How Funeral Home Owners Can Sleep Better With Artificial Intelligence By Alan Creedy Funeral home owners, by and large, tend to be like most people: numberphobic. Every funeral director knows how many families they serve. Very few know their average sale or how it is trending. Less know anything about their key metrics. Some are proud that they have no idea how their company is performing. As if being disinterested in money was a noble virtue instead of poor stewardship. After some 40 years in the profession, I get it. But, as a financial analyst, it’s confusing. Owning a business without knowing how you are doing financially is kind of like being a funeral director who knows nothing about embalming. (Yes, there are funeral directors who don’t embalm, but I bet they all have a fundamental understanding of it.) Funeral Directors Are Not Accountants Early in my career, I was taught that a business should be viewed as a living entity. It needs nurturing, sustenance and attention. Its “blood” is money. Without it, it quickly dies. To be viable, the ebbs and flows of money should be managed. That’s called stewardship. I think owners know this, but they are constrained by a feeling of inadequacy when it comes to financial issues. What I have found is that the presentation of financial information in tabular format is the roadblock. And funeral directors are not alone in this frustration. Judging by the number of books targeted at non-financial executives, one must assume that this frustration is not unique to small business owners. Trying to turn them into accountants is most often futile. They get even more frustrated and confused ... so they do nothing. But, intuitively, they know that our margins have declined so significantly that it is no longer possible to survive a full career operating “out of your hip pocket.” What to Do? I first began to find success by ultra-simplifying what they needed to know into five key indicators. This created some wonderful “ah-ha” moments. But it was not enough. Even though they were now able to understand what was happening, it was not yet obvious 18 | Directors Digest
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