Will the phone ever ring?

Sometimes you hear that funeral directors sit around wait for the phone to ring. To a certain extent, that is true. I find myself doing that exact thing on a pretty regular basis lately. For some reason we are experiencing a very quiet spell in our business. It's not that people are dying and not calling us, it's just that people are not dying in our town and service area.

We typically serve about 180 families per year at our funeral home. People often ask how many funerals we do a week. Well, the fact of the matter is that some weeks we do 2, some we do 9, some we don't do any. As it all averages out, it usually ends at about 180 per year. There are busy times, and there are slow times. I prefer to be busy. A "normal" month we do about 15 calls. It is easier to deal with if you look at it over a longer period of time.

The funeral business is an interesting one on many levels. If you let it, it will absolutely drive a person insane. When we hit these times when we are not busy for a week or so at a crack, I make a very strong effort to spend more time at home, workout more, catch up on the things that I cannot get to when we are busy. My wife says that she always knows when we are slow because I start cleaning things out (i.e. closets, drawers, etc.) Needless to say, it does not sit well with Mary Beth. I say our business is interesting because no matter how much advertising we do, no matter how many little league teams we sponsor, no matter how many Lions, Kiwanis, Rotary, Lodge, or Knights of Columbus meetings we go to, if people are not dying, the phone does not ring. So, do we sit around and wait for the phone to ring? I guess we do some of that. To make it perfectly clear, as I sit in bed and type this blog, my phone is sitting next to me on my bedside table where it will sit all night... just in case it rings.