A woman walks into a funeral home on a Tuesday afternoon. Nobody she loves has died. She’s sixty-eight, she buried her husband from this same building nine years ago, and she wants to write down what she’d like for herself so her children won’t have to guess. She remembers the director who sat with her in that first week. She remembers that someone called her on the first anniversary. She doesn’t remember a single advertisement.
Down the hall, the third-generation owner is looking at a stack of sympathy-card returns, a spreadsheet of families served over the past five years, and a calendar that’s already full. She knows the woman’s visit didn’t happen because of anything the funeral home bought. It happened because of a relationship that was kept, quietly, over nine years. What she doesn’t know is how to make that happen on purpose, for more families, without turning grief into a sales pipeline.
That’s the kind of question a strategy session is built for. This piece follows an invented family-owned funeral home in a mid-sized American town through one such session. The business, its people, and every detail are illustrative, not a client story. Nothing here describes a real result. The thinking applies to any organization whose relationships are long, infrequent, and deeply personal.
Most businesses see their customers often. A coffee shop sees regulars every morning. A dentist sees patients twice a year. A funeral home may serve a family once, and then not again for a decade or more.
In that gap, a lot can happen. The family moves. The director they trusted retires. A new funeral home opens on the edge of town with a bright sign and a website full of package pricing. The children who stood at the back of the room during their grandmother’s service are now the ones making decisions, and they’ve never met anyone at the funeral home on their own.
None of that is anyone’s fault. It’s what happens when a relationship depends on memory alone. The owner in our story has strong memories and a loyal staff, but the relationships live in people’s heads. When a funeral director leaves, so do dozens of relationships. When the owner is busy, the anniversary calls slip.
A plan doesn’t replace that care. It protects it.
A strategy session isn’t a brainstorm, and it isn’t a pitch for more advertising. It’s a working conversation that forces choices: who the next season of effort is for, what that season should produce, and what the business will deliberately not do.
At the end, the funeral home should leave with four things written down:
That’s it. Not a twelve-month content calendar on day one. Not a promise of more calls. Decisions.
The first exercise in the session is simply naming who the funeral home has relationships with. It’s a longer list than the owner expected.
Families served recently. People in the first year after a loss. They’re grieving, and their needs change week by week. Some want company; some want quiet.
Families served years ago. People like the woman in the opening. They may not have heard from the funeral home since the anniversary call, if there was one.
People who have pre-planned. People who’ve written down their wishes, and sometimes funded them. Their information can go stale. Addresses change. Wishes change. Children need to know the plan exists.
The next generation. Adult children and grandchildren who attended a service but never made arrangements themselves.
Clergy and congregations. Pastors, rabbis, and other faith leaders who often recommend a funeral home and stand beside families during services.
Hospice teams, hospitals, and senior living communities. Social workers and nurses who are often the first to be asked, “Who should we call?”
Local veterans’ groups, fraternal organizations, and civic clubs. People who organize honors, memorials, and community remembrance events.
Staff. The directors, administrators, and part-time attendants who are, in practice, the relationship.
Writing all of this down is sobering. The owner can’t give equal attention to every group. That’s the point of the next step.
Every strategy session should force at least one hard choice. For this funeral home, it’s this: Which relationships come first this season, and which ones will wait?
The owner’s instinct is to say “everyone.” The facilitator asks a different question: If only one group got consistent attention for the next six months, which one would the business regret neglecting most?
After some discussion, the answer is families in the first year after a loss. That’s where the care is most needed, it’s where the funeral home’s reputation is formed, and it’s where the current effort is most uneven. Some directors call families regularly. Others, overloaded, don’t call at all.
Choosing that group means saying, out loud, that other groups will get less this season. The newsletter to past families stays twice a year. Outreach to new hospice partners waits until fall. Nobody is ignored, but nothing else gets new effort until the first-year plan is running smoothly.
That’s the cost of making the choice. The cost of not making it is worse: every group gets a little, nobody gets enough, and the staff burns out trying.
Here’s where many plans fail. They’re written for the staff the business wishes it had.
The session asks the owner to count actual hours. In a typical week, how much time can a director realistically spend on calls and notes that aren’t tied to an active arrangement? What happens in a heavy week? Who covers when someone is out?
The honest answer is that the funeral home can give roughly a few hours a week across the whole team, more in quiet weeks and almost none in hard ones. So the plan has to work at the low end. If it only works in a quiet month, it isn’t a plan.
That leads to a capacity limit written in plain language: Each director keeps in touch with the families they personally served, using a short schedule, and no one is responsible for more than they can do in a heavy week. If a director is overloaded, the owner or the office administrator steps in, and the family is told who will be calling.
This limit does something useful. It keeps the plan humane, for families and for staff.
Next, the session works out how the funeral home will stay in touch with first-year families. The question isn’t “Which channels are popular?” It’s “Which channels feel right to someone who is grieving, and which can the staff actually keep up?”
A short note from the director who served the family, a few weeks after the service. No brochure in the envelope. No mention of other services. Just a few sentences in the director’s own words.
A call at a few predictable points in the first year, such as around the first holidays and near the anniversary. The call has one purpose: to check in. If the family wants to talk, the director listens. If they don’t, the call is short and kind.
Many funeral homes already host or share information about grief support groups, memorial services, and holiday remembrance evenings. The plan puts these on a simple, shared calendar so every director can mention them consistently.
For families who prefer it, an occasional email with grief resources or an invitation to a remembrance event. Never a sales message. Never a newsletter they didn’t ask for.
Text-message reminders, social media tags, and anything automated that a grieving person might receive at the wrong moment. The session doesn’t ban these forever. It decides they aren’t right for this group, this season.
A plan without a measure becomes a good intention. But the measure has to be respectful. You don’t measure grief support by how many families later buy something.
The session settles on two simple measures, checked once a month:
The owner reviews both monthly. If the touches are slipping, that’s a capacity problem, and the plan changes. If families keep mentioning the same need, such as help with paperwork after a death or information about grief groups for children, that becomes a signal for next season’s priority.
Notice what isn’t measured: pre-need contracts, revenue per family, or how often families come back. Those may matter to the business, but tying them to grief support would change the nature of the calls. Families can feel it when a call has a hidden purpose.
The woman in the opening came in to pre-plan. That’s a second relationship group, and the session spends time on it, even though it isn’t this season’s priority.
Pre-planning is often described as a gift to one’s family, and it can be. Federal consumer guidance from the FTC notes that planning ahead lets people comparison shop without time pressure and relieves some of the burden on family members. That same guidance also reminds consumers that they have the right to buy only the goods and services they want, rather than a package, and that they should feel free to compare at least two funeral homes. You can read it in the FTC’s consumer article on shopping for funeral services.
For a funeral home, that guidance is a gift too. It describes what a trustworthy relationship looks like from the consumer’s side: clear prices, real choices, no pressure.
The session writes down three commitments for pre-planning conversations:
Price transparency isn’t only good manners in this industry. It’s required. The FTC’s Funeral Rule sets out specific obligations for funeral providers. According to the FTC’s business guidance, Complying with the Funeral Rule, a funeral provider must give a General Price List to anyone who asks about funeral arrangements in person, and that includes people asking about arrangements in advance. The guidance also says providers can’t offer only package funerals to people who are planning ahead, and that people who call and ask about prices must be given accurate information from the price lists.
This is general information, not legal advice. The Funeral Rule has more detail than we cover here, and state laws add their own requirements. A funeral home should rely on its own legal counsel and its state licensing board for specifics.
Why does this belong in a relationship strategy? Because trust is the relationship. When a family that was served years ago calls to ask a question about prices, the answer they get either strengthens what the funeral home built or damages it. The session adds a small item to the plan: Every staff member who answers the phone knows where the current price lists are and how to share accurate price information when asked. That’s not marketing. It’s keeping a promise.
The session also looks ahead. The adult children who stood in the back of the room during their parent’s service are the funeral home’s future relationships, whether the funeral home does anything or not.
The plan doesn’t target them with ads. Instead, it focuses on what those adult children experienced during the arrangement. Were they included in conversations? Did they leave with the director’s name and a way to reach them? If their parent had pre-planned, did they know where the documents were?
One simple change comes out of this: at the end of each arrangement, the director offers each adult family member a card with their name and direct line, and a short sentence: “If you ever have a question, about this or anything else, call me.” Some families will never use it. Others will, years later.
These relationships wait until next season, but the session doesn’t ignore them. It writes a short note about what the funeral home will do when it’s ready: a visit to each hospice team to ask what they need, a thank-you note to clergy after each service they lead, and an annual remembrance evening open to the community.
Writing it down now means the owner doesn’t have to start from scratch in six months. It also makes the trade-off visible. These relationships matter. They’re just not first.
Every strategy session should end with a “will not do” list. It’s often more useful than the to-do list.
For this funeral home, the list includes:
The “will not do” list protects the plan from good ideas that would overload a small team.
When the session ends, the owner leaves with a short written package, not a slide deck. For this funeral home, it includes:
It fits on a few pages. Every director gets a copy. The owner keeps one on her desk.
The session also names a few mistakes that are common in businesses with long, infrequent relationships.
Treating every past customer as a lead. A family served five years ago isn’t a prospect. They’re people with a memory of you. Treat them that way.
Letting relationships live in one person’s head. When a trusted director retires, families shouldn’t lose their connection. A shared, simple record of who served whom, and what touches have happened, keeps the relationship with the business.
Planning for the best week. Plans built for quiet weeks collapse in busy ones. Build for the hardest realistic week.
Measuring the wrong thing. If the measure is revenue, the calls will start to sound like sales calls. Measure whether the promise was kept.
Adding channels instead of choosing them. More channels mean more work and more chances to send the wrong message at the wrong time. Fewer, well-chosen channels usually serve people better.
It helps to see the same thinking applied somewhere else. Imagine a small county historical society with a few hundred members, a volunteer board, and a part-time director.
Its relationships are also long. Some members have belonged for decades. Many renew once a year and are rarely seen in between. Like the funeral home, it has a next-generation question: the members’ children may love local history but have never been asked to join.
A strategy session for the historical society would force a similar choice, but the answer might be different. Its priority might be long-time members whose renewals have quietly lapsed. Its capacity limit might be a handful of volunteer hours a month. Its channels might be a printed newsletter, a few phone calls from board members, and an annual members’ evening. Its measure might be whether each lapsed member received a personal contact this season.
The tone would differ, too. A historical society can be cheerful and a little playful in ways a funeral home usually shouldn’t be. But the structure is the same: name the relationships, choose one priority, respect capacity, pick a few channels, and check one or two measures on a schedule.
If you’re planning how to keep long relationships strong, bring:
You don’t need polished materials. You need honest answers.
The woman who walked in on that Tuesday afternoon wasn’t responding to a campaign. She was responding to a phone call nine years earlier, on the anniversary of her husband’s death, from someone who remembered.
A good plan doesn’t make that call mechanical. It makes sure the call happens, for every family, even in a hard week, even after the director who served them has moved on.
If you’d like help building a plan that keeps your relationships strong over time, start a conversation with WeKinnect. Bring your list of the people who matter to your business, and we’ll work through the choices together.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
Written By
Darlene Gagnon is the founder of WeKinnect Global Branding Agency. Guided by the core value of Service before Self, she works with entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses. She focuses especially on restaurants, arts, and travel and tourism. Darlene writes on Branding, Positioning, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations, Storytelling, and Entrepreneurship. WeKinnect serves entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses across restaurants, arts, travel and tourism, banking, home services, nonprofits, and the pet industry, and Darlene brings that same spirit of service to every piece she writes.
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