A Conversation With Georganne Bender - What Families See That Funeral Homes Often Miss

Okay.

So George, what do you see as the major obstacle that funeral homes won't change to actually understand not just our families, but the consumer? Because our consumer is the family, but we don't want to look at a family as a consumer.

Right.

But they are.

I remember the first time.

that Rich, my business partner, who retired in 2023.

The first time Rich and I ever worked in your industry, we were called by the Minnesota Funeral Directors Association, the CEO of Wilbert.

And he called and he said, you know, I see that you mystery shop all kinds of different businesses.

Would you mystery shop funeral homes? And I thought about it for a second.

I kind of laughed and I went, yeah, we would.

Rich thought I was insane, but we did.

And I remember that very first presentation, I said...

I called the audience retailers and this is like 25 years.

They didn't like that.

I

was going to say, how'd that go over?

No, it did not go over well.

And I just went, but you are, I'm a retailer.

If you sell anything, you're a retailer.

But the good thing for you is that there are retailers out there doing incredible things in their stores right now to get people to trust them and spend money and choose them over everybody else.

And you can, you can use those same, techniques, those same tactics and to make your customers more comfortable.

So, you know, we're so comfortable right now with baby boomers.

Yeah.

So a lot of our customers, I'm a baby boomer.

We're still very comfortable with baby boomers.