Tampa, Florida – For years, funeral directors and their advisors and consultants have made the case that funeral homes need to raise the bar on the level of individualized and personal service offered to families and have frequently made com- parisons to the service models offered by renowned hospitality firms like Ritz-Carlton, Hilton, Marriott, etc. And when talking about making the funeral an experience that tells the story of the life of the deceased, another famous name that often enters the conversation is Disney.
So when Foundation Partners Group named Brad Rex, an18-year veteran of the hospitality industry, as its president and CEO, the 30-month-old company, whose founders already were known as service innovators, was taking a giant step in that direction. For the past three years, Rex has been CEO of the Brad Rex Group, a hospitality consulting company with expertise in business turnaround and growth, guest service enhancement and other hospitality issues. Previously, he served as executive vice president and chief customer officer for Hilton Grand Vacations and also spent 12 years at Walt Disney Company, where he led the EPCOT theme park at Walt Disney World for more than five years. He also held various positions at British Petroleum Company for six years.
At the same time, Foundation Partners also named Robert Bukala as chief financial officer and Amy Elliot to the post of vice president, human resources and organizational effectiveness. Bukala was previously chief financial and administrative officer for Geomentum Inc., an Interpublic Group agency. Elliot was a talent leader for OneBlood Inc., a large blood bank, and also held senior operations and human resources roles at Hilton Grand Vacations and Walt Disney Company. Foundation Partners now operates 34 funeral homes and six cemeteries across 13 states, providing burial, cremation and cemetery services primarily in suburban and non-urban areas. It is a portfolio company of Sterling Partners, a Chicago-based investment firm. Several months ago, Foundation Partners Group management, in conjunction with its board of directors and Sterling Partners, decided to seek executive leadership from outside the funeral home and cemetery industry, specifically targeting the hospitality industry. Given the comparisons within funeral service to the hospitality industry model, did Rex have any preconceived notions about funeral service?
“There are a lot of similarities, but frankly, I had never really thought about entering funeral service until I received a call about the position,” Rex said.
As he thought about it, the similarities were apparent. “In the funeral industry, you are serving others, and that is what we did at Disney and Hilton and hospitality,” he said. “I believe that [what funeral service does] is a high and noble calling. I had always looked at my service in the hospitality companies as very important to the lives of the people we touched.”
The comparisons continue. “Whether you are doing basically a once-in-a-lifetime vacation experience for a family or if you are trying to make sure to do a beautiful, memorable funeral service, you have to flawlessly execute and hopefully exceed their expectations,” Rex added. “You have one chance to do it right, and that why it is so critical that we have the service element in place and all of the policies and procedures to make sure that we provide an out-of-the-park experience for every family we serve.”
Drilling down deeper into the customer service element, Rex sees his role as assisting families and trying to help them by taking the whole service element and the experience to a different level. “One of the challenges I’ve seen immediately is that you have people out there who are so passionate about what they are doing and they love working with people,” he said. “I like to say that what I saw at [the National Funeral Directors Association International Convention & Expo] was both passion and compassion. Everyone I encountered just loved the industry, and they loved being in the industry and sharing it with me. They were very compassionate people, and I felt they cared about me.
“I think where we need to go in the next step is [to realize] that you are only going to get great service when you have great leadership,” he added. “I do believe from just the month I have been in the industry looking around and talking frankly to people that there has been a lack leadership development and training.” Rex acknowledged that many funeral homes don’t have the resources to offer such programs to their employees.
“One of my first steps coming into the job was to hire an expert in talent management and leadership development and education, and that is Amy Elliott,” Rex said. “I have worked with Amy before at Disney, as well as at Hilton, and this is her core expertise and something I hope we can bring to the industry to help develop great leaders out there who then are going to create environments where their people can provide outstanding service to the industry.”
18-year veteran of the hospitality industry, as its president and CEO, the 30-month-old company, whose founders already were known as service innovators, was taking a giant step in that direction.
For the past three years, Rex has been CEO of the Brad Rex Group, a hospitality consulting company with expertise in business turnaround and growth, guest service enhancement and other hospitality issues. Previously, he served as executive vice president and chief customer officer for Hilton Grand Vacations and also spent 12 years at Walt Disney Company, where he led the EPCOT theme park at Walt Disney World for more than five years. He also held various positions at British Petro- leum Company for six years.
At the same time, Foundation Partners also named Robert Bukala as chief financial officer and Amy Elliot to the post of vice president, human resources and organizational effectiveness. Bukala was previously chief financial and administrative officer for Geomentum Inc., an Interpublic Group agency. Elliot was a talent leader for OneBlood Inc., a large blood bank, and also held senior operations and human resources roles at Hilton Grand Vacations and Walt Disney Company.
Foundation Partners now operates 34 funeral homes and six cemeteries across 13 states, providing burial, cremation and cemetery services primarily in suburban and non-urban areas. It is a portfolio company of Sterling Partners, a Chicago-based investment firm. Several months ago, Foundation Partners Group management, in conjunction with its board of directors and Sterling Partners, decided to seek executive leadership from outside the funeral home and cemetery industry, specifically targeting the hospitality industry.
Given the comparisons within funeral service to the hospitality industry model, did Rex have any preconceived notions about funeral service?
“There are a lot of similarities, but frankly, I had never really thought about entering funeral service until I received a call about the position,” Rex said.
As he thought about it, the similarities were apparent. “In the funeral industry, you are serving others, and that is what we did at Disney and Hilton and hospitality,” he said. “I believe that [what funeral service does] is a high and noble calling. I had always looked at my service in the hospitality companies as very important to the lives of the people we touched.”
The comparisons continue. “Whether you are doing basically a once-in-a-lifetime vacation experience for a family or if you are trying to make sure to do a beautiful, memorable funeral service, you have to flawlessly execute and hopefully exceed their expectations,” Rex added. “You have one chance to do it right, and that why it is so critical that we have the service element in place and all of the policies and procedures to make sure that we provide an out-of-the-park experience for every family we serve.”
Drilling down deeper into the customer service element, Rex sees his role as assisting families and trying to help them by taking the whole service element and the experience to a different level. “One of the challenges I’ve seen immediately is that you have people out there who are so passionate about what they are doing and they love working with people,” he said. “I like to say that what I saw at [the National Funeral Directors Association International Convention & Expo] was both passion and compassion. Everyone I encountered just loved the industry, and they loved being in the industry and sharing it with me. They were very compassionate people, and I felt they cared about me.
“I think where we need to go in the next step is [to realize] that you are only going to get great service when you have great leadership,” he added. “I do believe from just the month I have been in the industry looking around and talking frankly to people that there has been a lack leadership development and training.” Rex acknowledged that many funeral homes don’t have the resources to offer such programs to their employees.
“One of my first steps coming into the job was to hire an expert in talent management and leadership development and education, and that is Amy Elliott,” Rex said. “I have worked with Amy before at Disney, as well as at Hilton, and this is her core expertise and something I hope we can bring to the industry to help develop great leaders out there who then are going to create environments where their people can provide outstanding service to the industry.”
The New Skill Set
With technology becoming a more integral component of a funeral home’s offerings, do funeral directors today need to develop a new, diverse skill set?
“I think technology is extremely important, and I think that is an area where we have been lacking in the industry, but I don’t think technology is enough,” Rex observed. “You have to use those tools, and we’re looking at that as well. We’re asking what should the entire process be and what are the tools we need in each step of the process to make it effective and to support our frontline team members?”
Rex also warned about funeral homes perhaps being too reliant on technology and sacrificing some of the human interaction. “I think you want to take the best of both and meld them together, and that is what we are attempting to do,” he said. “There is a different expectation from our customer today, and if we don’t meet that expectation, it is going to be very challenging in our industry.”
One of the interesting things Rex continued to hear at the NFDA convention was concern about the increase in the cremation rate.
He noted that the big disconnect about cremation is that funeral directors have not been letting people know what they can do for the cremation family. To help him draw this conclusion, Rex had to go no further than his own experience. Recalling his mother’s death seven years ago, he said the funeral director handling his mother’s service did not adequately inform his family about what their options were.
“The person who did her arrangements… I just really felt did the bare minimum,” he said. “Our family was in shock, we didn’t really know what the options were. The funeral director didn’t go through them very effectively, and we just had my mom cremated.
“After that, my sister and I had to arrange the memorial service and I asked for a checklist of things that I needed to do, such as cancel Social Security and whatever, and [the funeral director] kind of shrugged and said he didn’t have anything. So I had to look on the Internet and find this after-death checklist.”
The funeral home didn’t offer to help with a video tribute either; the job went to Rex’s then teenaged son. “Unfortunately, I think I am more of the norm and not the exception,” Rex said. “All of the things that happened that I ended up doing myself should have been offered by the funeral home, but it didn’t.”
Rex said his personal experience is a tremendous motivator to make sure others don’t go through what he did. “We need to be out there providing services, we need to help people with prearrangements and making it known how we can help them, and then, obviously, focusing on the service but also focusing on after the service,” Rex said. “I am so en- couraged by some of the funeral homes I have seen that are offering these aftercare programs to stay in touch with their families and help them get through those experiences. There are positive things happening in the industry, and I think it needs to be much more widespread.”
For the most part, Rex believes that it is just a matter of individual homes lacking the resources to launch and sustain such programs. “When you are an individual funeral home, you have to do the forward thinking and put all the systems in place, as well as run the business day to day and run the services,” he said, adding that Foundation Partners has the resources to educate funeral home management to take the whole funeral experience to a great new level of service.
To accomplish that, Rex said, a funeral home has to have the vision and show its employees, as well as the community, what a funeral could be like. “When I was at Hilton, as chief customer officer, I was responsible for all of Hilton’s time- share resorts across the country,” he said. “We had good service, but we wanted to take it to the next level. What I did is create a video that said this is where I want us to be. There were certain things we were doing those days, but there were a lot of things I wanted us to do in the future. As I painted the picture and said here is what I want the experience to be, people said, ‘Okay, I got it. I see what we are trying to achieve here.’ That is how we were trying to move forward, but we also had to do the heavy lifting and putting in place the processes and people to make it happen. You can dream, but you also have to implement. That is one of the big challenges.”
Connecting the Dots
This is where Rex’s own career connects the dots. He mentioned the picture he tried to create when he was at Hilton. The endgame was simply to tell a good story – and that is where his Disney experience comes in.
“The direction funeral service needs to go is in telling the life story,” he said. “Why do tens of millions of people come to Disney every year and come back to Disney again and again? It is because Disney is an incredible storyteller. The whole point of Disney is telling stories in incredible ways, whether it’s having you understand what it is like to be an astronaut or to be on a test track and show you what it feels like to be a race car driver – you are being immersed in a story. Imagine what it would be like if our services could really immerse you in the life of the person you are honoring and you could really feel and understand their life story. That is one of the things we are very passionate about at Foundation Partners.”
Foundation Partners Group released what it described as a purpose book called A Story Worth Sharing. That book, which Rex said is all about capturing knowledge and sharing life’s purpose, is built on the company’s Five Unique Truths, which, he says, distinguishes the company within funeral service. These five truths are partnership, relationship, innovation, compassion and people focus.
Before joining Foundation Partners, Rex said in his own book, The Surpassing Life, that one of the things he enjoys doing is asking people for their stories. “Everyone has an amazing story to tell. We have all had different life experiences,” he said. “I used to talk to my cast members at Disney and ask them to tell me about themselves, where they grew up, and their stories were just amazing.
“That is what I want to do for our families so that they can hear the stories of their loved ones,” he continued. “I have gone to funerals and I have learned things about people that I never knew. I knew the person very well, but I learned these whole new stories about them. To me, that is so encouraging and worthwhile in what we want to be doing for everyone who comes to our services. If we can facilitate that, that is going to be our differentiator. That is what is going to be bringing people back and saying that is what they want for themselves. ‘Don’t just cremate me and stick my remains in the closet. Tell a story about the people I impacted and how my life made a difference.’ I think this is what people want at their services. That is what I’d like to have. We need to be focused on that and figure out how to do that and do it efficiently and effectively and flawlessly.”
FPG Training
Foundation Partners Group’s plan is to develop its leaders and have them develop people so that they can provide this type of experience. “We are working through a lot of the particulars on how we are going to make that happen,” Rex said. “It starts with that vision of what we want people to experience. Part of what we will be doing over the next months is coming up with what we want the customer experience to look like. As we do that, we refine it with all of the different touch points on where we interact with families and how we can improve each point along the way. We will refine that and go and share that with our folks and provide the training and the processes.”
In-house training is half the equation. The other half is educating the community. Rex said there is a lot of preparation that a funeral home has to do in advance to not only educate the consumer on the potential of the funeral but to accli- mate them as well. The key is understanding the consumer. “There are going to be different segments,” Rex said. “Some people may want a very traditional service, and you certainly don’t want to attempt to force them to do something they don’t want to do. I think it is about understanding your customers and suggesting to them or showing them an example of what has or can been done.”
As more people are exposed to these new types of services, they will become more prevalent throughout the industry. “This, to me, is the importance of something like prearrangement, because you can find out the wishes of the person,” Rex said. “You need to understand your customers, and that is the big message, but you also have to suggest and offer them some options they might not have been exposed to in the past.”
He reiterated that he is a big believer in preneed. “I think that it takes that burden off of the family to make the arrangement and to take away that financial burden,” he said.
Rex also said he has not been in the industry long enough to join the debate about whether or not the mortuary sci- ence curriculum needs to be overhauled, but he did say that in his experience, it is interesting that many organizations are emphatic about learning the technical skills, as they should be, but they ignore the interpersonal and customer service skills. I think that is a big mistake. You have to focus on both and make sure that you are training your people appropriately for them to provide the services you want.
“That is a huge part of the blueprint for Disney, Apple and Southwest and all of the high customer service companies – their training in the classroom and on the job,” he said.
Rex said he has been deeply impressed with the aftercare program offered by one of Foundation Partners’ latest acquisitions, Hiers-Baxley Funeral Services, which consists of five funeral homes in Ocala, Belleview, TimberRidge, The Villages and Chiefland, and a cemetery, Highland Memorial Park in Ocala. “I am impressed with their facilities and their people,” he said. “Many in the industry think that your obligation ends on the day of the service. But what they do is they do a series of five seminars for the loved ones after the service to help them heal and transition back. They have seminars on dealing with grief and on how to travel for one, how to cook for one, how to make your home more secure. We need to be doing this everywhere. And I think back to my personal experience that if they had something like this for my dad, it would have helped him immensely in getting back to a normal life. They are on to something there. We are looking at that as being a center of excellence that we want to take people to and show them that this is how you should be doing things.
“I believe we know our customers and we need to make them feel special, which is something Disney does so well,” he added. “Always exceed their expectations and then stay in touch with them so they can be served now and in the future. And that is the core of Foundation Partners Group and what we hope to achieve in the near future.”