The lead sentence read: "As we navigate the ever-changing landscape of end-of-life planning, our team remains committed to serving your family's evolving needs with compassion, dignity, and excellence." I read it again, waiting for it to mean something. It never did.

I've read a version of that sentence probably four hundred times in the last decade, from hundreds of different funeral homes, each one convinced it sounded caring. None of them sound like anything. They sound like every other funeral home, which is the actual crime, because the whole business is built on being trusted enough that a stranger hands you their dead. You don't earn that with landscape and evolving needs. You earn it by being a specific, recognizable, accountable person, and somewhere in the last several years, an entire profession got talked into sanding off exactly the thing that made anyone trust them in the first place. Their unique blend of personality, service and connection.

A marketing guru I’ve followed for 30 years spent a chunk of his July letter on a report that opened with the phrase "Uncertainty Continues Because Of," and he threw the whole thing in the trash after that line. He labeled it AI writing client communications with dumb people checking it, and he wasn't wrong, but he undersold how far it's spread. It isn't just quarterly reports from banks. It's every "your loved one mattered" caption under a stock photo of a sunset. It's every grief-adjacent content calendar some marketing vendor built for a funeral home that has never once sat with a grieving family, generating posts that say nothing to nobody, on a schedule, forever. Noise dressed up as care. No signal.

I know because I've sold the technology that makes it possible. I spent years on the other side of this exact table, in rooms with funeral home owners, selling the very platforms that now auto-generate the sympathy language nobody asked for. I've sold pre-need the old way, sitting across from families with a legal pad and a pen, and I've sold the software that promised to replace that with automation. That's not a confession. That's the vantage point. I know what both rooms sound like, and I can tell you the second room has gotten very good at sounding like the first one without doing any of the work.

Here's what I keep coming back to. Another analogue marketing letter I’ve been reading for the last couple years said more this month than most books on lead generation: your dream customers are twenty times more likely to read a letter from you that they get in the mail than one more email in a pile of hundreds. He built his whole follow-up strategy around a simple idea. Wait until the objection is dead, then reach out as a real person, not a template or automation, a real person reaching out in the telephone. Make the value so obvious that it feels natural instead of pressured. He hides one thing in there that I won't. He tells his prospects it isn't a sales call. It is. I don't apologize for that, and neither should you. The dishonesty isn't in making the call. The dishonesty is pretending it's something else.

So a few weeks ago I put a phone number on the internet. An old landline, the kind that still works when the power's out, sitting at what I've started calling the Johnny Renaissance desk. No texts. Notifications are off on purpose. If you call and I'm there, I pick up. If I'm not, leave your email and I'll send you something worth your time whether we ever do business or not. That's the whole offer. It isn't hidden. It isn't dressed up as anything other than what it is. Me, wanting to talk to you, in exchange for something real.

Twenty-two people saw that post the first hour. Maybe one will ever call. I don't care about the ratio yet. I care about what happens to the profession when every single funeral home in the country starts sounding like the same evolving-needs newsletter, generated by the same tool, saying nothing to the same eleven hundred people who long ago stopped reading it.

That's actually the thing the Independent Funeral Group, based out of Maryville, Tennessee, is trying to hold the line against. Dr. Brad Kuchnicki, their executive director and a licensed funeral director and embalmer with nearly thirty years behind him, has been building a national network of family-owned operators specifically because the alternative to building that network is watching those operators get picked off one by one. SCI doesn't send a newsletter that says nothing. SCI sends a wire transfer, and then another community funeral home becomes a corporate location, and the family that trusted that name for forty years has no idea anything changed until the experience tells them.

The Independent Funeral Group's pitch isn't complicated. Stay independent, stay connected, and stop trying to fight the consolidators alone. Buying resources, continuing education, strategic partnerships. The structure that allows a single-location owner in a mid-size market to compete without having to become something they're not. That's the whole idea. And it matters more right now than it has in a long time, because the consolidation math, three and a half to seven times EBITDA for a well-run community home, is sitting right on top of a profession where thirty-eight percent of independent owner-operators are sixty or older and only twenty-four percent have a documented succession plan. Those numbers don't coexist peacefully. One of them is going to resolve the other.

Somewhere in that inbox is a family that needed one honest sentence from one specific human being, and got landscape and dignity and excellence instead. The funeral homes that are going to be standing in ten years are the ones that figured out what made them specific and then refused to sand it off, the ones that built real relationships in real communities, and the ones that had the structural support to stay in the fights when the offer from the consolidator came in looking like the only option.

The phone number works. That's the whole point of it. It's not a funnel or a campaign. It's a door, and it's open, and my name is on it.

-John Ashworth

608-845-2252

**For Independent Funeral Home Owners | Today's Intelligence**

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## LEAD STORY

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I am sitting across from a funeral home owner on an idle Tuesday afternoon. He has invited me in for what he thinks is a short conversation. Business is fine, he says, mostly. He has a marketing partner. That partner placed an agent with him a few years ago and he shows up a few times a week to write business. The agent produces. Numbers move, technically, in the right direction. But the owner has that feeling he cannot quite name, the one that shows up before the rational one does. His agent is here, physically, and somewhere else the rest of the time.

I try to tell him what I think is happening. I can see him not listening, not because he disagrees but because he has heard this before, from the last person, and the person before that. He has been burned by guys like me too many times. He’s likely being burned now. I am just the next guy holding a torch, walking toward a wound he has already decided is not worth reopening.

We finish the conversation. Nothing is decided. Two months later I hear that nothing has changed. The agent is still a few days a week. The owner is still unhappy in that specific, low grade way that never quite reaches the threshold of action. He is not stupid and he is not stuck out of laziness. He has simply run the math the way all of us run it without meaning to. The pain of staying the same is still less than the pain of change. So he stays.

This is not a story about one owner. It is the story of most pre-need programs in this country, sputtering well below what they could be, propped up by a rotation of agents who never really belonged to the funeral home in the first place.

Here is the part almost nobody says out loud. When a marketing firm places an agent in your building, that agent was trained by a carrier, incentivized by a carrier, and will be loyal to that carrier’s commission structure long before they are loyal to you or your community. You are renting a body. For a while the rental looks like a solution. The numbers move. Then they stop moving, or they move less, and you are left wondering, again, why a program with this much potential keeps sputtering, why this agent never seemed attached to your families the way you are, why replacing one underperformer with the next just produces the same result on a delay.

The instinct at that point is almost always the same. Find another agent. Call another firm. Go back to the bandage cabinet, because the wound is right there and it looks urgent and a bandage is fast. But a bandage over an open wound does not heal anything. It just hides the infection from view while it keeps oozing underneath. You have to actually clean the wound out and build a sterile zone before anything put on top of it will hold.

There are four places this wound tends to live. Most funeral homes have only ever looked at one of them, and usually not even that one closely.

The first is who you are actually talking to. Most businesses never examine this box because it feels presumed. Families come to you at their time of need, your reputation is intact, so the thinking stops there. But not all prospects are created equal, and the gap is not subtle. A healthy fifty five year old who says maybe someday is a different problem than a seventy two year old widow who already knows she does not want her kids dealing with any of this. The second one is ready. She is, in fact, where most of your walk in business already comes from, and if your marketing has never separated her from the fifty five year old, you have been spending the same effort on two completely different people and calling it one strategy.

The second box is the attitude of the salesperson, and this is the one people underestimate the most because it looks soft next to numbers and scripts. Sales is a transfer of belief. If the person sitting across the table does not believe, in the product, in the necessity, in the value of what they are offering, the family will feel that absence before a single objection gets raised. An agent who is convinced the product is too expensive, or who needs to cram every family into a multi pay plan to hit a commission number, is not failing at technique. They are transferring their own doubt, and no script fixes that, because the problem was never the script.

The third box is the selling environment, and this is the one owners hand off without realizing they are handing off control. The environment is not just where the meeting happens, though that matters too, whether it is a living room, an arrangement office, a phone call, or increasingly a Zoom meeting that more families are choosing than most funeral homes have prepared for. The environment is also the sequence. Whether the appointment was set with intention or stumbled into. Whether the family arrived educated, having already received material that prepared them for the conversation, or arrived cold and had to be talked into caring in real time. If you let the prospect, or the agent, dictate the conditions of that environment instead of controlling it yourself, you lose the thing that was never visible on a spreadsheet but decided the outcome anyway.

The fourth box is the skill of the salesperson, and it is the box that gets all the attention because it is the only one most owners think to look at. If I could just find a great agent, the thinking goes, everything would be fine. But great agents are rare, expensive in ways beyond salary, and often unwilling to work inside anyone’s system but their own. The more talented they are, the more true this becomes, and the more your entire program depends on one person’s mood, health, and willingness to stay. That is not a program. That is a bet, dressed up as a strategy.

The reason so many pre-need programs sputter despite real potential is that owners keep treating box four as if it were the only box, and keep renting the solution instead of owning it. A marketing firm that places you a good agent has, at best, patched one corner of a four sided problem. The other three corners keep leaking, and eventually the fourth one does too, because a talented agent operating inside an unaddressed environment, in front of the wrong prospects, without the belief to carry them through, will burn out or wander off no matter how gifted they are.

Fix all four boxes and something different happens. Not just better numbers, though those come. You create what I think of as a vacuum, a pull that starts drawing families, referrals, and momentum toward you instead of you chasing all of it uphill. Who you talk to, how your salespeople think and carry themselves, the environment you control instead of surrender, and the skills you build into a system instead of praying for in a person. That is the whole program, not one quarter of it.

I think about that owner from the idle Tuesday afternoon sometimes. He was not wrong to be skeptical of me. He had earned that skepticism honestly, one burned relationship at a time. But skepticism of the next agent is not the same thing as skepticism of the next system, and until an owner sees the difference, he will keep doing the math that says staying the same hurts less than changing. It does, right up until the moment it doesn’t, and by then the wound has usually been open a lot longer than anyone wanted to admit.

-johnny renaissance

There is a pool filter across the street from my house. It sits behind the apartment complex, runs most of the day, and gives off a high pitched whine that bothers me a lot more than anyone else in m…

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Six minutes of film. More than thirty celebrities. Ronaldo, Mbappé, Haaland, Kim Kardashian, LeBron, Channing Tatum, all sharing the same fake movie set. Trade press mostly loved it. Craft, ambition, easter eggs everywhere.

I watched the full film, not just the 30 to 60 second cuts running on TV. Those short clips are where most people are actually meeting this campaign, and out of context they land confusing. The full version gives you more to work with. But I played this game at an All American level and have loved it my whole life, and even with the full context, the film runs long and falls flat. Good, not great. That gap between the craft everyone is praising and how it actually feels to watch is the real story here.

Look past the reviews and the bigger picture is simple. This is not a brand flexing creative muscle. This is a company that cannot afford to miss, betting enormous money and creative capital to manufacture the cultural relevance it used to generate on its own.

The Jordan brand just dropped 16% in a year. Nike’s stock is down from $170 in 2021 to $46 now. When a company that size builds a six minute film with thirty stars and calls it a universe, that is not confidence talking. That is a company trying to buy back something it lost.

To me, that is exactly why it eventually reads as hollow and confusing, cut down for TV or not. Not because the film is poorly made. Because the risk shows through. When you go all in like that, the audience can feel it, the same way you can feel it across a poker table when someone pushes every chip in. Confidence does not need thirty celebrities to prove itself. Only urgency does.

I see the same pattern in deathcare. If you are a funeral home still relying on old channels, you are facing a smaller version of Nike’s problem. Even the stuff that is working right now, like seminars, is showing real signs of decay around the edges. The market never holds still, and you cannot get comfortable. If your preneed program has been stuck in the same mode for a decade, or even the last few years, that is worth a hard look. The longer you wait to evolve, the bigger the bet you eventually have to make to catch back up, and big bets read as desperation, not strength.

I watched a version of this play out early in my career. I worked for a technology company in this space that had real marketing instincts, before private equity took it over. I am not ready to name the company yet, but what replaced those instincts was a team more interested in looking clever than being useful, and a lot more interested in the balance sheet than the actual problems customers had. Same pattern as Nike, just smaller stakes. Substance gets traded for style, and eventually the audience feels it even when they cannot name it.

Marketing does not fail because a brand stops trying. It fails when a brand starts performing instead of building.

This is good news for funeral homes, because the good ones are already built on authenticity, connection, relationships, and trust. Those things do not go out of style, and they do not require a Hollywood budget to prove themselves. The work is making sure your market keeps receiving that message, which means steadily innovating your channels and your strategy long before you are ever forced into an all in bet just to stay in the game.

And her current insurance carrier? Completely ignoring her. Too small to matter to them.

Here’s what I told her…

Forget the magic systems. Forget the experts trying to sell you on their one weird trick. Keep everything you’re doing exactly the same. Just double your list.

That’s where it starts.

Most pre-need programs aren’t struggling because the market dried up. They’re struggling because there’s no list worth talking about, no CRM keeping track of it, no touch points, no broadcast email going out, no content, no system. The infrastructure is missing. And without the infrastructure, doubling your revenue is just a wish.

You don’t build the infrastructure all at once either. I spent the first half of my career as a health coach and clinical exercise physiologist. I never took someone from the couch to the best shape of their life in a single session. You take one step at a time. One year at a time when you have to.

For a pre-need program, step one is simple. Make doubling your list the initiative for the rest of this year. Just that. Build the list. Then send one broadcast email about something provocative related to funeral planning. See what happens. You’ll be surprised.

Everything else follows from there.

If you’re a smaller independent firm getting ignored by the big carriers, I built what I’m building specifically for you. Full podcast episode is at theashflash.com.

Johnny Renaissance

#PreNeed #FuneralHome #FuneralIndustry #DeathCare #CommandPreneedOps

There’s a difference, and most funeral home owners haven’t stopped long enough to feel it.

I had some PTO last week. I spent the afternoon thinking strategically about what’s in front of me. No calls, no interruptions, no reactive noise. Just space to think. And what happened in that afternoon was worth more than most full weeks of grinding.

I’m not bragging, either. That’s a warning.

Because most of the owners I’m sitting across from right now while I’m in the field, walking through cold doors, driving windy roads and eating the fast-food, haven’t had that afternoon. Some haven’t had that hour. Some, if they’re honest with themselves, aren’t sure they’ve ever truly had it.

I get it. The funeral profession is uniquely unforgiving in this regard. You don’t choose when the phone rings. A death call arrives and everything stops, no matter what. I have genuine respect for that reality. But I’m not going to pander to it the way everybody else does.

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Because that constant reactive state? That’s exactly why so many independent funeral homes are losing ground right now.

Not because you’re lazy. You’re not. You’re exhausted. But exhausted and strategic are two very different things.

The Problem Isn’t Time

Most people think they have a time problem. They don’t. They have a planning problem, which is really a space problem.

You can’t add hours to the day. That’s obvious. But you absolutely can create more space inside the hours you already have. Delegating. Blocking. Protecting. Building an environment that guards your most important work instead of constantly pulling you away from it.

My current practice: laptop opens first, before the phone. That’s it. That one rule means my best creative hours go to the work that matters most, before the noise of the day has a chance to crowd it out.

Simple. Almost embarrassingly simple. But the discipline to actually do it is where most people fall apart.

The framework I’ve been talking about and what I like call the Time Integrity Code starts with two questions.

Point A: Where are you right now? Point B: Where do you want to go?

The gap between knowing those two things and actually building a path between them is where most funeral home owners are stuck. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of them are too busy to stop long enough to realize it.

Here’s Where Pre-Need Fits

I want to connect this to the most important strategic conversation in independent funeral home ownership right now.

Because every owner I’ve described…the one running on fumes, the one who hasn’t had a real strategic hour in months? That owner doesn’t have a pre-need problem. They have a time problem. Which is a planning problem. Which is a space problem.

And because they never solve the space problem, pre-need stays exactly where it is: a side hustle. Commission income that shows up occasionally when a counselor writes a few contracts. Something that generates some revenue, maybe, but it’s not a priority, not a system, certainly not infrastructure.

For a long time, that was fine. The at-need volume was enough. The community trusted you.

That window is closing.

The consolidators aren’t figuring this out. They figured it out a long time ago. They’re in your market right now executing on it. And the independent funeral homes that treat pre-need as incidental commission work are handing those consolidators a competitive advantage every single day.

When you build a real pre-need program that is systematic, consistent, and running whether you’re in the building or not, you are building something with real balance sheet value. Contractually secured future revenue. Relationships deepened before families need you at their worst moments.

That is working on your business. That is exactly the kind of strategic activity that gets crowded out when you’re buried in reactive day-to-day.

A Word on Who I Work With

I want to be direct, because I only want to work with owners who actually get this.

Not because I’m being exclusive for the sake of it. But because the work I do requires a partner who understands what we’re building together. If pre-need is about commission checks and you’re satisfied with that framing, I’m probably not the right guy for you. And that’s okay.

But if you’re sitting there thinking,

“I know there’s more here. I can feel it. My pre-need program has more potential than performance. The families I serve deserve better access to planning and I’m not giving it to them the way I should be.”

If that’s you, we should talk.

The owners I love working with see pre-need for what it is: a long-term investment in the business they’ve spent their lifetime building. They want a program that runs with consistency and produces real results. They’re willing to partner with someone who has built that infrastructure and can bring it to their market.

That’s what CommandPreneedOps does. That’s what I do.

The Five-Year Clock

The owners who carve out the space to think strategically and act on it now are the ones who will look back in five years and be grateful they did.

Five years is about how much time I think you have. Maybe less.

The market isn’t going to wait. AI is not going to wait. The change that’s coming is not going to wait. And most of you are too good at what you do to let the reactive day-to-day steal that window from you.

Stop. Look at your Point A. Get honest about your Point B. And start making decisions about where your time and energy actually go.

Go build something.

— Johnny Renaissance

Subscribe to the Ash Flash at theashflash.com. Real talk, field observations, market intelligence you’re not going to find anywhere else.

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Apple and Intel had reached a preliminary chip-making deal. Intel’s stock close…

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He told me they’re doing four months worth of platform development in two weeks. Directly because of AI.

Let that sink in.

Four months. Two weeks.

That’s a signal. And if you’re a funeral home owner and you’re not picking up on it yet, this post is for you.

Your website was never just a website.

When I first got to Frasier Consultants, I called it what it actually was — online real estate. Not a brochure. Not a digital business card. Real estate. Something you own, something you build equity in, something that works for you when you’re not in the room.

That framing was true then. It’s more true now. Because everything that platform touches — your marketing, your lead generation, your preneed program, your ability to connect with families before a death call ever comes in — all of it runs through that digital foundation. And the ground beneath it is shifting fast.

The fear narrative is a distraction.

The media has one gear when it comes to AI: fear. AI is taking jobs. AI is replacing people. AI is the end of everything.

Some of that will prove true in some corners. I won’t pretend otherwise.

But the fuller story…the one the reports are actually telling, is that AI is going to create more opportunity than it destroys. More jobs. More leverage. More ways to build something that actually scales and produced more growth. In your business. Inside your career. And in the economy itself. I mean that’s already happening.

The funeral homes paying attention right now are going to have an enormous advantage over the ones who waited for permission to act.

The danger isn’t the technology. It’s the wrong partner.

Here’s where I want to slow down, because this is important.

There are a lot of people selling AI solutions right now. Some of them know what they’re doing. Many of them don’t. The space is full of noise, and making the wrong call here doesn’t just cost you money, it costs you time, it costs you momentum, and it can genuinely set your operation backwards.

You need someone who understands the death care profession. Who understands preneed. Who understands what it actually takes to drive growth inside a funeral home and build the kind of systems that produce consistent results.

Not a generalist with a deck. A partner with context and a track record.

What I’m seeing in the field.

Some of the accounts I’ve taken on over the last year and a half, two years — their growth has been real. The work has been real. And a big part of that growth has come from building the right technology foundation underneath everything else.

Lead generation systems. Marketing infrastructure. Appointment setting. Preneed program development. All of it connected. All of it working together.

That’s what’s available to you right now. That’s what’s possible.

But you have to start somewhere.

The move.

If you’re sitting on this and thinking about it, knowing you need to do something, just not sure what the next step looks like, that’s exactly the conversation I want to have with you.

Send me a DM over on LinkedIn. And I’ll keep dropping content here on the ash flash as it develops.

More podcasts are coming on this subject soon. This one was just the opening shot.

Don’t wait on this.

-Johnny Renaissance
theashflash.com

#PreNeed #FuneralHome #DeathCare #FuneralIndustry #CommandPreneedOps

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You have a space problem. And until you understand the difference, no productivity app, no morning routine, no motivational quote pinned above your desk is going to save you.

Here’s what I mean.

Most people…funeral home owners, preneed agents, directors wearing seventeen hats, spend their days convinced that more time is the answer. If I just had one more hour. One more day. One less fire to put out. But time really isn’t the constraint. Space is. The mental and operational space to actually pursue what matters. Most people don’t have a shortage of hours. They have a shortage of intention about what those hours are for.

We all get the same 24. That’s not a motivational slogan. That’s math. What separates the people who build something remarkable from the ones who stay perpetually busy and perpetually stuck isn’t access to more hours. It’s what they do with the ones they already have.

And in this business especially, where death calls don’t ask for your digital calendar link, where families show up in crisis without warning, where the at-need world can flip your day upside down before your coffee gets cold, the temptation to just react is overwhelming. Most days it wins.

But here’s the shift I want you to make. Stop jumping into your day as a responder. Start entering it as a builder.

That’s the foundation of what I like call the Time Integrity Code.

It starts with two questions. They sound almost embarrassingly simple. But simple isn’t the same as easy, and the gap between knowing something and actually doing it is where most ambitions go to die.

Point A: Where am I right now? Point B: Where do I want to go?

If you can’t answer both of those clearly, you’re not managing time. You’re just spending it. And like any currency you spend without a budget, it disappears faster than you think and you have very little to show for it at the end of the day.

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” That quote has been attributed to everyone from Lewis Carroll to Yogi Berra. Doesn’t matter who said it. It’s true. And in the context of building a preneed program, growing a funeral home, or trying to actually lead an operation instead of just survive one, it’s critical.

Busy does not equal productive. Write that somewhere. Say it out loud if you have to. Busy is easy. Productive is hard. And in this industry, we have an almost pathological attachment to being busy, as if the busyness itself is proof of value. It’s not. It’s often just proof of poor systems and an inability to protect your time from people who haven’t learned to protect their own.

So where do you start? The same place every good system starts. With data.

Spend one week — just one — tracking where your time actually goes. Every hour. Every task. Every interruption. You will be uncomfortable with what you find. I promise you that. The emails, the scrolling, the meetings that didn’t need to happen, the “got a minute” ambushes that somehow ate forty-five minutes of your morning before you even had a chance to think.

Chet Holmes wrote about this. The “got a minute” meeting is one of the most destructive forces in any business. Your staff, your colleagues, your well-meaning acquaintances…they are happy to spend your time. They don’t mean harm by it. But harm is what it does.

My answer to “Got a minute, John?” is no. Get your thoughts organized. Put something on my calendar when there’s an opening. Come ready to work. Gary V put it more bluntly, “I don’t want to eat bagels for fifteen minutes before we get to the point. Let’s just get to the point.”

That sounds harsh. It isn’t. It’s respect for your time, for their time, and for the work that actually needs to get done.

Once you’ve tracked a week honestly, plan with intention. Every hour. Yes, even your relaxation time. This isn’t rigidity. It’s awareness. When you assign a purpose to a block of time, you change your relationship to it. You stop drifting into it and you start showing up for it. Work time, rest, family, business development, spiritual practice, and learning — all of it earns a block. All of it matters. And when you can see it mapped out, you can also see where you’ve been lying to yourself about priorities.

Then build in flex. Murphy was right. Things go sideways. In funeral service, they go sideways more than in most industries. Think of flex time like the shoulder of a highway. It’s there when you need it, but it doesn’t slow down the main flow of traffic. You can use it strategically when you need to. Block ten to twenty percent of your day for the unexpected. On some days, especially in this business, it’ll eat more than that. When it does, get back on track as fast as you can. Follow the money. Follow your Point B.

There’s a trap that catches most people right around the time they start to get things under control. It’s the productivity trap, and it’s seductive because it feels like progress.

You can answer every email. Attend every meeting. Check every box on your to-do list. And still end the day having moved nothing meaningful forward. That’s not productivity. That’s performance. You performed busy. You didn’t build anything.

The question worth asking every single morning is this: what is the one thing I can do today that will have the biggest impact on where I’m trying to go? Not the five things. Not the ten. The one. Do that first. Everything else lines up behind it.

Most of us can genuinely focus on three to five real priorities in a day. Beyond that, everything else is noise. It competes for attention and it usually wins, because distractions are engineered to be compelling and our goals require something distractions don’t. That’s called discipline.

That sixth thing will always feel justified. It might be a long-standing client who needs something. A colleague with a request. An opportunity that feels urgent. It could be anything. But it’s the thing you have to learn to ignore. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because you’ve already committed to what matters more.

When you protect that space, you get the time back. When you don’t, it’s gone and you feel the weight of it at the end of every week, wondering where everything went.

Warren Buffett doesn’t spend time on his second tier. He’s famous for this. Twenty-five goals, circle your top five, avoid everything else like the plague. Ruthless? Absolutely. But Buffett didn’t build what he built by being agreeable with distractions.

Technology belongs in this conversation, and I want to be direct about it.

It can be your greatest asset or your biggest enemy. Your phone is the most powerful distraction delivery system ever created. If it buzzes every five minutes, you are not in control of your day, your notifications are. Turn off what doesn’t need your immediate attention. Treat your calendar like appointments with your most important client, because that’s what they are. Automate what’s repetitive so your brain isn’t burning energy on tasks that don’t require it. And find a system to organize what you’re building.

I use Notion. I couldn’t run what I run without it. The more preneed partners I take on, the more I need a single place where everything lives and nothing gets lost. If you’re a smaller funeral home sitting on the fence about a full case management platform, before you make that leap, try Notion. You might find it’s all you need to get organized and start moving.

So let me bring this back to where we started.

You don’t have a time problem. You have a space problem. And space isn’t created by working harder or finding extra hours. It’s created by getting ruthlessly honest about Point A, crystal clear on Point B, and building the structure between them with real intention.

A good plan today beats a perfect plan tomorrow. I know how that sounds. A little cheesy, maybe. But the truth embedded in it is real. Perfect is always the enemy of done. And done…actually moving, actually building, actually getting somewhere…is what creates the compounding results that change a business.

What’s your Point B?

If you’re still figuring that out, or you know where you want to go but the system isn’t there yet, that’s exactly what I built Think Different for. The digital copy drops at the end of this week. Everything I’ve put into the CommandPreneed Ops framework, the preneed infrastructure, the marketing and sales systems…it’s all in there.

Subscribe to theashflash.com; and I’ll send you an email with the link where you can download it. Get on the list. Be there when it lands.

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— Johnny Renaissance

by john ashworth

Barron’s ran a piece this week with a headline that should stop every business owner cold: U.S. Companies Have A New Speaking Styl…

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Nobody’s talking about infrastructure.

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I was digging into what Canva is doing with their AI Vision event in New York this week. Big room. Heavy hitters were there. O…

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My son Carl and I keep coming back to the same conversation.

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And as I’m cruising through Illinois, what am I thinking about?

Sales. Obviously. 🤓

Because over the last month I have run into an almost comical parade of bad salespeople. And before you hit me with the AI is going to replace everyone speech, let me stop you right there. You would not say that if you had spent time in the field lately. You would not say that if you’d watched a real salesperson walk into a room, read it in about 30 seconds, and walk out with a signed deal and a customer who is already planning to refer their friends.

AI is not doing that. Not today. Not ever, if we’re being honest about what sales actually is.

The Real Job

Here’s what I believe about sales, and I’ve believed this for a long time.

Every single day, as a salesperson, you have the opportunity to create the best interaction another person has had all day. That’s the job. That’s the whole job. Not the close, not the commission, not the quota. The connection.

People are terrible listeners. That is not a cynical observation, that is just the truth. Most people in any conversation are waiting to talk, not actually hearing what’s in front of them. As a salesperson, that is your competitive advantage. Shut up. Listen. Actually hear what the person across from you is telling you. Pick your moments. Let them talk. Most of the time, the sale is sitting right there in what they just said, if you were paying attention.

My late friend Eric used to say, John, you could sell anything. He was right. And the reason isn’t some magic trick or a silver tongue. It’s because I genuinely want to know what’s going on with you. What do you need? What are you worried about? What would make your life better right now? If you can get to that, you can sell anything to anyone.

The Commission-Only Crucible

I spent about 25 years in health and fitness. Clinical exercise physiologist, master’s degree, the whole thing. I was good at it. I was also burning out, and I knew I wasn’t doing it until I was 80. I’m going to work until I’m 80, but it was not going to be that.

So when we bought a Toyota Highlander from Smart Toyota here in Madison, and the experience was genuinely excellent, I thought to myself, I want to be inside that system. I want to learn how this works. So I went and sold cars. And then I moved to Lexus of Madison, where I spent three years learning things about people, about selling, and about myself that I could not have learned any other way.

The other day I was talking to a young guy who was thinking about getting into car sales. I told him something that stopped him cold. I said: every single person, you included, should have to go work 100% commission for at least a year or two.

He looked at me like I’d told him to jump off a bridge.

I meant every word of it.

Because here’s what 100% commission does to you. It removes the safety net. When you have to sell in order to eat, you get serious about selling. You stop overthinking the approach and start actually engaging. You get your nose bloodied. You feel like you got beat up on the drive home. You come back the next morning anyway.

Picture this. It’s the last day of the month. You need 10 cars to hit the bonus. You’re sitting at 9. You’ve got 8 to 12 hours, no prospects on the books, and the whole thing rides on what happens today. That is pressure that will either crack you or forge you. There is no in-between.

I came out the other side of four years in car sales saying it was the best part of my career. Not in spite of how hard it was. Because of it.

You’re Already Selling

Here’s what I want you to take away from all of this.

You are already a salesperson. All of us are. You sell your way into jobs. You sell your way into relationships. You sell ideas to your team, your partners, your kids. The question isn’t whether you’re selling. The question is whether you’re any good at it.

And if you’re not working on it, you’re not getting better at it. It’s a skill. It sharpens with practice and attention. Most people treat it like a personality trait you either have or you don’t. That’s wrong. I’ve watched people transform themselves into genuinely great salespeople because they decided to take it seriously and actually do the work.

You don’t have to be as obsessed as I am. Most people aren’t, and that’s fine. But you cannot ignore it and expect to advance. You cannot sidestep it and expect to build the career or the life you actually want.

AI is not coming for the great salespeople. If anything, it’s going to make them more valuable, because when everything is automated and commoditized and delivered through a screen, the person who can sit across from someone, actually listen, and build a real connection is going to stand out like a searchlight.

That person can be you.

Go sell something today.

johnny renaissance

Campaigns. Postcards. Facebook ads.

All surface level stuff.

And I get it, because that’s where the visible problems are. Leads aren’t coming in. Pre-need contracts aren’t getting signed. So you go looking for the next campaign, the next vendor promise, the next silver bullet.

But the real opportunity isn’t up there.

It’s in the foundation underneath it.

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Why Pre-Need Keeps Feeling Unfulfilling

Here’s the pattern I see over and over again.

You bring in a pre-need vendor. They make big promises. Things start okay. And then slowly, quietly, the results fall short. Again.

And you’re left wondering why.

It’s not always the vendor’s fault. The real problem is that nobody, not the vendor, not you, not your team ever built the infrastructure that needs to exist underneath the program.

Without that foundation, every campaign you run is just noise. Expensive, exhausting noise. Sure, you’ll produce some sales, but you’ll never have the system you need to crush it.

The Information Is Already There. It’s Just Stuck.

Here’s what’s wild about most funeral homes I work with.

The foundation already exists.

It’s just locked inside the heads of the owner, the funeral director who’s been there 25 years, the office manager who knows every family by name. It lives in Excel spreadsheets, in filing cabinets, in someone’s memory.

And when that person walks out the door? So does everything they know.

That’s the real crisis. Not your Facebook ad performance.

The Questions Your System Should Be Able to Answer

When you build the right infrastructure, something powerful starts to happen.

You can suddenly answer questions like:

• Who in this community has shown interest in funeral planning at our funeral home, and when?

• Who attended a seminar three years ago, and why didn’t they fund their pre-need contract at that time?

• Who downloaded a planning guide, and when?

• Who should hear from us this month, and how?

• Who is connected to which families?

When you can answer those questions, marketing stops feeling like promotion.

It starts feeling like stewardship.

That’s not a small shift. That’s everything.

This Is Where AI Actually Makes Sense for Your Funeral Home

Everyone’s using the obituary writing tools. A lot of you are using ChatGPT or Claude for your own writing and thinking.

But the question I keep getting is: What should I actually be working on, John? What’s going to make the biggest difference for my funeral home?

Here’s my answer.

Build the database first.

Not the website. Not the new case management platform. Not the pre-need automation tool you saw at the convention.

The database. The vault. The library of everything you know about your community, your families, your history, your relationships.

Because once that infrastructure is in place? AI becomes a multiplier. Without it, AI is just another shiny object.

The Problem With Outsourcing Your Pre-Need Program

There are companies that will take control of your pre-need program and run it for you. And honestly? They can be effective.

But ask yourself this: how does that secure the future of your funeral home?

You get the contracts. You get the future business.

But you miss the larger opportunity of building an infrastructure that gives you leverage and independence as the industry changes. And it is going to change. Drastically. Faster than most people are ready for.

The funeral homes that are going to win aren’t the ones that outsourced everything and hoped for the best.

They’re the ones who took the time to build the foundation.

Start Here

Your database matters right now.

Not someday. Not after you figure out the tech stack. Not once you’re less busy.

Right now.

Start getting what’s in people’s heads into organized systems. Excel spreadsheets, a simple CRM, Notion — I don’t care what you use to start. Just start.

Because the first step in taking advantage of AI for your funeral home isn’t buying a new tool.

It’s building something worth connecting a tool to.

If you’re not working on this yet, reach out. And make sure you’re subscribed here on The Ash Flash. The book is coming, the frameworks are going in it, and subscribers get first access.

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John Ashworth — Johnny Renaissance — Pre-Need Growth Expert

https://sendfox.com/johnashworth

Good morning. Grab your coffee. I want to talk to you about something that landed in Barron’s this week that most people will skim past — and shouldn’t.

The headline is about utilities. Stick with me.

Right now, as we sit here on a Sunday morning, the data centers already under construction in this country will eventually consume as much electricity as the entire nation of Italy. Not someday in some speculative future. Already permitted, already being built, already drawing power. One campus can pull 50 to 100 times the electricity of the Empire State Building.

That’s not a tech story. That’s a civilization-scale infrastructure story.

And here’s where it gets interesting. The companies running those data centers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta — are signing 10, 12, 15-year contracts with utility companies that most people have never heard of. NiSource. Entergy. Idacorp. Quiet companies in Indiana and Louisiana and Idaho that are now locking in a decade of cash flow from the biggest corporations on earth.

The Edison Electric Institute projects $1.1 trillion in utility capital spending between 2025 and 2029. Nearly double the pace of the prior decade.

Politically, tech is becoming the villain. Residential electric bills are up more than 30% since 2020. State legislatures are debating bills to stop new data centers from being built. Bernie Sanders wants a national moratorium. Trump promised to cut electricity costs in half in his first year. Bills went up 6.3% instead.

So there’s noise. There’s blame. There’s an election cycle worth of finger-pointing.

But underneath all of that noise is a simple, uncomfortable truth: the infrastructure required to run artificial intelligence at scale is being built right now, the contracts are being signed right now, and the bill — for consumers, for communities, for small businesses — is coming due whether anyone is paying attention or not.

And that brings me to you.

Because here’s the thing about infrastructure. It doesn’t wait for you to feel ready. It doesn’t pause while you finish your busy season or wait until you’ve had time to research your options. It compounds. It accelerates. And the gap between the people who are positioned early and the people who are still deciding — that gap widens every single day.

I’m talking directly to funeral home owners right now. Because I know this world. I know how busy you are. I know how much is already on your plate. And I know that AI can feel like one more thing somebody is trying to sell you that you don’t have time to figure out.

But here’s what I also know. The funeral homes that figure this out first — even in small, simple ways — are going to have a real and growing advantage over the ones that don’t. Not because AI is magic. Because leverage is real. And right now, simple AI applications can give a small team the output of a much larger one.

You don’t need a tech department. You don’t need a massive budget. You need a conversation.

If you’re a funeral home owner and you’re curious — not convinced, just curious — about where to even start, reach out to me directly. We’ll have a simple, no-pressure conversation about what’s actually practical for a business like yours right now. No jargon. No pitch. Just an honest look at where a little strategic thinking could start paying off quickly.

Find me at sendfox.com/johnashworth. Drop your name and email and I’ll reach out personally. The conversation costs you nothing. Waiting costs you more than you think.

This is Johnny Renaissance. Think bigger. Move smarter. Have a great Sunday.

I was talking with Welton Hong recently — CEO of Ring Ring Marketing and one of the sharpest digital minds in death care. He said something I want you to sit with.

“There’s no more excuse for not knowing how to write great content. You’ve got AI to write it for you.”

He’s right. And it stings a little because the excuse was always a good one. Writing is hard. Good copy is harder. And funeral home owners are already stretched thin.

But that excuse is gone now.

You can open an AI tool today, paste in what’s on your homepage, tell it how you’re different, and ask it to rewrite the whole thing. Takes 10 minutes. Costs nothing.

The question now isn’t can you do it.

It’s whether you will.

And before you go objecting to this idea on merit because you believe that’s cheating or AI writing for you is wrong, or more likely, AI writing doesn’t sound like me, please understand that’s not what I’m saying.

What I’m saying is that AI is your go to 24/7 copy editor and the more time you put into it, the stronger it’s work becomes.

The more time you put in, the more it sounds like you.

And the more time you put in, the more you will begin to understand the reality of something I just read yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, in an article titled, How Staying Small Became AI Startups’ Top Flex. Yes, there is a growing list of Silicon Valley startups that detailes how these companies are taking people like you who are extremely productive already, who then become insanely productive with the help of AI.

-John

PS. For all you salespeople out there like me, one of the other important points made in this article was the fact that while these startups are hiring less people in every department, the only department they are still constantlyh working to buil-up is…you guessed it, sales. Why? Because they understand that you need actual people to build those realtionships, execute those deals, and stay on top of the close…I’ve got more coming on this idea in the next few posts.