Here’s a little thing I quickly mocked up:

It uses a title modified from a suggestion by Michelle Carter.

Of course, this is just a preliminary.  I’ll take some better pictures of the magnetic funeral flag if I choose this idea for the cover.

Any comments on this title or the design?  The title is just a placeholder - I haven’t decided which one I want to use or if we’ve even heard the one I want to use yet.

An unidentified reader has just donated $50 to our cause!  Needless to say, he’ll be getting a signed copy of my book when it arrives in October.

While I won’t identify him, as he offered his donation to thank me for discussing FCA’s meddling in the funeral industry, I offer him a big huge THANK YOU!

Want to donate?  Click on the tab in the right column on the blog.  Of course, donations are voluntary and their details will not be shared with other readers.

Unless you want us to.  Then, drop me a line and I’ll talk you up on these pages.

For those of you who keep asking me “when will your book be ready?” stop asking already!

I know I’ve been promising the book for over a year now, but a recent invitation to speak at a funeral conference has finally pushed me toward the finish line.

I’m putting final touches on the manuscript, most of which has been taken from the pages of Final Embrace and our discussions on the blog.

But I’m stuck for a name!  The book will feature funeral home marketing and management advice (much like the blog does) but I want an amazing, arresting image for the cover.

So I’m offering two free copies of the book to the person who suggests the best title and a possible cover photo or image.  Don’t worry about crazy picture ideas:  I can find photos of just about anything.  I just need some pointers.

Wanna chance to win two free copies of my book, As Yet Untitled, when it arrives in early October?  Fire up those keyboards and leave me some suggestions in the comments.

Just for starters, I’m considering the title “Marketing and Management Advice for Funeral Directors” with a picture of one of those magnetic purple funeral flags on a white cover.

Anyone got something better?

I had a very pleasant comment from Robert about our recent discussions of FCA and their finances.

In fact, he was so happy that we’re talking about FCA and questioning their function that he wants to send us a donation.

So here’s a link so you can donate by PayPal or a credit card.

We’re also adding this link to our sidebar (that list on the right that shows a whole bunch of useful info) so that you can donate anytime.

Why accept donations?  Because I offer this blog free of charge.  We occasionally have sponsors, like our friends at Hilltop Computing, but the $25 a week we charge for sponsorship does little more than pay for the URL and other site support.

Do you have to donate to read?  Of course NOT!  Everyone who writes for Final Embrace does it for the good of the industry.  We don’t require restitution for this work.

Of course, if you choose to donate something, we’ll gladly accept it.  We’re not martyrs!

Photo courtesy of Flickr user pluckytree

I needed a wheelbarrow for a recent home improvement project (no, I’m not digging a storm cellar or a fall-out shelter) and I decided to try the discount store first.

I found a nice wheelbarrow for less than $40.  It was not pre-assembled, but really, how hard is it to assemble a wheelbarrow?

I picked up the barrow (I guess that’s what they call the actual scoop-shaped container), the two arms and a box containing the wheel, brackets and other parts.

The wheelbarrow was easy to assemble but I hadn’t counted on having to pump up the tire myself.

Here’s my quandry:  did the tire ship fully inflated, but lose air because of a leak, which would make the product faulty and eligible for return?  Or, do they ship the tires uninflated, to save shipping costs and weight, and simply neglected to tell me that I’d have to fill it up before I got home?

If there was some kind of written explanation on the outside of the box, like “tire ships un-inflated”, I would have known to stop on the way home, saving myself a trip to the local inflation station (otherwise known as the air/vacuum kiosk outside the nearest 7-11) and mitigating a whole lotta frustation and wasted hours when I could have been using my wheelbarrow to move stuff around my yard.

But then again, cheap products aren’t always well-designed or -thought out.

It’s one of the reasons that I constantly listen to our customers and ask new customers about their reaction to our quilted cot covers.  “Is the pocket easy to use?”  or “Are the care instructions written clearly enough?”

Hopefully, we keep making our products better and simplifying our explanations of how they work.

That way, we sell more of them (people like to buy what they can understand) and our customers like them better.

We’re finally back home (after an overnight stop in Chattanooga and a early morning drive to Florida) and it’s time to review the trip and update ya’ll on the final days.

Let’s start with a recap of our in-booth sales figures.  Day 1 saw 6 sales.  Day 2 generated 13.  And day 3 offered 12 more.

And while we didn’t reach our 40 cover goal, we still had 31 convention sales.  Even better, 21 of them went out the door, which means less time spent in the workshop boxing up product and shipping it out.

It also meant that we had less junk to take back to Florida with us!  With less baggage, we were able to see out the back window on the way home.

DAY 3 IMPRESSIONS

Wednesday (last day of the Expo) was actually kinda slow, with many funeral directors arriving later in the session to check out the expo before lunch and the Kentucky Digital Death Certificate explanation that followed.

Luckily, many of the people who promised to come back to order did, while others who had already ordered stopped back to say hello or drag another funeral director over to show off the new cover they’d selected.  A few of these new “converts” actually sold covers for us, just by their persuasive belief in our product.  It’s amazing how they retained most of the important points about features and benefits. 

Because it slacked off, I had the opportunity to visit with other vendors and do a few short interviews.  In the coming days, I’ll post videos with Spencer and Ryan from Hilltop.net, William from Custom Air Trays and Rob from Peaceful Valley Tributes.

CONVENTION WRAP-UP

Because this was our first Kentucky convention, I did not expect a warm welcome.  In fact, I really expected to do a lot of “fancy footwork” to get people interested in our product.  Fortunately, the folks in the Kentucky/Indiana/Ohio area are extremely receptive to new ideas and are very courteous.

My goal of 40 covers sold was based upon an expected attendance of 1200 funeral directors.  And while we spoke to many, many funeral directors, there’s no way we had interactions with even 600 of them.  In the business center of our Wingate by Wyndham hotel (where they let me use the copier for free!) I printed our convention special onto 300 of our brochures.  We’ve still got a handful of those left.

So a realistic assessment is that we had some interaction with no more than 300 funeral homes at the show.  Of those, we sold 31 covers, giving us about a 10% sell-through rate.

Is that good? 

Absolutely, considering that other forms of unsolicited sales, like direct mail or door-to-door, yield less than 2% on average.

Our average cover, with a 10% convention discount, goes for $202.50.  That means we generated over $6000 in sales during a 3-day show.  Here’s a breakdown of our expenses:

Of course, the sign and new display will be re-used at our next conventions, but I’ve included them here to create a more accurate picture of the full amount I had to pay to make this convention a success.

We generated $6000 in immediate sales, making this convention profitable, as I generally want ot make at least twice as much as we spend.  Do we have a 50% margin on our product?  Hardly, but I know that getting this product into funeral directors’ hands will mean more sales in the future, when their competitors and colleagues see our covers in person.

Interestingly, we’re one of the few companies that actually set such important goals and restrictions for our advertising.  I was surprised to learn that some other vendors don’t even track how many sales they get from each ad they run or don’t care how many direct orders they get at a convention.

But I run our little company on the idea that it has to make money to survive, which means I’m not going to tap my own savings or my partner’s savings to make it work. 

Our expenses for the NFDA Convention in Las Vegas last year were just over $4000 and we made $8000+ in sales.

For this year’s NFDA, we’ll save some money,  since the show is in our own backyard.  That means no rental car, hotel visits or entertainment expenses.  Absorbing the cost of the new display and a better sign means we’ve got more money to spend on other items.

I’ve already selected and paid for our booth at the 2008 NFDA Convention in Orlando this October.  Yes, it was expensive:  $2700 for a penninsula booth.  But the exposure and location are worth the price.

I’m setting a tentative goal of 100 in-booth sales for the 2008 NFDA Convention. 

Ambitious?  I certainly hope so.

Doable?  Just wait ’til you hear my amazing sales pitch!

Funny story:  our neighbor across the aisle at the KFDA show was William from Custom Air Trays.  He doesn’t own a funeral home or work for one, but by the end of the show he knew our speil word-for-word.  Heck, I think I might have been able to sell him one!

The second day of the show is over and we’re halfway to our goal of 40 covers sold.

Do I think we’ll make it?  The realistic part of my mind says we can’t possibly sell 20 more covers in our last 2.5 hour day, but heck, stranger things have happened

We met a lot of interesting funeral directors today and had some great conversations about the importance of beautiful, comforting removal images (that means getting better cot covers).

I also had some really good discussion with Spencer and Ryan from Hilltop.net about expos and how to interact with potential customers.  Hilltop.net offers a pretty impressive product:  easily-customized funeral home websites with a wonderfully-simple obituary editor that look really professional.  Even better, a total website solution, including a custom web address (example:  smithfamilyfuneralhome.com) from Hilltop.net costs just $29.95 a month.

Tomorrow, the Kentucky Department of Vital Statistics unveils the new online version of the Kentucky death certificate.  I’ve got a feeling (actually, Spencer Guiley had the feeling first and shared it with me) that many of our visitors will make it a point to attend the show tomorrow, if only to get some answers about the way this new digital certificate will change their business.

Even better, we’ve had a number of funeral directors who are returning Wednesday (tomorrow) to order something and take it with them.  Others told us that their bosses would be at the show on the last day and would order then.

So we’ll see how much we can sell tomorrow.  Until then…

First things first - my favorite part of this trip so far has been coasting down the hills of Tennessee and Kentucky and seeing the Prius’ info screen look like this:

The readout shows the blue power arrows pointing back toward the battery (meaning the the gas engine is off and the in-wheel generators are charging the battery) and the car is getting more than 99.9 miles per gallon.

We arrived in Louisville and headed right for the convention center.  We got most of the booth setup and headed out to the hotel. 

I booked a business hotel, Wingate by Wyndham, mostly because I knew I might need their business center (free photocopier, computer and printer use) and they offer free wired and wireless Internet access.  And the room is pretty huge:

After a bit of shopping (snack cakes to pass out at the show) we met Michael Manley from Funeral Business Advisor for dinner.

He had some great ideas and we’ll continue the discussion at our first vendor dinner on Tuesday evening after the show.

After dinner, we hit Wal-Mart and Lowes.  We were missing some simple items for the show:  cleaning wipes, an additional wire shelf and carpet.

That’s right, we hit the road for Kentucky without knowing what we’d use to cover the floor!

Luckily, Lowe’s had a remnant piece 12-feet wide and 14-feet long, marked down to just $42 because of a slight defect:  7 fist-sized holes caused by a forklift tine.

We still bought it, partly because I’m frugal, but mostly because my skill with a straight-edge, a utility knife and a roll of duct tape turned the 12×14 piece into a 10×14 piece with a perfectly disguised seam partway through.

We also had to create a new sign, since I accidentally forgot our fabric sign at the workshop.  Black foam board, peel-and-stick foam sheets and some quick-thinking turned into a pretty nifty sign.

Here’s the result of our hard work:

I especially like the way our beautiful, expensive-looking carpet (don’t tell anyone how little I spent) contrasts with the black of the side railing and the cover I made for our fake mortuary cot:

And the $130 we spent on a closet organizer and a few extra shelves turned into a custom-looking tradeshow display, quite to my surprise:

Even better, when we returned for the opening of the show, our neighbors from Hilltop Computing were there, including Final Embrace reader Spencer Guilley!

The show ended at 8:00 pm and we’d already sold 6 covers with promises of several more orders tomorrow from guests who visited today.

Many of the expected funeral directors haven’t yet arrived (Monday was only the kick-off reception) and a large number of our visitors shared that the decision-makers from their firm would be arriving on Wednesday.

We’ll sleep late tomorrow, have a leisurely lunch and hit the convention at Noon for a 1:00 pm Expo opening.

We’ve arrived in Louisville!

The convention center is large, but we were able to drive right onto the show floor (!) and unload the car just a few dozen feet from our booth.

The booth, which is 15 feet long and 10 feet wide, is great for our product.  We set up both the chrome metal shelving and our mock mortuary cot.

Made from PVC, the mock cot is designed to mimic the shape and height of a standard mortuary cot.  Unlike a standard cot, the mock stretcher fits into a small duffel bag (thanks to PVC elbows and t-connectors) and can be stowed in the trunk of a car.

I’m having dinner with Michael Manley of the Funeral Business Advisor magazine tonight.  We’re cooking up a few important developments for his and my readers.

Talk to you soon!

We started out at 6:30 this morning, leaving Eustis just after the sun rose.

I rented a Toyota Prius Hybrid vehicle, mostly to take advantage of the awesome fuel economy, but partly because I really want one of these and I thought we’d test it out in real-world conditions before I drop $22,000 on a new car.

We took over 50 of our cot covers, our shelving unit, printed handouts, luggage and more with us.  Here’s a few shots of the car, loaded down:

After an awesome lunch at Pappasito’s Cantina in Marietta, Georgia (we had the chicken fajitas, made with the moistest, most delicious chicken ever!) we made our way to Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Here’s our awesome hotel room:

Tonight, we’re off to the Vaudeville Theatre for “Mystery at the Redneck-Italian Wedding.”