Jake’s Book: Staying Alive In The Funeral & Cemetery Profession

Jake reflects on his thought process and then the writing, publishing and promotion of his book: Staying Alive In The Funeral & Cemetery Profession: Building A Business, Weathering Changes, and Finding Growth in 2019. You can get your own copy of Jake's book by contacting the Johnson Consulting office at 1-888-250-7747 or email at [e-mail]. You can also purchase the book on Amazon / Audile here. See the complete transcript here: Robin Heppell: Welcome back to the Funeral X Podcast. I am Rob Heppell and I'm joined with my Funeral Results Marketing business partner, Jake Johnson. Hey there, Jake? Jake Johnson: Hey Rob. How's it going? Robin Heppell: Pretty good. We're getting back into the swing of things from being in Las Vegas at the ICCFA convention, it was good to see lots of faces down there. And I think today, what would be a great topic, we did talk a couple funeral results marketing, Google Ads sessions, and being at the convention our booths were across from each other. And on your side, you had a big stack of your books that you wrote, Staying Alive in the Funeral & Cemetery Profession. So I thought, hey, this would be a neat little shorter episode where we could just maybe talk about the process of writing the book, what's involved, how it can help folks, and how does that sound? Jake Johnson: Yes, happy to. Let's do it. Robin Heppell: Cool. Okay. So now the book was published there in 2019, so pre-pandemic. And how long had you been thinking about writing the book? Jake Johnson: It'd been a couple of years. I just thought that just the opportunities I got to experience through my father and the people that he did business with and his buying and selling career and running Pierce Brothers in California. It's just some cool stuff that comes from Batesville, Indiana, which is where you're either a casket salesman or you sell pre-need or you sell funerals. So it just seemed like a fun thing to do. And for me, I've mentioned this in presentations, but I've got a stack of books next to my bed that one day I'm going to get to, but I wanted to make it something that was easy to read, quick, I even got it and you can listen in audible version of the book as well. So something nice and easy. Robin Heppell: That's how I consumed at Jake. Yes, audible is great. Okay. Jake Johnson: I should have had Morgan Freeman do it, that would've been nice when all day I fall asleep. That'd be good. Robin Heppell: So when you're doing that, so you put your mind to it. You're starting to work on it. I know that it would be probably a challenge to, I know how busy you are. Any struggles with it or and then what was your philosophy on how you laid it out? Jake Johnson: Yes, it was difficult. It's like if you imagine that you look at a piece of land and you want to build a house there and then you got to figure out how to design the layouts and then what kind of tile and all that. It's very much the same for a book what was the purpose? I think what you should start with is who is this meant for? What is your goal in writing the book and then what it started from there and then morphed into the different chapters and then so really I created all the chapters and then I filled them in as I went through that journey from beginning to end. Robin Heppell: Cool. Now what about, were there any chapters or sections that you thought, oh the folks reading this probably aren't going to like the hard truth? Jake Johnson: Well, to me, I was curious because it changes so fast when I talk about innovation grow growth technology would that be as relevant? And when I wrote documented it as is today, and as you mentioned, I did this in 2019, and my God, Rob, you and I were just at the ICCFA convention, and how many more booths than we've ever seen of technology vendors. So it was just curious to me as I laid it out, just what it would be like in the quickly in the fu...