with those buyers depends on a well-constructed marketing package, confidentiality, and a timely process. This will ensure your success to maximize your value. 

You may already have a buyer in mind, and that buyer would hope you would only talk to them. There are few buyers, if any, that would want to work with you indirectly through a broker. This is because they know they will have to pay more for the business. Ironically, all buyers would agree that a process that includes a broker is more organized, flows better, and is more timely to a close. 

In summary, to maximize value, more than one buyer needs to be involved and it must be a structured process. Keep in mind that the highest price may not come from the buyer you thought would pay the most. At Johnson Consulting, we like to have 7-10 buyers involved in each marketing package. We are continually surprised by who the ultimate buyer is, as opposed to who we thought the buyer would be. 

Work With Industry Experts

Selling a business is a complex process, the success of which will drastically impact your next steps in business and life. It’s essential to seek the outside expertise needed to execute a sale right. It’s surprising to see business owners who commonly use a real estate agent to sell their home, but not using an expert to sell the most valuable asset they own — which is their funeral business. 

If the industry expert does their job, they will increase the value which will accomplish two things: put extra money in the owner’s pocket and pay for the consultant without infringing on the value the owner receives. 

At Johnson Consulting Group, our team of death care professionals can help you through every step of the process, from obtaining a valuation, finding a buyer, and brokering an eventual sale. With our collective decades of experience in the field, our consultants, accountants, and brokers can help you plan an exit strategy from the ground up, aligning your goals with the potential of your business. 

It all starts by partnering with us. By conducting a holistic examination of your funeral home, we can help you determine where your business currently stands and what needs to be done before a sale. Reach out today to schedule a consultation.

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The post Thinking About Selling This Upcoming Year? Here are 5 Things You Need To Know appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.

In this guide, we’ll discuss funeral business accounting firms and how these professionals can help drive the strategic planning of your funeral home. 

Do You Need an Accounting Firm for Your Funeral Business? 

We’ve said before that your time as an owner is worth $1,000 per hour. For ownership and management to make the best decisions financially, they must have meaningful financial statements with benchmarks related to their profession.

It’s for this reason that funeral business accounting firms can play an essential role in your success, helping your team prepare industry-specific financial statements, provide expense benchmark guidance, and conduct bookkeeping and business consulting services. This is true for any business, especially small or family-owned businesses that may not have the staffing or expertise to dedicate the proper time to bookkeeping.

That said, a run-of-the-mill accountant may not be the most effective choice for your funeral business. An accountant with death care expertise can help you develop sound business strategies, analyze financial information, and identify areas of improvement for your business. 

Understand Your Funeral Business’s Financial Health 

There are many factors that make the funeral profession unique, and the right accounting firm will know how to navigate the right path through these ins and outs. They may even be able to help you increase your funeral home’s value over time by analyzing your financials and providing guidance for growth. 

An accountant that specializes in funeral business accounting will have the following unique attributes:

• Has a funeral business-specific chart of accounts for properly categorizing revenue and expenses
• Has an appreciation for the value of monitoring case counts, case mix, and average sales per case
• Has knowledge in reconciling and exporting out of the various case management and point-of-sale systems available to the funeral professional
• Understands the expense and revenue benchmarks and percentages attributable to successful funeral homes and cemeteries 
• Knows how to construct the accounting process and reporting as a management tool with guidance rather than simply just reconciling to prepare for taxes at the end of the year

Accountants who are experienced in the funeral and cemetery profession will be better suited for providing valuation and consulting guidance specific to the funeral business, unlike normal accountants.

When the time comes to sell your funeral business, having an experienced accountant on your team is crucial for preparing an accurate business valuation and getting the most from your sale. 

For businesses that are looking for an accounting partner, look no further than Johnson Consulting Group. Our accounting and financial management team can help funeral businesses of any size properly manage and understand their financial records. Our accountants have a breadth of experience in the world of death care, and they are qualified to provide businesses with the advice and guidance they need to ensure their financial health. 

Contact us today to learn how we can help your business reach its financial goals.

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The post Funeral Home Financials: Hiring the Right Accounting Firm appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.

As we head into the second quarter of 2023, it’s essential to—if you haven’t already—obtain a valuation for your funeral business. If you’re not convinced, here are four reasons why you shouldn’t delay.

1. Understand Your Business Health

Most planning meetings begin by recapping prior goals and their outcomes. While there are a number of metrics that can indicate the health of your funeral business (profit and loss statements, balance sheets, employee turnover rates), a full-fledged valuation takes everything into account and distills it into a number. 

This number provides a top-down overview of how your business is currently performing, and it serves as the benchmark for both the near and long term.

2. Identify Strengths and Weaknesses

While a business valuation can be represented as a simple number, a proper valuation also includes all of the constitutive elements that lead to this number. So while your valuation will provide a benchmark of your business’s performance, one that makes it easy to compare to industry competitors, it will also provide you with an in-depth analysis of your business’s strengths and weaknesses. 

A professional valuation will not only look at financial reporting, but it will also analyze many other things such as a funeral home’s management, market share, and future earnings prospects. From these more granular observations, your leadership team can determine what’s working and what could work better. 

3. Set Goals for the Year

Once you’ve thoroughly assessed the current positioning of your business, you can begin creating your strategic plan. Using your valuation as the jumping-off point, you’ll create a series of objectives that aim to increase the value of your business. 

For example, if your business is struggling with high turnover rates, you might create a plan for employee recruitment and retention. Similarly, if your sales team is struggling to fill your backlog of preneed sales, you may want to review outsourcing that functionality or what programs are being used, such as Lunch and Learns. 

Ultimately, all of these goals, when executed properly, will lead to a more favorable valuation. In fact, the subsequent valuation can help you evaluate the success of these initiatives.

4. Plan Your Exit Strategy

Even if you don’t plan on selling your funeral business in the near future, it’s essential to develop an exit strategy as early as you can. Unless you plan on living forever, you’ll eventually need to sell your funeral business — and a business valuation is a crucial resource during the selling process.

It could take more than a year to make the proper adjustments to get your valuation in an optimal place for sale. Because of this, it’s essential to know your current valuation and how far it may fall short from your goal valuation for a sale. 

Planning your succession in the funeral business can be a tricky process that often requires lawyers, brokers, accountants, and other funeral business owners. If you’re looking to learn the ins and outs of exit planning, then you should consider enrolling in the JCG Academy for Leadership and Management. 

Understand Your Business’s Worth with JCG

While a simple valuation can be performed in a matter of minutes using the revenue multiple method, this shorthand valuation neglects the more nuanced components of your business and its cashflow earning potential. When it comes time to sell your business and a professional valuation is required, the resulting number will be different. Because of this, you should seek the help of experts. 

Johnson Consulting Group provides valuation services that analyze your company’s historical performance and future projections. As well as examining your company’s financial records and operational structure, JCG will also compare your business to the greater marketplace, allowing the valuation to provide you with an accurate assessment of your funeral business’s value range. In the event that the valuation comes back less than you’d anticipated, the JCG team can also provide you with consulting services that improve your business’s value. 

For funeral businesses of any size and at any stage in their life cycle, Johnson Consulting Group can help you prepare for the future, both in 2023 and beyond. 

The post 4 Reasons To Kick Off The Year With A Business Valuation appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.

Multiples are based on a number of factors, including the specific industry as well as a business’s size and profitability. When you are considering what multiple to pay, it is the same as considering how many years of cash flow you feel confident you will receive from your purchase. It’s the number of years of cash flow you are buying.

In this guide, we’ll review the importance of multiples, how they’re assessed, and what’s considered a “good” multiple for the death care profession. 

What’s a Good Multiple When Selling a Funeral Business?

When planning to sell your funeral business, you’ll need to obtain a valuation, and during this process, the appraiser will determine a multiple range for your business. 

Multiples vary greatly by industry. In the death care industry, a multiple of six to ten is considered a good range for mid-to-large size businesses. However, this multiple will vary based on factors such as the current economy, lending rates, as well as the business’s case volume, market share, and historical trends. A business’s value is dictated by the level of opportunity and risk. The higher the opportunity and the lower the risk, the higher the multiple. How you demonstrate the opportunity and the risk depends on how well your marketing package and presentation is put together. 

How Can You Improve Your Multiple?

For many funeral business owners, improving multiples will be an essential step to take before putting a business up for sale. There are several proven ways to increase one’s multiple, and many of them dovetail with boosting a business’s valuation. 

Getting Regular Valuations

Getting regular valuations is an important step for any funeral business looking to improve its multiple. Valuations not only provide you with a top-down assessment of current performance, but they can also help identify areas of weakness in the business, which can then be addressed. 

When performed annually, valuations can track the progress of a funeral business over time and help establish realistic expectations for the company’s future. We often ask how often clients look at their investments in stocks/bonds/cash, most likely they are looking on a monthly or annual basis. Funeral business owners rarely look at their own business’ value, which is ironically the most valuable asset they own. 

Understand Your Financials

While some funeral business owners can tell you how profitable their company is, fewer can readily report the deeper financial picture. 

To increase a funeral home’s multiple, it’s essential for leadership to have a comprehensive understanding of the company’s current financial position and to be able to accurately interpret financial trends and performance. This includes clear and concise profit & loss/income statements, and balance sheets.

Set Goals for Growth

Setting goals for growth is also critical for improving a business’s multiple. By creating goals and executing a budget and plan to achieve them, your business can begin addressing any issues that caused it to obtain a less-than-ideal valuation. 

A good place to start this process is with a JCG performance analysis. Gathering key stakeholders and discussing the funeral home’s strengths and weaknesses in its 4 pillars of success is critical. By doing this, you can create a strategic plan that sets your business up for greater valuations.

Invest in Your Team

Payroll is the highest expense within your company, and it’s gone up at least 5-10% of net sales in comparison to recent years. Is your labor pool an asset or liability to the business’s success in the future? Bottom line: invest in your team.

Furthermore, higher turnover rates and employee dissatisfaction can hurt your valuation. You should implement strategies to recruit and retain top talent. In many cases, to optimize the performance of your teams, leadership may create incentive compensation plans that reward top performers within your organization.

Lean on Funeral Home Consultants

Improving the multiples of your funeral business will require extensive planning and years of execution. Your time is best suited to being active within the community and with the families you serve. 

We like to say an owner’s time is worth $1000/hour….Where are you best spending your time? What are the things you should be doing, and what are the things you should be outsourcing to the experts? In these cases, it’s logical to rely on the expertise of funeral home consultants. 

Johnson Consulting Group (JCG) is a leading firm specializing in the death care industry. By partnering with your leadership team, we can help you through every step of the way to improve your multiples, assist with exit strategy planning, conduct valuations, and provide brokerage services. 

The JCG team provides the outside perspective and industry expertise that allow funeral businesses to boost their multiples. Reach out today to learn how we can help.

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The post What is a Good Multiple when Selling a Funeral Business? appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.

By taking the time to create a smooth user experience and provide options for online selections, a website can become an integral source of outreach and ecommerce revenue. Here are some tips for success.

Enticing, User-Friendly Website

Just as your grounds and facilities create a first impression for in-person clients, your website does the same for online visitors, effectively serving as your digital storefront. With this in mind, you’ll want to make sure it’s presentable. For starters, you’ll want to include some helpful images and videos that showcase the strengths of your funeral home. Consider including photos of your leadership and staff. You might even throw in a video walkthrough of your facilities, helping users understand how a service might look with your business. 

Finally, your website should also be easy to use. This part might take some trial and error, but optimization is worth the effort. Ideally, when a user visits your website, there will be clearly displayed links to contacting your business, learning more about its history, and even selecting atneed and preneed arrangements.

Online Shopping (E-Commerce)

Funeral services usually require in-person consultations, during at which time clients select their type of service and gain more information about pricing. However, a growing number of people prefer to shop online, particularly younger generations. 

To meet the needs of this type of client, your website should allow people to select services online. For example, a website built by Funeral Results Marketing is a modern, user-friendly experience that helps visitors discover your funeral home, access the information they need, and begin browsing your services.

For example, if a person is looking for a cremation package, they should be able to schedule and pay for it online through your cremation arrangement website. Alternatively, people should be able to book standardized funeral packages online when appropriate. 

Particularly when it comes to selling preneed funeral arrangements, offering them online greatly increases the chances of people completing a purchase. People may not know you can pre-arrange funeral services, and displaying this option on your website can help increase the visibility of this offering.

Naturally, death care rituals require a level of individualization that’s difficult to accomplish without consultation. There’s hardly a one-size-fits-all approach to funerals; however, your online offerings can serve as base packages. Once your team makes contact with an interested family, you can then discuss additional customization options. 

Transparent Pricing

Before making a purchase, the vast majority of shoppers conduct research, including comparing prices between vendors. Because of this, it’s important to display prices on your website.

When a person has no idea what they can expect to pay for a funeral service, they’re less likely to follow through and select your business. Alternatively, having a price displayed, even if it only represents a base rate, can make them feel more confident about making a purchase. Even if your website price isn’t the lowest, the act of displaying a price allows you to demonstrate your value and transparency, noting exactly what’s included with each service. 

Marketing

Your website will also play a key role in any type of digital marketing. If you plan to run ads on Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, or other social media, they’ll inevitably link back to your website. Ideally, your ads and website will work hand-in-hand, the former directing them to your site and the latter compelling them to select a service. 

Additionally, your website can organically gain traffic by targeting relevant keywords. Use your site’s blog section to create informative and useful content about death care. Your site will begin to rank more highly in online searches, ultimately increasing your business’ visibility and customer base. 

Consultation Services with JCG

Managing a website can easily become a full-time job. After all, many larger businesses devote entire teams to building and overseeing their web presence. For smaller businesses, particularly those new to the world of digital marketing, it’s often helpful to rely on the expertise of consultants. 

At Johnson Consulting Group (JCG), our team of death care consultants can partner with your business to create a holistic marketing strategy, one that helps you build a website that drives e-commerce. With years of experience helping funeral businesses of all sizes, our team is familiar with industry-wide best practices and can help you implement them in your own marketing practice. 

The post How to Increase Success With Your Funeral Home Website appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.

While there are a variety of ways to engage the staff of your funeral home — incentive compensation, robust benefits, and growth opportunities, to name a few — no two team members desire the exact same things. To better understand how to engage your teams, leadership must regularly meet with their staff. 

By creating a schedule of informal check-ins combined with more thorough quarterly and annual assessments, managers can better understand their employees and how to engage them most effectively. 

One-on-one Meetings

Funeral home leadership should set aside time for casual, one-on-one meetings with each of their team members. Occurring on either a weekly or bi-weekly basis, these meetings offer managers the chance to check in with their team members on both the personal and professional levels. 

Unlike more formal review-based meetings, weekly one-on-one sessions allow team members to express how they’re doing, what’s currently going well, and what they might be struggling with. This information is valuable for leaders as it can alert them to potentially larger issues before they affect the business. 

It’s important to note that this one-on-one shouldn’t feel like a laundry list of tasks for the employee to complete. Rather, it’s a time to check in and address any issues that might be holding them back in the short and long term. 

Quarterly Check-in

While similar to weekly one-on-one meetings, quarterly check-ins require a bit more preparation, and they should be primarily focused on team member goals and their progress. To start off, managers should ask about each goal of the team member. These goals may be related to numbers, or they might consist of personal development. Regardless, managers should use this time to get up to speed on each team member’s status. 

Once updated, managers can then dig deeper and figure out what’s going well for the employee and what challenges are holding them back. This allows managers to adjust goals effectively and offer assistance as needed. 

Annual Review

The most formal variety of meetings, annual reviews should begin with written evaluations of the employee, both from the employee themself and from their direct manager. Once this information has been collected, both team members can use it as a jumping-off point for discussion, running through each goal, success, and challenge of the team member over the last year. 

During the performance review, managers should remind employees that these sessions are two-way conversations. If a manager notes that an employee struggled with a component of their role, an employer should feel comfortable to honestly express what contributed to this struggle. This way, both personnel can discuss the ways in which these issues can be addressed in the coming year. 

Overall, annual reviews should be future-focused. Through the process of retrospectively reviewing a team member’s performance, managers should help them build new goals for the coming year, goals that both challenge their strengths and encourage them to grow in areas of struggle. 

Develop Your Team with JCG

Regular meetings help you stay in touch with employee strengths, needs, and struggles. By using these meetings to inform your managerial practice, you can improve engagement and retention in the long run. While much can be done to engage employees by increasing pay and providing on-the-job training, in many cases, team members can benefit from outside learning. 

Top-performing employees are often rewarded with increased responsibilities and pay. To make sure these growing employees have the skills they need to do the job right, you can look to the help of outside funeral home training courses. 

Offered through Johnson Consulting Group, a leading funeral home consulting firm, JCG Academy helps equip death care professionals with industry-leading tactics. Currently, our consulting firm offers courses in leadership and customer experience. Led by experienced death care consultants, these courses augment employees’ skill sets.

By meeting regularly with your employees, you’ll gain a thorough understanding of how they perform and how they’d like to grow. In many cases, this growth requires some outside help, making JCG Academy a great way to refine your employees’ approach to work. Contact us today to learn more.

The post How Frequently Should I be Meeting With My Funeral/Cemetery Staff? appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.

By taking the time to not only critique employees but also listen to them, engage them, and create collaborative goals, leaders can ensure that performance management meetings become a cornerstone of their management strategy.

1. Preparation

Before entering a performance review meeting, managers should examine an employee’s previous performance reviews. Within these reviews, you’ll find a comprehensive look at an employee’s strengths, weaknesses, successes, and drawbacks, as well as their goals for the future. 

During the impending review, managers should use prior reviews in order to contextualize an employee’s current performance. For example, suppose a prior review indicated that a funeral director aimed to improve their satisfaction rating from families. You can use this information in the new review to understand whether or not they achieved this goal.

2. Reflection

On the employee’s end, employees should be asked to review themselves before engaging in a formal review. In this type of self-evaluation, an employee will return to their prior reviews, take a look at the goals they’d set for themselves, and assess how they performed.

During the present review, managers should refer to these self-evaluations as the foundation of discussion. When an employee notes that they’ve reached a goal, leadership can applaud them, as well as discuss what actions the employee took to achieve said result. Alternatively, if an employee acknowledges that they’ve failed to achieve a goal, a manager can discuss how this can be improved in the future, setting goals accordingly.

3. Active Listening

Ultimately, the goal of any performance review is to better understand how team members work, how they currently excel, and how they stand to grow. Because of this, managers need to create an atmosphere of empathy and trust. 

Employees should not fear that admitting to a shortcoming will result in their termination or demotion; rather, they should trust that their manager listens to their experience. If team members feel comfortable expressing their weaknesses honestly, then managers can help them practice new skills to overcome any relevant obstacles. Growth mapping in this manner is one of the best ways to engage employees.

4. Transparency

Honest communication is crucial to any performance review, and this is just as important for both the employee and the manager. Both participants should speak honestly about the employee’s performance. This provides the basis for discussion.

If a manager feels that a team member could perform more effectively, they should state this, albeit compassionately. In response to this honest feedback, an employee may agree, disagree, or even ask clarifying questions. Ideally, at the end of the review, an employee and manager are on the same page in terms of current performance and subsequent steps. 

5. Goal-Setting

Based on the collaborative assessment of an employee, both an employee and manager can work together to create goals for the upcoming year. In most cases, an employee will need several sets of goals that play to their current strengths and challenge them to work on their shortcomings. 

By articulating these goals in a formal manner, managers can realign with their team members and ensure that they’re on the same page with company-wide goals.

6. Action

No goal is complete without accompanying actions and KPIs (Key Performance Indicator). If an employee aims to increase their preneed sales, then they will need to settle on a tangible number of sales within a certain timeframe. 

For goals that are more difficult to measure––for example, refining one’s leadership practice––managers might consider career development opportunities, calling on outside assistance to boost the skill sets of their teams. 

Develop your Team with JCG Academy

While many death care skills, particularly those for younger employees, can be learned on the job from senior team members, employees with more experience should still be given opportunities to grow. For these team members, it’s often helpful to call on those with professional development expertise. 

Johnson Consulting Group, a leader in death care consulting, offers a professional development service, JCG Academy. Administered by JCG’s consultants, JCG Academy courses can help your teams with leadership, management, and customer service skills. The consultants at JCG Academy possess a wealth of experience working with death care businesses of all sizes, and they can help your team stay up to date on the best practices in the industry. 

Performance management meetings help employees realign with the goals of their teams at large, setting initiatives for the coming year and planning for growth. If you’re looking to fast-track your employees’ growth, then JCG Academy courses can help refine the existing skills of your teams. 

The post 6 Components of a Successful Performance Management Meeting appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.

Define Success

When strategizing key company initiatives in your funeral home, start by defining the end goal. By beginning with the end in mind, it’s easier to plan ahead and effectively allocate the resources required. Are you looking to grow your funeral home business profits? Do you struggle with staff turnover and want to create a better culture to attract and retain talent? Or perhaps you’re interested in exit planning and want to get the business in a good place before selling it. 

Evaluate the Prior Year 

Once you’ve decided on a company initiative, whether it is introducing new services or optimizing an existing process, the next step is to understand where you are currently and where you’ve been in the past year. Take some time to reflect and collect feedback from your team. Explore questions like: 

• What went right?
• What went wrong? What did we learn from these failures?
• What are the biggest opportunities in front of us?
• What are the biggest current challenges we face?
• Where do we want the company to be three years from now?

At Johnson Consulting Group, we send our clients a pre-work questionnaire that includes questions like this and more. The questionnaire is completely anonymous and serves as a crucial starting point as we craft a strategic plan for our clients. By consolidating the answers into a workbook, we can gather insight into a client’s starting position and better advise them going forward. 

Analyze the Situation and Establish Key Company Outcomes

Once you have a better understanding of your previous year, it’s time to perform a SWOT analysis. Performing a SWOT analysis on a regular basis is a powerful way to keep track of your funeral home’s health as a business.  SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Your funeral home can use a SWOT analysis to assess internal operations and how you stand up to competitors, which helps the leadership team understand where the company is currently positioned. From there, you can decide what outcomes you’d like to see for your funeral home. This could be any number of things, such as improving the family experience, increasing preneed sales, or expanding to a second location.

Choose a Key Company Initiative

Now that you have a foundational understanding of your business’s capabilities, it’s time to choose Key Company Initiatives (KCI). Your team likely has many wonderful ideas, so this is an excellent time to analyze and vet each option before choosing which ones to focus on first. This consists of three steps:

Development

Brainstorm a list of possible KCIs that could achieve the outcome you want. Include everyone during this process, as it will help identify everyone’s perspective. When we work with clients, a JCG facilitator will go around the room and gather each person’s thoughts on what is the most important initiative to work on first. Each member of the team will have a unique perspective to offer, which can provide valuable insight during the process. 

Evaluation

After gathering a list of possible initiatives, break down each initiative into more precise components. This will help your team understand how feasible the initiative is as far as budget, current staffing, and other available resources.

• Name of initiative – Define what the project is and what it will involve.
• Owner – List who will spearhead the initiative. This person does not necessarily have to execute on every step, but they are the main point of contact.
• Definition of success – What is the goal? Establish what your team hopes to achieve as a result of the new initiative.
• Milestones and timeline – Look ahead at your end goal, then break down the smaller steps necessary to get there.
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics – Discuss how you will measure the success of the initiative using specific KPIs. You should gather metrics before, during, and after launching the initiative.
• Resources and support – Compile a list of resources your team can go to for more information. This might include consultants, market data, competitive research, and more.

As the funeral home manager or director, it will be your job to divvy up ownership and individual tasks according to your team’s strengths and availability. If we take the example of increasing preneed sales, you might want to appoint a lead sales agent for the initiative who can administer the training and report back to you on progress.

Prioritization

Once you’ve finished establishing the components for each KCI, it’s time to narrow down your list and decide which initiative to tackle first. For example, remodeling your funeral home facilities might be a KCI you have in mind to improve the customer experience. However, if you lack the cash flow to comfortably budget for the project, you might decide it will take a lower priority on your list.  Where initiatives typically fail is when decision-makers don’t have all the necessary perspectives required to achieve the proper timeline or result. If your team rushes through the development, evaluation, and prioritization of a KCI, your team may struggle to achieve the desired outcome and waste budget and energy in the process. For example, the funeral home owner may prioritize their own ideas rather than take the time to gather the insight and perspective of their team. They might not understand how much time is wasted while waiting for outdated software or a slow network to load. This could directly clash with a KCI to improve the customer experience by adding an online chat to the website.  This is where an outside facilitator, such as the experts at JCG, can be extremely helpful. We can offer funeral directors a fresh, unbiased perspective of the business and a strategic path forward.

Monitor the Progress

As you proceed through the steps of your plan, be ready and available to address issues that come up. In many cases, it will become necessary to adjust the budget. You should be prepared to do so, provided your point person has a thorough justification for said moves.  You should also not be afraid to delegate or reassign work as needed. As frequently as possible, keep in touch with your leadership team to communicate any progress and setbacks.  Accountability is a crucial part of the process, too. Management should regularly check in with the initiative owner, and the initiative owner should check in with any staff they are managing during the rollout. Estimates for budget and timeline are just that — estimates — so it’s likely they will differ from the final result. Accountability meetings can help leadership evaluate whether the initiative is on track and make adjustments as needed. Generally, it’s best to hold this accountability meeting every 90 days. During the review, recognize successes and wins of the initiative as well as any challenges or concerns. This is also a good time to check if employees are hitting any barriers that are holding them back from success.  During our strategic plan accountability meetings with clients, we also ask the questions: What went right? What went wrong? What did we learn? Questions like these will help you determine how to work more effectively. While each of your initiatives will differ in nature and scope, your business can continually improve the way you plan for and approach new initiatives. 

Partner with an Expert

With thorough and strategic allocation of resources, your funeral home can accomplish goals both in the near- and long-term. However, it’s not always obvious where to position your money and your people. If you need help with the planning process, consider enlisting the help of consultants. At Johnson Consulting Group, our team of death care consultants has helped dozens of funeral businesses plan and implement strategic initiatives that help them grow. Most importantly, our consulting team has a clear and holistic vision of how resources play into the equation. We can help you set budgets and stick to them. The most important initiatives for your business require budgets and galvanized teams. With the help of JCG consultants, we can help you figure out how to align these resources with your greater success.

The post Strategic Planning 101: How to Effectively Allocate Resources appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.