Arrangers Academy - Frazer Consultants

Arrangers
Academy
CONNECTING
THE
DOTS
BETWEEN
WHAT YOU KNOW
AND
WHAT THEY NEED
FUNERAL HOME
FUNERAL CUSTOMER
www.arrangersacademy.com
About The Arrangers Academy
Todd A. Borek and Karl E. Jennings founded their funeral firm with a singular passion and focus; to change
the way people think about funerals and funeral service. The by-product of their work back then is now
revitalizing a discouraged profession, revolutionizing the way funeral directors feel about themselves and
transforming the way the public is choosing to say farewell to those they love.
In 2000, Todd and Karl acquired three funeral homes in a seven-week period. The year before the total
volume of their funeral homes was less than 240 calls a year. Today, they serve over 400 families a year.
Each of their funeral homes is in small market. None of their funeral homes use price discounting to
try to gain market position. They’ve grown their business at each location by expanding the geographic
region they serve.
In 2001, two significant things happened that
forever changed the way Todd and Karl
serve families. The first was a book Karl was
reading called “The Experience Economy” by
Pine and Gilmore. Sadly, the second was the
events that took place on Sept. 11, 2001 and
the days that followed immediately thereafter.
The powerful national narrative at that time is
now forever seared on the nation’s collective
psyche. This narrative now serves as the platform
to help the willing and skeptical understand
the value of meaningful ritual and the necessity
to have an intentional plan to help their family
begin healing.
Our Results
67% Increase in Call Volume
115% Increase in Total Revenue
50% Decrease in Cost of Goods Sold
Our Team
Karl E. Jennings, 30 year Licensee
Todd A. Borek, 20 year Licensee
Arvid Northrop, 8 year Licensee
Brian K. Marry, 15 year Licensee
Matthew Mazurek, National Sales Director
Steve Johnson, Communication Specialist
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SURFACE, SOLVE AND SERVE
The Arrangers Academy
The 3 Keys to Success in Funeral Service
in the 21st Century
Surface
There are essential experiences that each family must have to begin a healthy grief cycle. We provide a healing
narrative that surfaces the emotional, relational and spiritual needs of the surviving family. Once surfaced, the
family will choose an experience to help them engage an intentional plan that is therapeutic, interactive and
educational. This plan attends to their most poignant needs at the time of loss.
Solve
The primary question of the Silent Generation is “What should we do?” The primary question of Baby Boomers
is “What should I feel?” These questions often create a generational stalemate between the privacy oriented
conformists from the silent generation and their more self-focused, rebellious and non-traditional baby boomer
children. Solving these questions with a healing narrative that addresses what the Silent Generation should do
and what the baby boomers should feel enables both to navigate the seven phases of the acute loss period.
Then they are better able to choose services that attend to their emotional, relational and spiritual needs.
Serve
The death of a loved one is a life changing experience.
We don’t have to create the opportunity; it is being
handed to us to nurture. Providing experiences
and support services that nurture the human
experience during the acute loss period and attends
to the emotional, relational and spiritual needs of
the surviving are the delivery components of the
Acute Loss Management System.
The temptation of business is always to feed yesterday and starve tomorrow.
- Peter Drucker
1
Our Core Values
INTEGRITY
We desire to promote integrity with every client. Promoting integrity means that we will
be accountable to our clients and will hold accountable those who join our cause.
Integrity is telling myself the truth, honesty is telling the truth to other people ~Spencer Johnson
INNOVATION
Funeral Service has never been more ripe for reinventing.
The public doesn’t choose cremation because they like it, they choose cremation
because they don’t think you can help them.
If we had asked the public what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. ~Henry Ford
INSPIRATION
People working in the funeral profession today need a reason to
believe in themselves and their future. Our training will revitalize your passion
and reestablish your professional relevance.
Just because everything is different doesn’t mean anything has changed. ~Irene Peter
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The Seven Factors of Growth
Mission
This is the reason you get out of bed in the morning.
If you don’t get excited by your mission statement no
one else in your company will. Be bold…be fearless.
Dare to change the world. The quality of your cause
will determine the quality of the people you attract to
your company. The conviction by which you execute
your mission will determine who stays. Everyone needs
a reason to get up in the morning. If you don’t provide
one, they will create their own and it will likely be
centered on their personal needs, not the needs of your
company or clients. From the largest companies to the
smallest the failure to have a clear reason for being
creates little kingdoms and the definition of success will
be diminished and subjective.
Effective Leadership
Effective leadership starts at the top of any organization. You may be at the top because you were the lucky
descendant of a successful family business or perhaps you worked your way to the top. Either way the lowest
form of leadership is positional leadership. You must earn the right the lead everyday.
Socrates guiding principle was to “Know thyself.” Any leader who fails to understand their strengths, weaknesses
and interests will limit the growth their company. Leaders who don’t understand how to develop others will
have people they must guide task by task and day by day for their entire careers. We will help you grow yourself
and your staff in order to grow your company.
Marketing Plan
Bet you just want to skip this section. Everyone will tell you how to best market your business. You’ve
trusted one, two maybe three so-called experts, spent thousands of dollars and, well, let’s just say you haven’t
experienced the results promised. Here’s the problem, their job was to sell to you, not your customers or your
company to your community. They know where you’re vulnerable; they know you like seeing pictures of
yourself and your buildings in local media. They know you like hearing from your friends that they saw you on
TV or in the newspaper. You hear them and you think my plan is working but your business never grows.
Here’s our pitch. If the outside perception of your business isn’t the same as the inside reality or visa-versa, no
marketing plan can be effective. You must first, understand what makes you unique and worthy of someone
taking the time to learn about you. We don’t know what your inside reality is; we don’t even know what the
outside perception of your customers is. We know what they should be.
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Simple Sales Narrative
If you can’t explain in less than 30 seconds the value of what you do, the skeptical client will have stopped
listening. We live in a sound bite world. People are impatient. We will teach you how to take 27 seconds off your
30 seconds pitch. We can enable you to qualify whether they are your customer while they determine if you will
be their funeral director.
Remember if you sound like everyone else, the price shopper will be listening for only one thing…price. You must
stop them in their tracks, surprise them with something they have not considered and earn the right to teach them.
Earn the right to teach them and you will have earned the right to serve them.
Seamless Delivery
This is simple. If you promise it, deliver it as well as anyone could be expected to. Here’s the hard part.
If there’s anyone else helping you serve the family you must have a predictable system to ensure seamless delivery.
That way you don’t have to “make it up” from family to family. Simple choices make for easy marketing,
uncomplicated arranging and seamless delivery.
Effective Technology
Few things will limit, frustrate or derail the execution of your company’s mission quicker than poor, obsolete
or antiquated technology. If there is a more efficient way for you or your staff to get something done, do it now.
Then you can use the margin that has been created by greater efficiency to focus on the things that build your
bottom line.
R.I.P - Really Inspired People
One of the biggest mistakes that small business people and site managers make is hiring people to do a task that
they personally don’t want to do. This is closely followed by hiring friends of other employee’s without qualifying
their ability or skills and then wondering why after months of training they seem unmotivated, disinterested and a
poor fit for the job.
Getting the right people doing the right things
in the right places in your company is one of
the most important jobs you have after you hire
your first employee. Your job then becomes
equipping them with the tools, training and
resources to succeed. Our delivery system
(including administrative, event planning and
service support) provides a platform to properly
place staff in their areas of strength.
5
Strategy for
Growth
To Experience growth you must combine and embrace these seven factors. Leave one
out and you will limit your ability to meet your full potential.
Mission
Leadership
Sales Narrative
Technology
Seamless Delivery
Marketing Plan
Personnel
Poor Mission
Poor Leadership
Poor Sales Narrative
In-Effective Technology
Limits Capacity
No Seamless Delivery
Dissatisfied Customers
No Marketing Plan
Wrong Personnel
Defines Your Value
Expands Capacity
Creates Advocates
Determines Growth
Determines Results
Subjective Success
Chaos
Confused Customers
Marketi
Plan ng
ctive
Effenology
ch
Te
Determines Reach
p
hi
rs
R.
I.P
.
Mission
de
Se
De amle
liv ss
ery
Defines Cause
Le
a
Limited Growth
Poor Results
es
l
Sa e
e
l
v
Simp r rati
Na
The Arrangers Academy offers instruction which will develop the fundamental knowledge base that is required for
the modern era of funeral service. Our training incorporates the language of healing and the use of cutting edge
technology to lead families through a therapeutic, interactive and powerfully personal experience with loss.
Upon Completion participants will achieve credentials as a “Certified Farewell Guide”.
6
We all know that we sink or swim by how well we create value for what we can do for a family. During the first
15 minutes in the arrangement room, the family will decide three important things. They are;
1. Do you care about them and their loss?
2. Why do they need your care?
3. How will you care for their needs?
In the first 5 minutes of an arrangement conference you must show the family that you care…in the next five
minutes you must show them why they need your care…in the last five minutes you must show them how you and
you alone can make sure they get what they need. Our program consists of one and half days of comprehensive
training with our trainers, followed by one training video per week and takes one year to complete. This is not a
magic bullet. It’s an opportunity for you and your staff to become the very best guide any family could hope for and
the best funeral home in your market.
1. Day One
• Doers and Feelers: Knowing our Customers
• The Experience Economy and Funeral Service
• Surfacing the Need: The Seven Phases of Acute Loss
• Shopper on Line One: 3 Seconds to Silence and Success
• Inside Out: Internalizing the Narrative
2. Day Two
• Solving Their Problems: Technology and Personalization as Healing Support Services
• Reel Time: 3 Recorded Arrangements with our Families
• Family Dynamics and Managing Difficult Families
3. Continuing Education
• 52 Weekly Training Videos
• Monthly: Team Training Videos
• Quarterly: Healing Today Videos
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Training Fees:
@ Our Hamburg, MI Site:. . . . . . . .
@ Your Site:. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Deposit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Annual Fee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
$4,000/person
$4,000/person, minimum of three people + travel expenses.
$500/person
$500/person
Additional Items:
We offer a money back guarantee on training at the Hamburg, MI location. If unsatisfied with our training you will be
reimbursed all monies paid less the $500.00 deposit. You must notify the instructor at the end of your training.
If your state requires Continuing Education Units we will apply for accreditation prior to your attendance and after your
deposit is received.
A non-refundable deposit of $500.00 is required to reserve a space in one of our Hamburg Site trainings.
The deposit maybe transferred to a different date with 7 days notification.
The balance is due before the start of training.
A $500 annual fee allows you to both maintain credentials and continue our training. Additionally this would qualify you
for an annual refresher course for a reduced rate of $750.
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Why should a family use your Funeral home?
Why should a family spend $10,000 on a funeral?
S
DOE
A N D F EE
S
R
LE
R
What is keeping you from finding out?
www.arrangersacademy.com
When We Must Say Farewell
How to Help Yourself and Others Through
the Worst Experience in Life.
When We Must Say Farewell takes you on a
journey of life and death through the experience
of the grieving. In the process you will learn how
to help yourself and others through the worst
experience in life. When We Must Say Farewell
was written to show the way to prepare for, and deal
with, a loved one’s passing as a tool for families,
terminal care workers and fellow professionals.
Karl E. Jennings
Author
Karl E. Jennings is author of When We Must
Say Farewell and C.E.O of Borek Jennings
Funeral Homes and Co-Founder of the Healing
Farewell Center of America. Over the past
eight years Karl and his partner Todd Borek
have developed and proven the healing
farewell philosophy.
Arrangers
Academy
Arrangers Academy
7425 M-36/PO Box 735
Hamburg, MI 481394
Phone: 810-844-1444
Fax: 810-231-2739
E-mail: info@ArrangersAcademy.com