It’s been a whirlwind around here lately, with planning for two conventions and a monster opening month for 2010.  Doing all of it leaves little time for talking about all that we’re doing!

We had our best January ever, with the combo of January-February shaping up to the be the best two month period in our history, outside of a national convention.

Helping out our February numbers has been our trip to the South Carolina Funeral Directors Association Expo, held in Columbia on Tuesday, February 2nd and Wednesday, February 3rd.

The EXPO, which featured a wide range of vendors, attracted a great crowd of funeral directors from South Carolina and a few from neighboring states.  I even saw Bill Wappner, current NFDA President and one of our customers from Ohio.

We entered the show with a goal to sell 20 cot covers.  Our goals, which help us measure success during and after the show, are based upon our expenses for the event and the expected turnout.  I normally budget $50 per cover sold toward the cost of attending.

While I initially planned on spending about $1000 to attend the EXPO, our final numbers look like this:

BOOTH:  $600
FUEL:  $75
MEALS:  $130
OTHER:  $50
——————-
TOTAL:  $855

By my $50 standard, we needed to sell 17 covers to pay for the show.

Any wonder, then, that we sold 17?

Now, I don’t count sales by our wholesale customers, even if they are generated at the show, but one of the companies that retails our product did sell two covers to a customer. 

So we fell short of our goal, but we were still able to pay for the show with sales.

Here’s a list of the conventions we’ve attended, which includes the costs for each and the goals we set because of those costs.  You’ll see that the two conventions where we missed out goals by a wide margin were two years of the Kentucky show.  Also, the last three convention are in the future, so the expenses are only educated guesses at this point.

Since our biggest non-booth expense for most of our conventions is lodging, finding a place to stay in our host cities is a nice benefit that saves serious money.

In South Carolina, I was fortunate enough to have family living in Columbia.  For the IFDF’s 2010 show, I’ll stay with my sister in Tampa.  I may be able to save money on the Ohio convention, if I can convince my good friend Albert to let me crash on his couch.

No matter how the next few conventions shake out, we expect to be able to continue getting close to our goals (or exceeding them) because of the great response we’re getting to our quilted cot covers. 

Of course, I’ll continue to closely monitor our progress and adjust accordingly.  Stay tuned!

Heads up to our friends attending the South Carolina Funeral Directors Association Conference and Expo:  we’ll be there!

We’re heading North to show off our quilted cot covers to the great funeral directors in South Carolina.  I’m excited, since the organizers tell me that funeral directors from at least three other states regularly attend the show.  In fact, I’ve heard from a number of other exhibitors that South Carolina is one of the best Southern shows to attend.

Truth is, we were disappointed by last year’s Kentucky expo and did not expect to attend many other small shows.  Our NFDA presence has been such a great benefit to us that we considered sticking to larger expos and forgetting about the smaller venues.

But then we took a long hard look at our last couple of shows, including the Ohio, Georgia and Florida shows, and came to a surprising conclusion:  small shows are usually just as profitable as the big ones!

Oh, but one caveat:  only for the first two years.  After that, we have to either find a new product to push or take a year or two off.

Our Independent Funeral Directors of Florida expos were great the first two years, but the third year saw a dropoff, mostly because we’d already sold covers to every funeral director at the show.  Our pool of potential new customers shrank every time we sold to another person from the group. 

So we’re planning to roll out our dressing table skirt design at the IFDF show in June.  In fact, we’d like to show it off at the Georgia Expo in early March, but I’m giving my team time to get everything squared away without crazy pressure.

This South Carolina expo, February 2-3, is going to cost us less than $1000 to attend.  First, we’re staying with my uncle, who lives in Columbia, so no hotel room.  The rent of the booth itself is just shy of $600 and my Prius sips gas sparingly, so we should be able to make it there and back on just over two tanks of gas.  Add to the total some food and other incidentals and I’m thinking $800 or so for the entire event.

After we get back, we’ve got just a few weeks to process all the orders and head out to the Georgia Expo, which is March 1st and 2nd in Atlanta. 

Come see us at a show!  Remember, we always give a healthy discount for Expo orders.

I read a lot of blogs.  My feed reader has almost 50 blogs in it and I try to read something from each of them on a regular basis.  True, there are some blogs that update more often and, because they’re more interesting, get my attention every day.  Other bloggers update every few weeks, but I keep them in my feed reader because they’re just so darned interesting.

One of my favorite bloggers, a down-to-earth guy named Trent, writes “The Simple Dollar,” a blog about personal finances.  Three years ago, he blogged about tackling 101 Goals in 1,001 Days.

Now, he didn’t quite make it, but he managed 52 of them and is donating money to charity to make up for the others (that was goal #26).

In a similar vein, and because it clearly worked well for him, I am planning 50 goals in 500 days.  Now, I hear your question:  Why fewer goals and fewer days? 

First, fewer goals is more obtainable.  And while Trent might not have a big issue with not actually finishing, I’d like to cross everything off that list.

Second, I already have long-term goals, many of which, conveniently, are set to end in the next few years.  500 days works out to early June 2011, which allows me to set a lot of incremental goals that will track along with my overall big goals and get me there in the timeframe I’ve set up.

Only problem?  I haven’t even started writing the goals yet!  Anyone want to make some suggestions?

I know one of my first goals is going to be writing a book.  I started one, which never quite panned out.  I’ve got part of a fiction book written and I want to finish it.  But what I’m really excited about is a book that develops from interviews with funeral directors.

In short, I want to write about the habits, plans and goals of effective and successful funeral directors.  What makes them great businesspeople, how they handle their unique jobs and how the industry has changed, including the challenges now facing their firms.

So look for my goals in the next few days.  And comment with some suggestions.  I gotta find 50, remember?

The quilted cot cover business that started in my one-car garage in 2003 has seen some pretty impressive growth in the past.  During the first few years of our business, sales tripled annually.  Then, as the business began to mature and we gained a foothold in the industry, our growth “mellowed” to a still-impressive 50% more each year.

2008 looked like a plateau, with the year ending with 10% more sales than the previous year.  And while it was a good omen, I was still sad to see the days of 50% increases end.

After a rocky start to 2009, where year-to-date sales in the first six months were off by as much as 30% from the previous year, we began rebounding in August.  Steady gains in September and October – helped along by the 2009 NFDA Convention & Expo – prepared us for an absolutely crazy November and December.

How good was the upswing in business?  We ended 2009 with more than 10% greater sales than 2008! 

That’s right, in a down year, when most businesses are struggling to keep the doors open, we added 10% more sales.

So how did we do it?

First, we are fastidious (I love that word) about tracking our sales numbers and comparing our current figures with previous results.  On any given day, I check how we are doing compared with the same month in past years as well as how we are doing compared to the past month. 

While January and February were off the 2008 numbers, March saw an increase, which might have bolstered my spirits, if a healthy portion of that hadn’t been due to the Georgia Expo we attended.  I am careful to track how much of our business comes from conventions, wholesale customers and the website, so I knew that while our convention business was bringing in new sales, our other avenues were falling off.

April and May were not any better, but by that time we’d already begun a recovery plan.

First, I reached out to our wholesale customers, the ones who resell our product on their websites, through their sales reps and in their catalogs.  We offered an even-better wholesale discount during the summer, hoping to jumpstart our wholesale customers’ sales machinery.  I also began seeking out new resellers to add to our list.

In June, we signed up three new regional supply companies to resell our product.  Their exuberance about the product helped spark sales and the rebound began in earnest in August.

We also worked harder on the website, fixing some bugs in the search engine optimization and adding new designs to our offerings.  The new covers, while not huge sellers so far, have bolstered our line, filling in a few gaps left by discontinued fabrics that we can no longer get from our suppliers.

In September, we added “morgue cart covers” to our website, in hopes of capturing more of the hospital market.  Many hospitals use a cart with a metal-tubed framework to cover the body.  This has a fitted fabric cover over the top, giving the cart the appearance of an empty draped table.  Interestingly, the companies that sell the carts do a lot of advertising on the Internet about their great tables, but they never tell you how to buy a replacement when the one you have starts to look like crap.

We’re using our FluidBlocker nylon fabric to create lightweight covers that meet both OSHA and infection control requirements.  So far, we’ve sold several dozen of them are we’re looking for ways to get the word out to hospitals around the country.

The 2009 NFDA Expo exposed us to a number of new customers, with 113 covers sold during the convention.  Since then, we’ve been riding a wave that the convention created, with many new customers calling months later to buy “that great cover we saw at the convention.”

Like most companies, we spent a lot of 2009 cutting costs, re-evaluating our core expenses and rethinking strategy.  Because of intelligent decisions, a reluctance to shout “the sky is falling!” and an industry that believes in our product, we came out of 2009 better than we started.

How about you?  Did you take time during 2009 to differentiate yourself from your competitor?  Did you rethink your basic plan and search for new markets for your compassionate brand of funeral care?  Did you buckle down and cut some unnecessary spending?

If you’re still looking for something to improve your firm’s appearance and set you apart from your competition, why not consider one of our beautiful quilted cot covers?  They’re affordable, amazingly versatile (and protective, thanks to our great lining) and guaranteed to add comfort to any removal.

Visit our product site at www.cotcovers.com.

Anyone else host or attend a holiday remembrance service this year?

I went to one hosted by a good friend of mine at his corporate funeral home.  It was on a cold, rainy night.  I was amazed at how many of his clients braved the wet streets and construction (his company is building him a beautiful new facility) to attend the short service.

They read all of the names of those they had served the previous year and had a wonderful caroling group in period costume sing some beautiful songs while they lit candles in commemoration.  They ended with a prayer and a word from the funeral director.

In past years, he’s asked families to decorate a tree with an ornament they had made, he’s given away dove ornaments to everyone who attended and held candlelight services in the cemetery attached to his funeral home.

No matter what he’s done, the people who attend – sometimes hundreds, sometimes less – are touched by the gesture of remembrance and reaffirm their bond with his firm and his staff.

Is it any wonder that his funeral home continues to grow each year?

Batesville makes caskets, right? They’ve been making them for a while. They make a lot of them. They have lots of customers and they have an impressive distribution system in place.

According to Ryan Thogmartin from Connecting Directors, Batesville has just bought the intellectual rights to Goria Corporation, a company that, until the sale, made molded vaults from what I suspect is some type of plastic or polycarbonate or other rigid but lightweight material.  Here’s the letter from the Goria website that describes the sale:

To our valued customers and supporters:

For the past five years, Goria Corporation has been pleased to produce and sell our patented Eonian™ and Endurance™ burial vaults to funeral service providers across the country. During this time, we’ve gotten to know many funeral directors who appreciate our revolutionary products and share our commitment to delivering value to families.

My purpose in writing today is to advise you of a change in our business. Effective November 16, 2009. Goria sold the molds and intellectual property rights on which our vaults are produced. Goria has closed its burial vault business and have ceased all manufacturing operations and will no longer be a supplier of burial vaults. For a number of reasons, we felt the time was appropriate and are confident we made the right decision in choosing the reputable organization we sold too.

On behalf of my family and our staff, we appreciate your business and are thankful for the support you have given us.If you have questions about our selling the molds, patent rights or closing our burial vault business, please feel free to contact Pierre Goria at info@goriacorp.com or call 336-697-0189 ext. 301.

I met Pierre a few years ago at an expo and he was excited about using rotational molding of plastic to transform the way vaults are made and sold.  Because of the lower weight, he was able to create his vaults in one factory and ship them across the country for a reasonable cost, making competition with concrete vault companies possible and profitable.

So let’s get back to the part where Batesville spends some cash to buy his molds and intellectual property.  See, his company makes a lot more than vaults.  So he didn’t sell them everything, just the vault part of the business.

Does it mean he no longer wanted to make vaults?  Does it mean that no one else will make these kinds of vaults?  Not necessarily, on either count.

Now, I haven’t spoken to Pierre, but I know how excited he was about his product and how convinced he was that funeral homes would see the benefits of his kind of vault.  And I know that if Batesville is serious about shifting the industry toward a mass-produced, centrally-manufactured vault, selling his intellectual property was a great way to get the product into the marketplace in a big, big way.

From a businessperson’s view, he made a great move.  Batesville has the resources to push the product in a much-greater way that he ever could have.  They have the means to compensate him for his hard work to create the product and begin marketing it.  Even better, he still owns his original company.

Ryan Thogmartin brings us a great perspective from the vault world when he states:

Maybe the story interests me more because I am also in the burial vault business, but regardless, if Batesville decides to take on burial vaults they could make a big impact on the burial vault world. Just think of the ramifications, if Batesville switched all their customers over to using their burial vault?

What do you think the impact could be?

Well, Ryan, I think it’s going to have a big impact.  I doubt that Batesville would have spent cash to acquire this knowledge if it didn’t intend to use it to create a product line. 

Yes, sometimes companies buy a product to kill it, but Goria wasn’t competing with Batesville because Batesville doesn’t make vaults.  Yet.

In fact, if Batesville had never intended to enter the vault world, they would have little reason to even know that Goria existed.

In my estimation, Batesville either wanted to get into the vault business and decided that buying the intellectual property outright was easier that fighting a protracted patent battle later or saw this as an easy way to add a product to their already-impressive distribution network.

So yes, Ryan, I think the vault business is in for a big shakeup.  Most affected, I think, will be vault companies who sell a large amount of product to the corporates, as they will be the easiest for Batesville to convert in large numbers.  Batesville clearly already has a wide-reaching relationship with management at the corporations, so convincing them to make the switch won’t be hard.

But what about all the unafilliated firms?  How will Batesville convince them? 

First, maybe Batesville doesn’t need to convert that many to create a viable product line.  I’m sure that the business from SCI alone would make it highly attractive to launch the product.

And once the product is launched and used in some funeral homes, others will try it out.  If Batesville can deliver a similar level of customer service, I think smaller vault companies have reason for concern.

But that brings us to the biggest issue facing any business:  how good is your customer service? 

Someone can always create a cheaper product, copy your product features or create a better product.  And that may convince some folks to switch.  But for a repeat purchase, such as vaults or urns or caskets, the delivery experience and customer service are very, very important.

Batesville deals with funeral homes now.  What happens when they have to learn to deliver to cemeteries?  How will they interact with cemetery staff?  In smaller cemeteries, who will handle the opening and closing?  Will they sign up a bunch of small vault companies to sell their product?  Can Batesville handle the customer service for so many new customers, like the cemeteries who will be in line to buy their vaults?

There are a lot of questions still to be answered.  And to be fair, I rushed this post out with very little preparation, so you’re getting my “stream of consciousness” ramblings here.

It will be interesting to see how Batesville rolls out their line of vaults, which I think is inevitable.  Even more interesting will be the reaction of current vault sellers.

It’s that time of year again!  No, not the time where we dance naked in the moonlight to celebrate the winter solstice.  Unless, of course, any of you are Wiccans, in which case, by all means, dance away.  Just remember, it’s pretty cold out there, so start a fire or something.  But not a raging forest fire, those are bad.

Wait, where were we?

Oh yeah, it’s time for a “best of” recap of 2009. 

I’ve reviewed the blog, noticed how seldom I’ve posted in the last few months, and, after scolding myself, compiled what I consider to be the best posts of the previous year.  Here they are, in chronological order:

January
Hey, Vendors. Stop Telling Me How Hungry You Are.
Just Another Celebrity Cremation
Are You Still Conducting Processions?

February
Nobody Cares About the Jones
Minnesota Funeral Director Opens Up About Effects of Cremation

March
2009 Georgia Expo Day 2 and Results
Why You Can’t Protect “Ideas” in Business
Quantity Can Produce Quality
Choosing the Right Convention Opportunities

April
Making Money with Online Memorials
Dale Clock Shares a Review of ICCFA Expo 2009
Why I Joined the Eternal Space Advisory Council
Charles Cowling Comments on My Affinity for Eternal Space

May
Ohio FDA Expo Preparations Are Under Way
OFDA 2009: Expenses

June
EternalSpace Not So Eternal After All?
Eustis Historical Museum: Something Borrowed
Eternal Space: a Debacle?
My Letter to Thomas Parmalee About EternalSpace
Great “Almost Obituary” for Michael Jackson

July
Elite Uniforms is Open for Business!

August
How Many People Will you Meet at the NFDA Convention?
Last Minute Preparations for NFDA 2009

September
Cremation Continues Its Unrelenting March

October
Exhibitor Advice

November
2009 NFDA Convention: The Whole Story

December
Anyone Hiring a “Corpse Beautician”?

I received an interesting email today.  At first, I thought it was a joke.  But the writer is serious.  Here’s the email:

Hello Tim,
I am very glad to find you and your posts on the internet and your website. I am writing to ask you for help in finding employment. I am a licensed Estetician and am interested in the position of Corpse Beautician. I have been working with the public and applying make up for over 5 years and now find I am interested in this aspect of Estetics. However I have been researching online and not finding anything. Looking at online funderaljobs.com and places like that I have used their search windows and not found anything remotely called ‘corpse beautician’. I have also not found anything like this job description in the long list of funeral jobs in existance.
What I mean to express is that not for looking can I find even on the internet the job of corpse beautician or related position. Do I just not know the official name of this job? Do I just not know the category under which this job is listed? Is it that there is just no listings for this position at this time and my timing is bad?
I live in Houston Texas and I would like to transfer my skills in Estetics to the funeral industry. I don’t know if my serach criteria is bad or if the market is non-existant at this time. Is this position in funeral homes so rare and should I make a point of calling each individually and ask if they employ such persons? Do I need to sell myself and my skills as a new service to a unexposed area?
I simply can’t ascertain the market in my area nor online as I get no results from google searching.
If you have any advice how to approach the market or funeral homes directly and/or how I should go about getting experience on some corpses first before seeking employment I would appreciate it.
 
Sincerely,
Jil W.

After thoughtful consideration, here’s what I sent back to the writer:

Jil:

Thank you for your kind words about my website.  And yes, I can tell you a little more about the job you’re seeking and why there’s not much on the internet about it.

 

First, I’ve never heard the phrase “corpse beautician” before.  Frankly, it sounds in poor taste, which may be why no one uses the title.

 

You would do better to talk to funeral homes about cosmetologist positions or ask about employments as a dressing room attendant.

 

But the more likely reason that you can’t find job listings for the position is that few funeral homes employ someone who only does makeup.  Most funeral homes know that putting makeup on the deceased is such a tiny percentage of the workday, making it a job done by the same person who embalms the body, dresses the deceased and puts them in the casket.

In smaller funeral homes, that person might also empty the ashtrays on the smoking porch, vacuum the chapel, typeset the memorial folder, run the death certificate and stand for the visitation.

 

In fact, some firms that handle 60-80 funerals a year (near the national average, actually) might only have two full-time employees.  That means the licensed funeral director is doing all the preparation and the secretary/assistant does all the jobs the funeral director doesn’t want to do.

 

What I’ve just described is analogous with my experience working in a small, family funeral home.  However, you might be more interested in what I saw at the large corporate firm where I worked.

 

There are several large corporations that own groups or “clusters” of funeral homes across the country.  These clusters operate at their most efficient when they utilize a central prepartion facility to handle the embalming, dressing, cosmetizing and casketing of the deceased for several funeral home locations.

 

In this arrangement, there are folks whose full-time jobs are to embalm and prepare the deceased.  In the large central facility where I worked in the 1990’s, there was a person whose sole job was to dress and cosmetize the deceased clients.

 

Before you get your hopes up, you should know what that job required:

 

Lifiting 100 pounds or more (to lift bodies into caskets)

Manipulating remains for dressing
Making a windsor knot in a tie on a person who’s lying down (harder than you’d think)
Dealing with purge (bodies that leak after embalming)

Lifting, stacking, pushing heavy caskets
Any other thing the funeral directors ask you to do

Still want this job?

 

Seriously, if this is something that you’re interested in, you should call some funeral homes.  But don’t be surprised if they don’t give you the warmest reception.

 

When I worked in the funeral home, I could always tell when a beauty school had just graduated a class because I would get ten calls in a week from freshly-minted cosmetologists who thought they were the first ones ever to look for a job in a funeral home.  And it was sad to have to tell them that my boss handled all the cosmetic work and was actually really good at it.  Besides, how would they make a living coming in once or twice a week for an hour to makeup a few bodies?

 

I hope I haven’t upset you terribly.  I think you will be able to make better decisions about your future with the information I’ve offered.

 

Once last bit of advice:  don’t try to sell yourself as a “corpse beautician.”  Sounds kinda creepy.

 

TIM

Just read the blog post from Unnecessary Umlaut.  It’s interesting and disturbing and, I’m sure, something that makes this funeral home memorable.

Spooky:  Miniature Golf in Basement of Ahlgrim’s Funeral Home