By Joey Haas
Transcript of our video interview with Nelson Thulin at Johnson Consulting Group.
Heather:
Hi everyone. And thanks for checking in with us at Funeral Innovations: Trends, Tips, and Technology, where we chat with industry leaders to discuss marketing trends, business technology, and technology innovation, and discuss how digital marketing helps you better serve your families. I’m Heather Mierzejewski. I am the marketing director here at funeral innovations.
Joey:
And I’m Joey, I’m the marketing and design coordinator at Funeral Innovations.
Heather:
And today our guest is Nelson Thulin. Is it “Thoo-lin” or “Too-lin”?
Nelson:
It’s actually “Too-Lean”.
Heather:
Excellent. I was off. Thank you for correcting that. So Nelson is from Johnson Consulting Group and we’re so glad you’re here today, Nelson. Thanks for joining us. Can you start us off just by telling us a little bit about yourself and about Johnson Consulting Group?
Nelson:
Sure. My name again, Nelson Thulin, I’m the director of business consulting services within Johnson Consulting Group located in Scottsdale, Arizona. I always tell people we’re kind of like the the Mayo Clinic of consulting in the funeral service and cemetery world. We’ve got divisions that have everything covered from mergers and acquisitions to divestitures and everything in between specifically what my role is is with the consulting and there too, we do a consulting with large, large firms. Some of the corporate entities as well as a mom and pop operations and everything in between there. We provide a tracking for services and surveys. We do programming to help develop people within the organization and specifically one-to-one coaching with funeral home owners and their staff just so that they can be the best they can be.
Joey:
Awesome. That’s great. Talk a little bit more about that coaching process one-on-one with funeral professionals and how you help them?
Nelson:
Sure. In fact, it’s something that we’ve just developed within the last couple of years, because we were concerned that there was a large segment of the funeral and cemetery industry that we didn’t normally interact with. I think a lot of times when people have thought about funeral Johnson Consulting in the past, it’s it’s at a degree that’s above what some of some of our clients could afford. So we’ve, we’ve created this coaching in that we provide one on one discussions throughout the course of a month. We base it on what we referred to as an RPI program. So it’s results, progress and issues. And so what they discussed with us is first of all, their issues, things that they’re trying to accomplish, we work through strategies to help them overcome any issues or improve their business, what they’re looking to achieve. And then the following months we go through what those results were. Were they able to implement the changes and if they’re making ongoing progress and we just consistently worked through problem solving with them, it seems to work exceptionally well for smaller based clients who only have so much time there. Most of them are in funeral directors most of the time. And that’s part of it. They’re working in their business rather than on their business and to have a coach that kind of helps them along. I I liked the term coach because I I kind of compare it to like a world class athlete. We don’t come in and tell anybody out to run their business. They already been doing it in some cases for generations upon generations, but even a world class athletes take baseball. For example, they want to get to first base with a few less steps because they’ll get on base more often and they’re more likely to score. Same thing with funeral director. They know what they’re doing, but they’d like to be a little bit more efficient and a little bit more profitable and just move that needle a little bit faster before they’re ready to retire someday.
Heather:
That makes a lot of sense. Can you tell me how long Johnson Consulting has been around?
Nelson:
Boy, you had to go into history route on me. Well, I started off with Tom Johnson. Tom Johnson has a long history in funeral service. Anybody that’s been around for some time. They know Tom back from the 80’s when the acquisitions were big. He gradually moved into just having his own consulting business with his son, Jake. And today Jake is the sole owner and CEO of the, of the organization. And I would say it’s probably as a as a formal entity has been around for about 18 years.
Heather:
Okay, great. And something that you said in answering that last question about you like people to work, they work in their business and, but they should be working on their business. What, I’ve heard that before? Can you explain what that means?
Nelson:
Yeah, so especially I, I think most funeral people out there they’ll appreciate this. They’ll go to a conference, they’ll go to a meeting, they’ll listen to a webinar like this and they’ll write things down feverishly, and they’ll be all excited about what they could do and what they could implement. And low and behold, you go back to the daily grind of everything. And in funeral service, we referred to it as a whiteboard. That’s where all the services are being listed. What’s happening, which family are you caring for? What are the unique circumstances in providing the care for them? And it doesn’t take long for that white board overcome your ability to implement other things. Cause you’re simply trying to take care of what has to happen now. The difference between seeing and looking out into the future and working out a plan to adjust for, or maximize the possibilities compared to a manager, which oftentimes is just dealing with the day to day just working through whether it’s a crisis like COVID or it’s something where it’s just a customer service issue that they need to work on. That takes away from that planning, that ability to look out and work on things. And again, for us, we can help monthly keep their eye on the ball. And looking ahead, especially if somebody is looking towards eventual retirement or divestiture they need to maximize profits and look at the enterprise value, grow that, so that at the end of a long, long, difficult career, sometimes they have something to make up for it, the profits that they get from selling their business or the joy that they get from passing it down to another generation.
Joey:
Gotcha.
Heather:
So can you talk a little bit, say about a funeral home when they come to you and say they want to be more efficient or they’re planning for succession, or they’re having these challenges? How does it look for the funeral director when they work with you?
Nelson:
So we go through a very comprehensive performance analysis and from the Johnson Consulting thought is that there’s really four areas in which a successful funeral home will do extremely well on. the first one is customer service and just obviously taking care of the families and meeting their expectations and really exceeding them that throughout the history of funeral service has been the growth potential is in the families you serve. And the other people that come to visit the services and they see what you do for the family is that’s what the growth potential is. Then there’s the workplace itself. You want to create a workplace that is inspiring and creates challenges and value for the people that work there. You’ll want to have a fair environment. You want it to be something where communication is at the highest levels, then there’s the marketplace. That’s where we then focus on what is the competition in the area? What is the changing demographic that may impact the case types that we’re serving? You all know the changes that have been going on for years in terms of the gradual shifting from burial to cremation services, all that obviously impacts what they’re able to do and what they’re able to achieve out in the marketplace. And then finally, it’s financials. We always talk about financials last because we truly believe that if the three items before taking care of families, taking care of the people that work for you, and you’re looking for opportunities in the community and the marketplace, pretty much the financials should take care of themselves. But there again is where we excel with the accounting department. We work within the funeral service and cemetery world that some accountants don’t really understand how funeral service works. It’s, it’s unique in the way that we conduct business. A lot of times we, we do cash advance programs that most funeral homes don’t do. In fact, we encourage people to kind of wean away from that, but that’s been a long time history of funeral service where the funeral director provided for everything even paying other people’s bills and then coming back later and, and solving it with the family, just so that in that time of need, that the family had no worries and no concern. That’s becoming more and more difficult for funeral funeral homes nowadays to carry that load especially families again, think about COVID how many people are having funerals that they weren’t expecting and then possibly losing their job right along with it. They’re looking to funeral homes to help them through that. And I must say the vast majority of funeral directors are awfully giving, and sometimes that can be at their own detriment.
Joey:
Hmm. Well, thank you for breaking those main focuses down into those categories. I think that really helps. And I know at the beginning of your answer there, you touched on customer service and kind of on that customer wavelength, are there any trends you’re seeing from customer surveys at a national or local level?
Nelson:
We recently, every year we take and consolidate the information that we get. We we survey anywhere around 150,000 families every year throughout our, our clients. And we consolidate that information into some trends that we see for the most part customer service continues to grow in terms of people’s satisfaction. And what we’ve been building upon that for several years now, we actually have a customer experience program that we coordinate. It’s a workshop program that goes out to the funeral homes in which we worked through them again, not telling them how to care for families, but generally speaking, helping them coordinate and provide some consistency to their services. That’s the, one of the things that we do see in surveys coming back that families will sometimes report significantly different experiences based on services that they had only six months apart to the point where, you know, if I didn’t know how my dad was cared for, and I only knew the way my mom was cared for six months later, I wouldn’t come back to your funeral. I mean, that’s an extreme, but that happens. And we certainly don’t want people having an experience that’s based solely on the chance that they get Bill or Ted on any given day. We want them to have a consistent service. So we pull the funeral home together and we work in a workshop that has all the participants in that process, the people that go to a family’s home to initiate the transfer through all the care and preparation and the deceased, their arrangements with the families until the final hugs at the grave site. We want that to be a seamless service that everybody understands their role in providing that service and ensuring that there’s no, no blips along the way. In doing that, then the funeral home grows because the family then is an advocate for them. You’d be surprised on many families will go out and tell people, you know, if anything happens to you, XYZ funeral home, they made the difference for us. We’re seeing that coming back in surveys now as well, people talk about the fact that even though we do through the pandemic, the funeral homes stepped up and were able to provide some type of service, some meaningful ceremony to get them through a time where we really couldn’t have the traditional services.
Heather:
When I think that answer leads nicely into my next question, which is what do you see as the biggest challenges funeral professional space today? You talked a little bit about that people process quality or consistency. What do you think it is, the biggest challenge?
Nelson:
Well, I think for, let me answer it this way, I think sometimes our assumption is, is that people are not looking for what a funeral service has to offer and it could be true, but it isn’t that they don’t want to have funeral service. And I say that because in my travels and I crisscrossed the country and especially now with COVID, I’m driving rather than flying, but even even do this for yourself, if you go on a trip and think about how many roadside memorials that there are there’s a cross and a flower and maybe a note or a teddy bear, nobody organized that other than the people that had a need to memorialize that person. You think of princess Diana, that was a country that came out collectively on their own. Nobody orchestrated, you know, you can remember just the waves and waves of flowers that were being cast upon the hearse, as it drove down the street, no one organized that people want, that they look for a way to express their sorrow, their pain, the significance of what that person played in their lives. That’s just a human thing. And I think the biggest thing for funeral service is to understand that that means different things to different people. And that’s a lot of part of, again, when we talk about customer service not trying to pigeonhole people into the 10:00 AM service with the prayers at the cemetery in the afternoon. We really have to be open and willing to create an experience something that’s different than what our grandfathers were doing.
Joey:
Hmm. And so do you think you could talk about how that challenge has evolved since the pandemic has started? Because obviously things are different now and, and services are there’s different options, like live streaming and that kind of thing, but can you talk about how that challenge has changed?
Nelson:
Well, you, you said it the most, the biggest is the fact that there’s live streaming of funerals. And the interesting thing about that is live streaming of funerals is not anything new whatsoever. There’s been companies providing those types of services for 20 years. But we didn’t embrace it in terms of funeral service. Now I would dare say it’d be hard pressed to find a funeral home that wasn’t providing some type of streaming service that just happened within the last six to seven months. And praise to the funeral homes out there that when they realized what was happening, they adapted and they adapted quickly. But on the flip side, that’s that service at capacity has been there for 20 years and we let it kind of linger and go by the boards. You just kinda wonder how many other things are out there that we haven’t fully embraced just yet. And something that people are looking for, but we just haven’t thought it through, or haven’t taken the steps to get outside our comfort zone. Again, that’s one of the things that we’re always helping owners to do. It’s a great, great byproduct of all the wonderful funeral homes that we work with throughout the country, because we’re getting great ideas all the time. And when we see one client and we know what they’re doing in New Mexico, and we have another client that has a similar circumstances in Maine, those people may never cross paths, but when we’re talking with them, we share ideas with one another. And like I said, it’s a wonderful byproduct for us. We learn and truly are inspired by the clients we serve every single day. And it’s, it’s great to be able to share that information back and forth.
Heather:
Are there specific things Nelson that you wish funeral directors were doing right now that they maybe aren’t?
Nelson:
You know, it’s difficult to say when we think about the here and now. It’s a different world that so many of them are working through. I I think for, for some of them in the last couple of months, and you can understand this for most people that had pre-need programs it just wasn’t appropriate. They, weren’t looking at calling people up when every night on the news, they were hearing about another thousand people dying that day throughout the country. And I think what we missed in that case is that people needed that education. I think that’s the key for everything. It’s not like we were shocking them by the fact that there were people dying. But what we were letting them do is go without the knowledge of what they could do ahead of time. And and in not having that vital education, which I think is key for the future of funeral service people don’t know what they don’t know. And here’s a good, good little story for you. I’m trying to representative Gifford from Arizona. You’re a member. I think she was shot seven, eight years ago or something like that. And and so on her way to the hospital, the nurse that was working with her in the ambulance was trying to keep her focused and just try to look at me, look at me. And the one thing that she happened to notice was this pendant that was hanging from the nurses neck. And she asked her what that was and make a long story short. If you know what Thumbie are, where people can make a little imprint, it happened to be the Thumbie of her mother. And after the word got out, that was a story that was picked up like on the morning news shows. And they started talking about that and there were just waves and waves of requests for that at the Thumbies you know, for all that, there’s several different ones, but that’s kind of, when you refer to a soda as a Coke ya know, it’s just kind of a brand name that just catches, but, but there’s a number of companies that do that. But the fact of the matter is, is that so many people out there were not aware of it. And and we don’t do probably a good enough job at education. In light of that NFDA put out a survey of families that had been served families that had gone through the funeral process and they, and I forget the number, but it was a significant survey and the responses that they get back was pertaining to a booklet that NFDA puts out “Having the Talk of a Lifetime.” You may have heard of that. So the results came back from this survey and it found that of the people that had been exposed to that “Talk of a Lifetime”, nearly 50% of them said that it made them take actions. So in just reading the book and understanding the information and being a little better educated, it caused 50% of the people to say, you know what I’m going to follow through on this. Unfortunately, another part of the survey indicated that only 16% of the people were aware of that booklet. So, there, again, I think it shows you that we have tremendous opportunity there to go out and teach the world the value of funeral service and the importance of it. You know, we, we teach it in the schools about funeral services always been a taboo to talk about. And I think we’ve got to get beyond that. Cancer, talking about cancer was a taboo 20 years ago, you know, the C word and, or, you know, nobody would want to talk about it, but now, you know, every weekend you have a running event or a charity event because people have been educated about cancer, and now it’s not scary, it’s scary, but at least they understand it better. I think that’s what funeral service needs to do in order to really find it’s spot in the future. If we don’t educate people, we’re leaving them to make up their own decisions. And again, they don’t know what they don’t know.
Joey:
Hmm. Yeah. I think obviously it’s yeah, very integral part of like helping families and serving families. And yet, like you said, knowing you don’t know what you don’t know. Are there any other key bits of business advice that you would like to share with funeral directors or anyone in this profession?
Nelson:
Yeah. So it’s important to look at your business. I, again one of the things I share with a lot of people is you, you don’t know how much you can make until you know, how much it takes. A lot of people don’t fully understand just what expenses are being involved for running a business. We, we talk to people every year and they’re saying, you know, we’re up 15 calls and we are really doing this, redoing that, but at the end of the year, I didn’t make any more money than, than what I did the year before, or they’re even going backwards. Sometimes there’s a, there’s a lot of formulas that are kind of scary and funeral service right now. And I dear say the pandemic probably gave us a look at probably a six to seven year future in the last six to seven months. I’ve been telling people for quite some time that the gradual shifting from burial to cremation reduces your revenue. And subsequent to that, they’re also saying though that there will be more deaths in the future. Of course, they’ve been predicting that for years and years, but the reality of it is, is that you do have the baby boomers. And what nobody really thinks about is, is the generations behind the baby boomers are even bigger than that. So the need will arise. There will be increasing deaths over time. Unfortunately, we don’t have as many people entering funeral service. So supply and demand, if there’s less funeral directors to, to a higher, the rate for them is going to go up higher and higher. So you have that converging of those two plans where the expenses are rising simply to have the licensed professionals that are needed to do the work. And there will be worked in needed to be done. But if people are relaxed, the expense and the revenues are not going in the right direction what’s going to happen is it’s just going to be more and more difficult for people to to see a product. And like we talked about before, profit as essentially that multiplied by market factors to come up with your enterprise value is, and if you’re not looking at that and changes that need to be done, you just can’t flip a switch. You’re going to have to do it over a five, six year period. But anybody that would be thinking about a divestiture selling their business or transferring it to someone else, a family member you definitely want to be looking at a plan for five to 10 years out, depending upon what the circumstances are because you just, you just can’t make it happen overnight. You’ve got to make adjustments over the long haul.
Heather:
You mentioned in that a little bit about staffing and that it’s harder to find a funeral directors right now, Alex McCracken wanted me to ask you about how are you seeing funeral homes manage and for anybody who doesn’t know Alex’s are one of our head sales person, how are funeral homes managing staff during the pandemic, or what kind of challenges around staffing have popped up?
Nelson:
That’s a good question. And you can tell Alex that we talk quite a bit. It’s a good question because of there there’s multiple dynamics going on there. One in most cases, funeral homes still needed the licensed staff. They did see a drop back on the non-licensed staff, people that are used when you have a full traditional service. So for instance, you weren’t having visitations for a while, or the ones that you were having were very limited. So as somebody that you would hire to work and evening visitation, that just wasn’t necessary anymore someone to drive a hearse to a church or a cemetery they weren’t doing that publicly anymore. And so they didn’t have a role to play. So art time, primarily jobs within funeral homes were greatly reduced. The vast majority of licensed people though still had more than enough to do, but they were being pressed into different things that they needed to do. I would say before the pandemic labor or labor shortages was by far funeral services, biggest issue to resolve just because of the services that we’ve been reduced to having the the ability for one funeral director to make, you know, a lot of limited services or direct cremation services is not nearly as time consuming as it is if you’re having a traditional service visitation and funerals and everything like that. So within the pandemic I think there has been a balancing of, of the staffing needs compared to what we’ve been able to provide. But again, that turns the corner and we started seeing that there’ll be a continuous growth in the death rate, but we’ll get back to where now people are having the regular services that they had before it’ll quickly become the big issue for funeral homes.
Joey:
And kind of along those lines of pandemic have you seen the pandemic affect mergers and acquisitions at all? And how so if, you know, if it has?
Nelson:
Yeah. Early on, of course everybody was afraid, you know, everybody was unsure of doing anything. So we witnessed several deals be put on hold, but now it has escalated to a whole new level. I think for people that in some cases, a funeral service was helped out with a lot of the insurgence of money into businesses to keep them afloat. And they ended up with dollars that they’re able to use. The SBA loans that are out there now that give you six months of forgiveness on them has put several people, several people, a lot of businesses very flush with cash and they can start looking at opportunities. I think the other part of it is, and this, this would have gone back to the question that I had mentioned before, but it would have happened over the next six to seven years. And that’s that convergence of expenses rising and revenues going down. I think for anybody that was kind of saying, well, that’s six, seven years or 10 years from now. I don’t have to worry about it. Suddenly the pandemic gave them a real clear look at what the future held and for some funeral homes, it’s going to be tough. And I think they have made themselves available for consideration for, for acquisition. So, yeah, that has increased dramatically. And I never want to refer to the pandemic as being in the past cause we’re clearly not, but I think as people are starting to adjust to working through the limitations and what we have to do there’s, there’s a lot of activity going on.
Heather:
Now, you talked a little bit about trends you’ve seen, but are there any predictions you want to make or things you think are going to be happening in the next, you know, we’ve kind of had this first six months at a pandemic, what’s the next six months going to look like?
Nelson:
I think again, it would go back to to the education. And I think for people to understand what can be done in lieu of a traditional service, if we, you know, you hear that every night on a news and it just, you know, you know, I’m sure for any funeral service professional out there, it just pains it to, to think about people dying alone and, and families unable to, you know, be with people. And, and even in some cases afterwards when they would like to gather together for services if, if the restrictions go on we do need to work on other ways of providing that assistance to people. I think there’s a lot of funeral homes out there that fear the fact that if families can go through a cycle or two of having services or seeing the loss of a family member and not having the services, I think there’s going to be you know, some people believe that that maybe they’ll be okay with that. And I, and I know some of our clients now who provided, they said, well, this is a service that we’ll have for you in the future. But now that future is come three, four or five months later when people thought, well, things will get better. And now that they haven’t families are saying, you know what, it’s six or seven months later. I don’t think we’re going to have those services. And so we have funeral homes now that are writing the refund, checks back to families that potentially had prearranged or paid for them in bands or anything like that. And now they’re looking for the money back. One time has passed and they say, you know, time heals all wounds to a degree that’s what’s happening. And if somebody has been out of job for a couple of weeks or a month they’re looking at that refund from the funeral home as a, as a stop gap measure. I think on the flip side, I linked it, look at it as a, a more positive trend. I think oftentimes we don’t appreciate things until they’re gone. And my guess is there’s a lot of people that have come to that awakening is that, you know, before I used to go to family funerals and just go through the motions, but when you can’t do that and you, when you can’t be together with friends and family at a time when you need the most, I think that for a lot of people is going to be an awakening that when they can have services, they’re definitely going to have them because they missed it when it was taken away from them. Again, I think that’s, that’s what we’re looking at is probably like everything in our world. It seems like it’s polarized. And I think you’ll have some people that will, you know, what I can get by, without a funeral. And there are other people that absolutely know that that’s what they need. And funeral directors have to be able to swing that pendulum back and forth. Yeah.
Joey:
So this is the last question we have for you. We ask everybody this question. So what is the biggest lesson you’ve learned from serving in this profession?
Nelson:
I’ve been a funeral director and in the funeral service profession for just about 35 years. And I see it over and over again when I was working with families directly. And when I hear the stories from the clients that I have today you, you hear once in a while, a story that that reminds you how vitally important we all play in this world. You know, it’s kind of like that movie, it’s a wonderful life that sometimes we don’t fully understand what an impact and what a significance somebody has had in our life until they’re gone. And I think in our role in our profession, we have that not only that honor of doing it, but that, that requirement to do it, a vast majority of us will never have a statue made or a article written in the newspaper, but we’ll have that one service that obituary that monument that’s at a cemetery. That’s, where the individual caretakers of history and the significance that everybody has. And, and I think that’s the thing that I’ll always cherish in, whatever my role is in funeral services as to knowing how important that is, that we treasure every life, every life that we come across.
Joey:
Hmm. That was very well said. So those are all the questions we have. Thank you so much, Nelson. We really appreciate your time. And thanks for joining us this week on Funeral Innovations: Trends, Tips, and Technology. So we’ll be posting this video on our blog, on our YouTube channel, and you’ll be able to access it on our Facebook feed. And we’ll be back with another show soon. So check back in with us next week. If you have any topics you’d like to see discussed or someone you’d like to hear from in an interview, add it in the comments down below and be sure to visit our website at funeralinnovations.com. Have a great day. Thank you so much.
Heather:
Thanks so much, Nelson.
