June 19, 2006

Yesterday was father's day and I just finished up a four day weekend that was quite eventful so I thought I'd tell you about it.

Oh yeah by the way I decided to call you Bob after a fictional character on a podcast I've been listening too.

So I don't know if i mentioned that Jerry Bagley asked me to come down and interview for an executive position with Stewart or not but on Thursday I interviewed with him and looked over that situation.  It's a high level job but ultimately I don't know if I want to go back into management at this point.  I have continued to have failed marriages with that position, the latest being ARM and developing a sales crew through that.  But it would still be worth a try.  Now it seems that a good idea that I had is not a burden on the ability to even give this a shot.

Moving the family in has created a problem where I can't move.  If I take the job in which is in SD I would have to move, period.  No way to commute at minimum I'd have to have a small apartment in SD and come home on the weekends and I think that's a bad idea.  Now here's the problem, the extra money that I earned would almost entirely be dumped back into the extra expense of moving down there, whether I would have to supplement the household and all of us move down to SD or just get the small apartment down there. 

So net this would all mean actually same money approximately.

 

But just out of curiosity let's put together a basic business plan.

1st draft:

 

Business Plan for El Camino Memorial Park

 

Appoximately 1400 interments with similar mortuary case load

 

Quota based primarily on new heritage with a large portion coming from higher end properties (properties over 50k).

 

FS structure

 

            3 teams each with 6 to 7 counselors per team

 

            Rotating team schedule each team gets an opportunity on schedule and the ASD of the team makes up that schedule and runs their team.

 

Short term business plan.

 

Go through the business process with each of the ASD’s as a trainee.

 

There is currently no obvious division in the office or the daily board volume report on how each of the individual teams are doing.  Either there value has been diminished over time and they are no longer needed or this is a quick obvious change that will stack rank the teams.

 

Follow through with the tracking system that Jerry has already started to put in place and start compiling numbers for counselor evaluations where they will be judged on the following categories.

1.      In Home/Office family follow up

2.      AN family to Heritage ratio’s

3.      Referral Development

 

This process should be given to the ASD’s to do with subsequent group reviews done by me with each of the ASD’s.  I think this become the weekly ASD’s meeting where we focus on what their team is doing and then individually I can then review the counselors data and meet with the ASD and counselor on an individual basis.

 

Additionally, in each team there are people who have community contacts which are probably not bein utiliezed to their fullest extent.  If nothing else through the job of FS we come in contact with a community leader from time to time.  From there each team should be able to develop at least one community outreach event per quarter.  That would give us 12 community outreach events per quarter which would significantly impact the parks exposure.

 

Finally, the protection plan….. This must be simplified.  It’s not my goal to go through and change everything I know that can easily backfire.  But the idea that there are options available to counselors who just want to take credit for someone else’s work is beyond me.  A good counselor does not worry about their families coming in and buying from other people they simply serve their families well and expect to be rewarded.  I don’t have a direct timeframe for making this change since it to me requires additional investigation into it’s merit’s but since Jerry is so opposed to it and would like it changed then I’m sure it’s crap.