Cremation Options Innovative Funeral Home Owner Shares His Ideas For Success
William M. Scott is a third-generation funeral director who isn’t afraid to spend money, but like everyone else, he likes to see a return on his investment. As owner of Scott Funeral Home, he chose to build a new facility in Jeffersonville, Ind., in 2002, which cost close to $3 million. But now he has a facility that includes an 800-gallon aquarium in the center of the lobby and some of the newest technology to help him serve about 230 families per year. We asked Scott to share some of what he’s learned so you can build upon his successes and avoid his mistakes. If you are building a funeral home, think about doing something different. Scott hired an architect who knew next to nothing about funeral service. “I felt that was really important,” he says. “You can drive into any town and even if you don’t have your glasses on, you can pick the funeral home out from 300 yards, especially the new ones.”All Scott had to do was lay out the functions of the building and tell the architect to get to work. “It turned out to be perfect,” he says. “A hallway goes right through the middle, front to back.”• When building a new location, think about keeping the old one open. This might not be an option if you need to sell the old location, but Scott still conducts about 20 funerals a year at his former place. He doesn’t maintain an active staff there, but sometimes community residents prefer sticking to what they know. “When we do sell the old place, we will have a restriction on it so it can’t be used for a funeral home,” he says. Don’t be afraid to break with tradition. Scott says it’s time to pursue new ideas. “For instance, at our funeral home, when someone comes in the door, we have computer monitors, and we have a picture of the person they are visiting, info about that person, and then it scrolls and has something about the funeral home and our pet crematory,” he says. “People stand there and stare at it.”• Focus on small but meaningful touches. Scott invested in a computer kiosk in the lobby where people can find local restaurants, check the weather and carry out simple tasks. “People come in and they use it, and they talk about it,” he says. “When you just look at the amenities around the funeral home, it gives people something to talk about.”• Have a slideshow and keep it running in your arrangement conference room. While Scott or one of his arrangers is fumbling around with papers, a slideshow plays for family members. It even gets into subliminal messaging when it shows a picture of a concrete box next to a burial vault and the corresponding waterlines, one that goes up into the box but not the vault. The slideshow gets the point across to families without Scott having to say a word. “But if I’m meeting a family real short on funds, I won’t play that thing because I don’t want them to feel guilty, “he says. “If I let someone pick out something for $12,000, and they can only pay me $2,000, what good have I done?”• A spectacle can be a good thing. Scott’s aquarium is 10 feet long, 300 feet wide and 30 inches tall, and it’s a favorite among visitors to the funeral home. “We have two filter systems in the basement that run it and a 100-gallon air compressor in the garage as well,” he says. “It’s not a cheap proposition, but people love to sit there and watch the fish, especially the kids and the old people. They put their faces right against the glass.”• Beware of thinking there’s a market when there isn’t one. Scott invested about $6,000 in video recording equipment so he could tape services, but so far, he hasn’t really seen a return on investment. “I thought it would be something you could charge for, but it’s not like weddings,” he says. “Weddings are happy moments and funerals are not.” Even so, Scott looks on the bright side and provides CDs of the services to the family for free, and looks at it as another service that separates him from competitors.• Branching out into pet memorialization might not always mean more money. Scott cremates about 6,000 pets per year, and you’d think he’d be making a lot of money, and maybe he would be if he charged more. But at $150 per pet, he’s just not seeing big profits. “We do it as an extension of the funeral home, and we know some people are more attached to their pets than they are to their relatives,” he says. “Relatives don’t come visit, but pets are there every day.” Scott will need to revise something about his pet operation before it really starts to make him money. “We’ve gone on the philosophy of let’s charge a fair price, and let’s get all the business we can,” he says. “But it’s not making that much. We have a monstrous gas bill, and we burnt up the first cremator and had to rebuild it and put in a second one because the first one was not meant for that kind of volume.” He adds, “At the end of the year, we do make a profit, but not much. It’s money in and money out, but what we get to do is we support two more families with a job for the guys who work here, and I think we are performing a good service to the community.” Scott feels that even though he’s tried some things that haven’t worked out as well as he expected, he’s ahead of the curve. “Are all these things worth it?” he asks. “Well, due to the increase in our business over the past few years, I would say, ‘yes.’”
If you or a family member have any further questions or concerns with respect to cremation, cremation services, cremation costs or a direct cremation please feel free to contact Cremation Options toll free 24 hours daily at 1-877-989-9090.
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