One question you can answer from your own books right now: how many preneed contracts did you write last year, and how many at-need calls did you serve? Divide the first number by the second. If the result is below 1.0, your program is not keeping pace with your own volume.
What is your number?
A general manager in North Carolina told me something recently that surprised me. He estimates about nine in ten people living in his community are not from there. They moved in from somewhere else. They have no grandmother who was buried by the local funeral home, no uncle who served on the town council with the owner’s father. They have no affiliation at all. He said it plainly, the way someone says something after they have already absorbed the full weight of it.
That number is his estimate, drawn from what he sees every day in his community. I am not going to treat it as a census figure. But even if the real number is six in ten, or seven, the argument holds. A funeral home built on affinity is built on a population that, in a growing share of American communities, has already left.
Most funeral homes in this country still operate on the assumption that the family will call the name they have always known. That assumption was reasonable when communities stayed put. When the same families lived in the same houses for three generations, when the grandchildren of the people you buried still went to the same church and coached the same youth baseball teams, affinity was a business model. It is still a business model in some places. But in a community where nine in ten residents moved there from somewhere else, it describes a market that no longer exists.
The GM has changed how he operates because of that reality. He is building relationships with people who have never heard his name, people who arrived last year or three years ago and have not yet given a single thought to which funeral home they would call. He has accepted that nobody in town is waiting to be asked.
He is not alone in facing this, but he may be ahead of most of his peers in recognizing it.
The competitive environment is shifting in ways that make the affinity assumption more dangerous.
North Carolina law now defines a branch establishment as an ancillary facility of a principal funeral establishment, and a single manager can oversee multiple establishments within fifty miles of the principal location. Larger operators read that kind of regulatory language and start running spreadsheets. They are already doing it. They pull demographic data on where new residents are settling, what income brackets they fall into, and how to reach them before a local independent ever introduces itself. The independent funeral home counting on name recognition with a population that arrived from Ohio or New Jersey two years ago is competing against organizations that have already mapped that population and begun building toward it.
I have been watching this play out with a specific owner I know, and it is a harder story to tell because I like the man. He writes for a traditional insurance carrier. He is planning to pass the business on to his son. He has three locations in Illinois, and when we first connected I was genuinely excited to talk with him because he is using technology in many of the ways I promote. Gather, digital tools, the kind of forward-thinking infrastructure that most independents his age have not touched. On the surface, he looked like exactly the kind of owner who gets it. Exactly the kind of owner I love to work with.
But here is what is actually happening. He has been using our conversations to gather information while telling me he is interested in working together. Four times I have stopped by to see him. Four times I have left with nothing changed on his end. He is still running the same preneed program he was running before we met, or more accurately, he is still not running one; and his numbers are admittedly slipping. What he is doing instead is complaining about the lack of loyalty in his market. Families are not calling the way they used to. People do not seem to know who he is anymore. He is frustrated by it.
And all the while, his three locations are now surrounded. Precoa has moved into his market. Corporate consolidators are circling. One large independent consolidator is actively working with Precoa and buying up every decent competitor he can get his hands on. The pressure is not coming. It is already there. He just has not fully accepted what that means for where his business stands in five years, or ten.
I am not telling this story to embarrass him. I am telling it because he is not unusual. The denial he is living in is the most common thing I see in this profession. The affinity he built over decades feels real and earned, because it is. But it does not transfer automatically to the families who moved into his county from somewhere else and have never driven past his building on their way to anywhere.
What I can tell you from what I see in the field is that the dynamic the GM described down in North Carolina is not unique to his county. Communities across the South and the Southeast are absorbing new residents faster than the funeral homes serving those communities are adjusting their marketing posture. The homes that are adjusting have one thing in common. They are building a preneed pipeline that does not depend on affinity. And regardless of your geographic location, you should be doing the same.
Preneed is how a stranger becomes a family on your list before the call ever comes in. That is its function in a market where the assumption of loyalty no longer holds. Knight Strategies has reported that annual U.S. deaths will climb past the COVID peak around 2034, driven by aging baby boomers, and stay above that level through 2100. That is the market you are preparing for right now, or failing to. Knight Strategies recommends a preneed replacement rate of 1.0 or better, meaning one preneed written for every at-need call served. Most independent programs are well below it. Some are at 0.3 or 0.4. A few are at or near zero, running no organized preneed effort at all, which means every family they serve this year is starting fresh next year with no relationship built, no list populated, no pipeline feeding forward motion.
A funeral home used to be the center of its community by default. The building was familiar. The name was on the sign for sixty years. People drove past it on the way to the grocery store and it became part of the mental map of the town. When the people in a community change, that default position does not transfer. The center moves to whoever builds the relationship on purpose. That takes a list of the people who have moved into your market in the last three years. It takes a follow-up schedule that puts you in front of them more than once. It takes something of value sent without asking for anything in return, a planning guide, a resource like my new online planner, which becomes a gentle and low-pressure conversation starter that helps them think through something they have been avoiding. The funeral home that sends that resource becomes the name on their mental map. The one that waits for them to look it up is not on the map at all.
The preneed conversation, when it is done with clarity and without pressure, is an act of service. You are giving a family the gift of a decision they can make now, on their own terms, with clear thinking. You are giving them peace of mind and something real to pass to the people they love. A new resident in your community who does not yet know your name has no reason to call you. But if you have been present, if you have shown up with something useful before anything urgent happened, you become the obvious choice when the call is needed. That is the entire point of building the relationship on purpose rather than waiting for affinity to do the work.
The GM I spoke with in North Carolina gets this. He is not operating under the old model. He has looked squarely at the nine-in-ten figure and built his approach around the town that actually exists. The owner with three locations and a son waiting to inherit the business still has time to do the same thing. But the consolidators surrounding him are not waiting for him to figure it out.
A note on the North Carolina law
The provisions referenced in this piece come from Session Law 2025-76 (House Bill 1003), which became law on July 9, 2025. According to the North Carolina General Assembly’s published summary, the act allows a single establishment manager to oversee multiple funeral establishments within a fifty-mile radius of the manager’s principal establishment, and it adds statutory definitions for branch establishment and principal funeral establishment. A later act, Session Law 2026-48 (Senate Bill 857), amends the same definitions, and readers should check the current text of both laws before relying on any detail here. This is a plain-language summary, not legal advice.
Sources
North Carolina General Assembly summary of Session Law 2025-76 (House Bill 1003): https://house.ncleg.gov/Legislation/SummariesPublication/Summary/2025/12/H1003-SMBP-76%28sl%29-v-4/
North Carolina General Assembly summary of Session Law 2026-48 (Senate Bill 857): https://ncleg.gov/Legislation/SummariesPublication/Summary/2024/17/S857-SMDC-74%28sl%29-v-5/
Knight Strategies, “Within 10 Years, Annual U.S. Deaths Will Pass the COVID Peak”: knightstrategies.net
Published at theashflash.com. Written for independent funeral home owners and preneed professionals.
John Ashworth, aka Johnny Renaissance Preneed Growth Coach, Speaker, and Podcast Host Call me: (608) 845-2252 theashflash.com