Week of October 31 to November 6, 2026. Two pu…

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First one: Passare just launched what their CTO Kyle Swearingen says is the first MCP server in the funeral profession. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. The plain-English version is this: it is an open standard that lets an AI tool connect directly to software you already use, with no custom code required for each new connection. So instead of exporting a report or digging through a system manually, you could ask an AI which preneed contracts in your Passare account are still unfunded and get an answer pulled from your actual records. That is the direction this is heading.

Now, let’ me explain exactly what’s happening. This is important…

Right now, the launch is aimed at technology partners and developers building on Passare’s platform. Funeral home owners cannot just flip a switch and have this running by Friday. Think of it as the first door opening, not a finished room. But I am genuinely glad Passare built it, because every vendor that connects their platform to AI tools makes the owner more capable, not more dependent on corporate infrastructure. If your software vendors are not thinking about this, they should be. One question worth asking every vendor you work with: “Do you have an MCP server, or a plan for one?”

Second item: SCI reported preneed funeral sales production up 6 percent in Q3 2026, roughly $19 million. Comparable preneed cemetery sales were up 5 percent, and year-to-date cemetery preneed is running 7.5 percent ahead of last year. Those are company-reported figures. Management says buyers are shifting toward single-pay preneed insurance contracts over multi-pay arrangements, and they read that as strong consumer confidence with no sign of a slowdown.

Here is what SCI says they are doing to drive those numbers: more sales counselors, more seminar and lunch-and-learn activity, targeted marketing, digital lead generation, and a move to guaranteed hourly pay to hold onto their counselors.

Now I want to ask you something directly. Did your preneed numbers move like that?

If production is flat while the largest company in this profession grows it every single quarter, standing still is falling behind. I am not telling you what your numbers look like. I am asking you to find out. Pull the last four quarters of your own preneed production and look at the trend. Then pick one thing to do this month. A seminar. A lunch and learn. A real conversation with every family you served in the last sixty days.

You hold something SCI cannot buy, which is a local name and families who already trust you. That is a real advantage. But trust does not convert without a process behind it.

Here is where the two items connect. SCI is growing preneed with people, events, and systems. Passare is showing us that the systems side of this profession is starting to open up to AI. Owners who build the infrastructure around preneed will have both the data and the process to see their own numbers clearly and act on them. Marketing is infrastructure. It is not a campaign you run once.

Pull those four quarters. Ask your vendors about MCP. Those two moves cost you nothing but attention.

-John

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Oct 27, 2026 · @John Ashworth

The ground is vibrating. Can you feel it?

Day two on the floor at NFDA, and I keep noticing something that I think a lot …

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That answer is the reason Remento exists. And that answer is also the reason I think every pre-need agent and funeral home owner in this country needs to pay attention to what Charlie built.

Here is the core problem in our profession right now. Only about a quarter of people ever pre-plan and fund their funeral. When you ask most people why they haven’t done it, they’ll tell you their kids know what they want, that the family will handle it. They’re not hostile to the idea. They’re just completely uninspired by the conversation we’re inviting them into. Paperwork. Insurance. Lump sum pricing. There is nothing in that list that makes a person feel anything other than mildly uncomfortable and slightly bored. So they put it off, and we let them, and then one day they die without a plan and their family spends the worst two days of their lives making financial decisions while they’re in shock.

Remento changes the entry point to this whole process. Instead of opening with funeral planning, you open with legacy. With stories. With the question of what a person actually wants to leave behind for the people they love.

The way the product works is straightforward and genuinely clever. Once someone starts a Remento project, they receive a storytelling prompt every week, delivered by email, text message, or a regular phone call. They respond by speaking for a few minutes into their phone. No writing required. Remento’s speech-to-story technology then converts those recordings into polished, biographer-quality written stories, preserving the person’s word choices, their vocal patterns, the specific details they chose to share. Those stories accumulate over time and get printed into a hardcover keepsake book, up to 380 pages, complete with photos and, here’s the part that really gets me, QR codes at the top of every chapter that link directly back to the original voice recording. So the book doesn’t just hold the stories. It holds the person’s voice, permanently, for every generation that comes after.

Charlie held up his mom’s book during our conversation. About a hundred pages, eight by ten inches, hardcover. You can run multiple volumes if you need them. The annual cost is ninety-nine dollars. For a family that wanted to hear their grandmother’s voice again, or a grandchild who never got the chance to meet someone, there is no meaningful price on what that book actually is.

The product is built to be collaborative from the start. Family members can join the project, ask their own questions, respond to stories as they come in. One Remento customer told Charlie that her mom’s grandchildren range from four years old to twenty-nine, and each of them is asking completely different things. The four-year-old wants to know what grandma was like in preschool. The twenty-nine-year-old is asking about her marriage, her decision to have kids, what it felt like to raise a family. That range of genuine curiosity coming at a storyteller every week is, according to Charlie, the single most powerful driver of continued engagement. People stop telling their stories when they feel like they’re speaking into a vacuum. Once they realize there is a real audience listening right now, the whole dynamic shifts.

For funeral homes and pre-need agents, the strategic implications here are significant and I do not think most people have fully thought them through yet.

First, there is the front-door problem. Legacy is a conversation people will actually have. Funeral planning is a conversation most people will avoid until they absolutely cannot anymore. If you lead with Remento at a seminar, or offer it as part of a pre-need consultation, or give it as a bonus when someone sets an appointment, you are leading with something that creates genuine emotional engagement. The funeral plan becomes the natural next step in a process they are already invested in, rather than the awkward main event everyone is quietly hoping to skip.

Second, there is the relationship window that almost nobody in this profession is working. Charlie pointed out that the average gap between when someone signs a pre-need contract and when they pass is somewhere between seven and twelve years. That is a long time during which most funeral homes do essentially nothing to maintain the relationship. A person who is actively building their Remento legacy book, whose family members are receiving notifications and responding to stories, whose children and grandchildren are getting drawn into this process, that person becomes an evangelist. When they talk to their friends about it, they are going to talk about where it came from and who helped them understand why it mattered. That is word-of-mouth referral built into the product itself.

Third, Remento works in aftercare. When a family has just lost someone and you introduce the idea of capturing the stories of the people still with them, you are meeting them exactly where they are emotionally. They understand, more acutely than they ever have before, what it means to wish you had someone’s voice one more time. Charlie mentioned that people are paying fifty dollars a month to keep a deceased family member’s phone line active just to call the voicemail. We can do better than that for the people we serve.

The estate planner who approached Charlie after a panel discussion put it well. He said that all the planning they help people do, the financial, the medical, the memorial logistics, is necessary and important. But none of it addresses the question that might matter most: how do you want to be remembered? What is the emotional inheritance you are choosing to leave behind? Remento is the only tool I have found that actually answers that question in a form families can hold in their hands, scan with their phones, and pass down for generations.

Your family does not need to hear you recite the three values that guided your life. They want to know what surprised you on your wedding day. What it felt like to bring your first child home. What was going through your head when you dropped your kid off at college. Those are the stories that make a person real across time. Remento is built to capture exactly those moments, from exactly the people who will never think to write them down on their own.

If you want to talk about how to build Remento into your pre-need process, reach out through the contact links on the podcast. I am building the systems around this and I am glad to walk you through it.

-John

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*note: this was a livestream so start the video at about 2 minutes if you don’t want all the fluff at the beginning and I can almost guarantee you you probably don’t want that fluff. the beef of it begins at ~2m. -John

The noise around AI safety this week is loud enough to drown out the part that actually matters to you. So let me cut straight to what I was working on this morning before I headed out the door.

I was in Claude, working through a proposal. Can’t get into the specifics of what it is, but I can get into what came out of the conversation, because one paragraph Claude produced stopped me mid-read and I just had to share it with you.

Here it is, slightly out of context, but you’ll get enough of it:

“The transparency compounds here too, John. Showing your commission structure openly, while also noting that you initiated this idea rather than responding to a demand, tells this person that what you brought to him is your best read of what his platform actually needs, and that you are willing to stand behind it with visible economics. That combination is harder to manufacture than a polished pitch deck.”

What Claude is describing there is the thing that separates salespeople who consistently build real relationships from the ones who are always starting over. You cannot manufacture earned trust. You can only build it, one honest interaction at a time, by showing up with something real before anyone asks you to.

This is the point I keep coming back to, and it connects directly to something I hear from salespeople in this profession constantly. They know they are good. They know they bring value. But they cannot figure out why the people they are trying to reach keep treating them like just another vendor with a pitch deck. And the answer, most of the time, is that they are leading with the pitch. They are waiting until they are in a room with a prospect to show what they know. They are holding their best thinking hostage until the deal is on the table.

That is backwards.

If you are a unique sales talent, someone who has worked across industries, sold in different environments, read people well, built relationships in places where relationships were not supposed to be built, you already have the raw material. The question is whether you are deploying it every single time you interact with someone, or saving it for the moments when you think it counts.

Every interaction counts. That is the whole thing.

My goal as a salesperson, and this is something I have said for years, is to be one of the best interactions someone has on a given day. That has nothing to do with whether they are going to buy from me. It has to do with whether I showed up with something real, listened enough to understand what they are actually dealing with, and contributed something of genuine value to their situation. If I do that consistently, the sales take care of themselves over time. And if I do not, no pitch deck in the world is going to close the gap.

AI helps me think through this more rigorously than I could on my own. Using it as a 24-7 editor and thought partner, a consultant I can go back and forth with at any hour, has sharpened the way I prepare for conversations, structure proposals, and identify what I am actually trying to accomplish in any given interaction. It is embedded in my workflow now in more ways than I am going to get into here. And I deleted Netflix from my phone and I work on this at night instead.

But the thing Claude said that I keep turning over is that combination of transparency and initiation. Bringing the idea before someone asked for it, and then being willing to stand behind it openly, is what signals to the other person that this is your honest read of their situation. That signal is the hardest thing to fake. And because it is hard to fake, it is the most valuable thing you can build a reputation on.

Bring the insight first. Show the economics. Stand behind your read. That is the pitch deck nobody else is walking in with.

608-845-2252. My desk in Madison. If I’m here, I pick up.

Whole life and final expense sales are up. Way up.

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