Today’s clients have a whole new set of expectations for funerals. As a result, funeral home directors are being prompted to think outside the box. One critical area that needs adjusting is the funeral service itself. Continuing to promote traditional funeral services will only allow you to appeal to a shrinking segment of your potential [...]
What do people really think when they drive by your funeral home? Do they think, “I hope it’s a long time before I ever need to call a funeral home,” or “What a miserable business to be in. How do they do it day in and day out?” As funeral directors, we have a lot [...]
Throughout all of history, people have expressed their joys and sorrows through music. They celebrated births and marriages, praised and honored their God or gods, and mourned the death of their loved ones by putting melody and rhythm to their feelings. With song, harmonies or the beat of drums, these mourners joined in the procession [...]
Since monuments come in so many types and designs, one of the services you can offer your clients is to help them sort through the options. With all the other critical decisions they need to make, this is the one that stumps people unexpectedly. Grieving families who had assumed that a traditional headstone is the [...]
It is true that the majority of people who walk into your funeral home are unfamiliar with the funeral home business per se. They only know what they have heard from relatives, friends or co-workers. They may have gotten your business name out of the phone book because they liked your ad. They rarely have [...]
Often people in grief are still in such a state of shock that they have difficulty making critical decisions. Although we as funeral home directors recognize this reality, it can at times make the process of completing funeral arrangements grind to a halt. In order to facilitate the healing process, we are as patient as [...]
Today, as a funeral director, you have a new-found freedom to introduce unique and meaningful elements into funeral services. More and more people are becoming comfortable with actively celebrating the life of their loved one during the funeral as opposed to the expected traditional service. This opens up effective ways for you to help grievers [...]
As you help grieving families prepare the funeral service for their loved one, explore their religious background with probing questions. Even if people are not particularly religious as adults, when death hits close to home, many of them grab onto the symbols of faith they remember from their childhood in church, synagogue or mosque. These [...]
The long-held tradition of having a hushed funeral service with family and friends whispering and tiptoeing around may have been formally broken. Respect for the deceased has been recast, replacing passive mourning with active celebration. When did this happen? Funeral celebrations have actually been around for centuries in various cultures and in certain religious groups, [...]
That is what the Golden Gate Funeral Home does very effectively, according to their happy clients. Featured on The Learning Channel’s pilot show, “Best Funeral Ever” Sunday, January 6th at 9 EST/10CST, viewers were able to discover a whole new approach to funerals that makes everyone re-think the way funerals have traditionally been done. The [...]
