A profession that got talked into sounding like nobody

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.

The email arrived from a funeral home in the Midwest, forwarded to me by the owner with no note attached, just the subject line: "thoughts?" It was a quarterly newsletter, the kind that goes out to eleven hundred families on a mailing list nobody remembers building. Which is better than nothing, or is it? Because there’s a cost to email even though it’s ‘free.’

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