Get Proactive: A Proven Formula for 2025 Growth
BY Tyler Anderson
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN The Director
A sound growth strategy makes all the difference between scaling up or stagnating. It's one of the most critical pieces of your business, guiding decisions both big and small, and with 2025 just around the corner, there's no better time to evaluate your strategy and prepare for the future.
But sustaining long-term growth isn't easy. In one analysis conducted by Bain & Company, it was found that only 1/3 of companies ever achieve sustainable growth.1 The rest either stalled out, were acquired, or went bankrupt.
In today's consumer landscape, mapping out a solid plan for growth is more important than ever. You want a strategy that taps into your market potential, consistently attracts new families, and results in committed customers for years to come.
Today's consumers are changing fast. Nearly 90 percent of business owners say their customers' behaviors are shifting more quickly than they can keep up, according to Accenture. Families today think differently about funeral service than they did even a decade ago—and these changes aren't expected to slow down anytime soon. NFDA projects cremation rates to top 80 percent by 2045.
Yet the causes of these changes are complex – the religiously unaffiliated now make up 29% of the U.S. population, family members tend to live further from each other than ever before, and more baby boomers are getting divorced after the age of 50. As a result, families are increasingly left to define funerals for themselves, and the default becomes commoditization and convenience.
The impact on funeral homes across the country is declining average funeral values, and when you pair this with the increasing costs of doing business, sustaining growth feels like an uphill battle.
Yet even with so many complicated causes, the solution comes down to one simple but powerful question: What if you could educate families long before they ever step into your funeral home?
Families deserve to understand how meaningful and important a funeral can be, and a recent study shows that consumers are beginning to think so, too. NFDA found that 68 percent of Generation Z strongly agree it's important to commemorate the life of a loved one with a funeral or memorial service, compared to 44 percent of Baby Boomers. These findings are encouraging for the future of funeral service, but the challenge remains the gap between believing something is important and taking action. This is what a growth strategy centered around a proactive approach to preneed is designed to solve.
You may have already heard the business analogy about vitamins and painkillers. A vitamin is a product or service that customers perceive as nice but not essential. On the other hand, a painkiller is perceived as critical—it solves a pressing problem.
Which category does funeral service fit into? It depends on who you ask. Many people today view it as a vitamin. They see it as optional, with benefits that aren't immediately apparent. What they may not recognize is how a meaningful ceremony helps loved ones gather and reflect after a loss.
But in reality, funerals aren't vitamins. They're painkillers. They address deep emotional needs and can help people begin to move through grief and start on the path to healing. The challenge lies in getting more of your community's families to appreciate and understand this, and here's where a proactive preneed strategy is so important.
For one thing, it gives you even more opportunities to show families not only the logistical benefits of a prearranged funeral—how it alleviates them from hard decisions, financial burdens, and the disagreements and doubts that arise when it's unclear what the decedent would have wanted—but the much deeper emotional benefits as well.
In other words, being proactive allows more people to plan ahead so they can focus on connection when it's needed most. And in terms of growth strategies, a proactive program is one of the best ways to increase market share and prearrange new families.
Most funeral homes are so focused on serving the needs of families and running their core business that they naturally leave preneed on the back burner. This means they usually end up only prearranging families who take it upon themselves to either walk-in or call-in. Unfortunately, these are primarily families who would have chosen your funeral home anyway.
Compare this to a proactive program, which allows you to find, educate, and build relationships with more new families in your community. This is how you truly unlock the potential in your market. As many as 70 percent of Americans believe it's a good idea to preplan their funerals but far fewer actually do it. By being proactive, you give families the gentle nudge they need to take action.
Not only will you be able to meet families years or decades before they experience a loss, you'll be educating them on the value of funeral service when they're ready to listen. It's much easier to make rational decisions and sort through details when you can sit down and think through what a memorial will look like, rather than amid the fog of grief.
The point here is that a proactive strategy allows you to evolve the conversation about funeral service. Families discover that its benefits have lasting value and will positively impact the lives of their loved ones. Not only that, but providing families with deep insights and authentic aha moments results in higher quality preneed experiences overall, leading to more committed customers.
And the best part? Increasing your volume of prearranged families enables you to focus even more attention on providing exceptional service at the time of loss instead of trying to pin down decisions and details. In turn, the families you serve will be more inclined to become lifelong advocates for your funeral home who spread the word about your brand, further adding to your book of business.
As you look ahead to 2025, there's no question that a proactive preneed strategy is one of the most powerful tools for driving sustained growth. It strengthens your relationship with families who already know your funeral home and helps you attract new families who are unfamiliar with your brand or undecided about their options.
But to unlock the full potential of preneed, funeral homes typically have to invest a lot of resources and energy into making their programs more effective. What we've found at Precoa is that there isn't just one magic bullet—every stage of the preneed pipeline demands attention or else leads can fall through the cracks, leaving you with far less growth than you're capable of.
If you start by improving the effectiveness of your marketing so that it results in more quality leads for your funeral home, you might also consider investing in the quality and effectiveness of your follow-up systems. What percentage of leads are setting appointments? Are there proven nurture paths for families who are not yet ready to take the next step?
There's also the matter of increasing support for Advance Funeral Planners. This involves zeroing in on the training and coaching that improves performance and helps them create even better experiences for families. The other thing that often gets overlooked is data. Investing in your data infrastructure allows you to better track performance so you can keep improving and becoming more effective.
Instead of doing this all yourself, many funeral homes find it helpful to outsource the work to a trusted partner. No matter what you choose, a proactive preneed strategy is one of the best ways to set yourself up for sustained success. You can no longer wait for growth to come to you. Instead, take the reins and thrive in 2025 and beyond.