As funeral homes and crematories push to focus on offering better benefits for staff, there is one particular area that is a hot topic: work-life balance.

Between new technology, ambiguous working hours, different family situations, and plenty of other factors, it’s not easy for a funeral director to achieve balance between their career and personal life.

Dan Gorton prioritizes this for his staff at Front Range Burial & Cremation, and was able to create a real, tangible work-life balance when he switched to Gather’s funeral management software. Learn how below.

The Legacy of Front Range Burial & Cremation

Front Range Burial & Cremation is located in Denver, Colorado. Their firm offers several different services to families:

• Traditional Services
• Cremations with Memorial Services
• Immediate Burials
• Direct Cremation
• And much more!

Since rebranding and focusing on increasing their presence in Denver, Dan and his team (in the last 6 months) have scaled average monthly cases from 1-2 cases per month to 10-12 cases per month.

Dan’s Approach in Death Care

With an early start at 14 years old as an intern, Dan Gorton holds a wealth of experience in the funeral profession (25+ years). After helping the owner of Front Range with various rebranding tasks, he recently took over as the general manager for Front Range Burial & Cremations 6 months ago.

He believes in treating every family as his own, especially because he’s helping people through the worst moment in their lives. Because of his legacy, Dan has had the past privilege of supervising mortuary school students through their funeral arranging and funeral directing clinicals.

To this day, he’s still in communication with generations of families from when he started in 1998, whether it’s a Christmas card, a Thanksgiving card, or a small interaction at the grocery store. However, for every family he serves, he advises funeral directors to:

• Focus on relationship-building skills with families, and
• Be unafraid to say no if something is slightly out of scope, and
• Underpromise and over-deliver

Funeral Businesses Must Be Forward-Thinkers

In the Colorado market, Dan notes that new generations of families are capturing a larger part of the market nowadays – with that trend, the new generations also bring a stronger preference for online arrangements, where everything is on cellphones, and fewer arrangements are completed in person.

The modern market expects a modern experience from your business – and so does your staff. And once you get to a certain point or case volume, your funeral home or crematory needs management software. After receiving a demo from every software option available, Dan opted to choose Gather as their platform which already puts Front Range ahead of the curve as they transition into the next 15-20 years in the funeral industry.

How Gather Has Impacted Business

Since switching, Dan has pinpointed Gather as one of the main drivers of the business, in several different ways:

• New, Integrated Website: “We started with a different vendor to produce an industry-standard website that every funeral home uses, and that brought us on level with everyone else. Now [since switching to a Gather site], we’ve done something that completely sets us apart and raises the standard in our market.”

• Simpler Family Collaboration: “We get a lot of families, because of the trauma of a death, who need something to do right now. And that’s what I love about [Gather], I can give them something to do right now, even before the arrangement. You’ve given them something to do and they feel like progress is being made right off the bat, and that gives families peace of mind.”

• Gather Saves Time: “The biggest change I noticed after we implemented Gather was how much time I had. It didn’t take me forever to go through a case. Everything was right there. A family could call me on the weekend, I can now pull up Gather on my cellphone instead of running to the office for one file or form.”
  

• WorkFlows For Every Case Type: “Gather WorkFlows cover everything from pre-need to trade service, and it can be customized for each type of service that you provide. We can build [and customize] them around the way we do business.”

• Gather Offers Flexibility: “Now I can make sure every family is served and satisfied from the comfort of my own home. So it’s allowed me to have and maintain more of a personal life, which is difficult to do in our profession. The at-your-fingertips availability [of Gather] is huge.”

• Reliable Software Support: “Huge shoutout to the whole team, everyone’s been so wonderful. Wesley has guided me through this so well, she explains things so thoroughly and she has the nicest way of explaining (and re-explaining) how to use certain features in Gather.

Make Work-Life Balance a Standard By Switching to Gather

You heard it here: Dan from Front Range Burial & Cremation recommends Gather’s integrated funeral home software for all deathcare businesses that are looking to remain competitive in both the consumer and employee markets. Enjoy features like:

• AutoForms and E-Signatures
• Centralized Document Library
• Statement Builder
• Digital GPLs and Digital Showrooms
• Obituary Builder
• Reporting
• Aftercare Tasks
• And much more!

Request a free demo to get first-hand experience with the platform and learn about what it would cost to get started with Gather today.