I want to tell you about my Ron Popeil moment as much because it’s embarrassing as because it will help us get at the central question about the tidalwave of tech companies we’re asked to evaluate.
Ron Popeil, if you don’t know, essentially invented the infomercial. Along the way, the softball queries he tossed into his cohost’s wheelhouse challenged the notion that there’s no such thing as a stupid question: “Wait! It slices AND IT dices?!?!?”
I met Guidant founders George Owens and Michael Cooperman cold, introduced by a mutual friend who told me they had a tech solution for cemeteries. When they explained their product to me, I honestly was waiting for the punchline.
The shortest version is that Guidant makes the equivalent of a “buy now” button for cemetery plots. When I asked them what made theirs different from the others, I put them in the awkward position of having to explain to me that it was the first and only one.
“So you’re telling me that no other company thought to put a ‘Buy Now’ button in their software?” I asked.
It was embarrassing on two levels. The first was how Popeil-like it sounded as soon as it left my mouth. Second, it was something I felt as if I should have known in a dog that didn’t bark kind of way.
At the heart of the continuing tech incursion into funeral service lies the space between “of course it exists” and “what do you mean it doesn’t.” That disconnect has, I imagine, been the hole into which millions in R&D has been thrown, sometimes for better, sometimes less so.
This raft of nonsolutions has made me way more skeptical about emerging tech than I used to be, especially as companies continue to come out with “new” products that already are on the market.
Most of their stories tend to go like this: “I was a funeral customer. I couldn’t find the product I needed, so I made it.” It’s laudable, but these consumer-inspired solutions are getting super specialized. The inspiration seems to have switched from “the industry didn’t have what I wanted” to “current tech can be improved upon.”
It’s what tech people do. It’s not their fault.
The Data Behind the “Buy Now” Button
What makes Guidant stand out is its insider nature. Owens came from SCI and founded Fortitude (the company behind the Foresight Companies’ Funeral and Cemetery Consumer Business Study). He and Cooperman had worked together at JD Powers earlier in their careers and reunited at Fortitude.
“We have the data. We are creating the independent record of what the voices of customers are telling us,” Owens said. “We know there’s a certain percentage of consumers who want to purchase cemetery property online. They can’t currently do it. Cemeterians want that business. They don’t want somebody else to do it.”
Cooperman spent the intervening years between JD Powers and Fortitude at auto-sales disruptor TrueCar, which, he said, helped inspire them to be a little more inward-looking.
“I had a front row seat to watching the automotive industry clash with these digital disruptors. It was a painful process. It was painful to watch,” Cooperman said. “The technology middle was always fighting, ‘Are we on the consumer side or are we on the industry side?’”
It’s a philosophical rephrasing of “Who’s your customer?” but as technology becomes more entrenched, it’s bigger than that. How do you sell something someone needs without holding them hostage? That was the real problem, not inserting a “Buy Now” button (which, as it turns out, has its own patent-worthy complications).
A Tool, Not a Middleman
There were two things going on at Guidant’s founding. The first was discovering what they could provide. The second, and most critical, was how they could provide it without adding a layer between Guidant and the cemeteries that use it.
Owens and Cooperman decided that building a tool that sits on top of a cemetery’s existing website would leave the control and the profit with the cemetery. They didn’t want to be brokers, but rather facilitators. Guidant worked with all the major cemetery tech providers to integrate their sales technology with existing inventory software.
The resulting tool allows potential customers to select from plots designated by the cemetery. Owens explained that a cemetery’s inventory management system isn’t a bar to online sales.
“One of the things that makes our offering unique is that we know and understand the necessities of the industry,” Owens said. “We can do it with a plot map, and we’re ready to go. It doesn’t matter what operating system they use, it doesn’t matter what web developer they use, it doesn’t matter what payment portal.”
Cemeteries with digital inventories can set aside specific sections or plots on the interface. Those without can designate particular sections in the Guidant system itself.
This is as much a function of practicality as it is of scale. For very small cemeteries, it might make sense to use the tool and pay a percentage of individual sales. Larger cemeteries might be better served with a subscription.
Either way (and critically) all transactions are run through the cemetery’s sales team. That is, once a purchase is made, the customer is handed off to the cemetery salesperson, so there is someone on the ground in touch with the families.
Avoiding the ‘Disruptor’ Trap
It’s important both attitudinally and operationally that Guidant isn’t a “disruptor” (although that word has aged about as well as “information superhighway”). They’re a facilitator. Their central question wasn’t “how can we get customers to buy plots online?” it was “how can we help cemeteries who want to sell plots online?” It’s a subtle but critical distinction.
As Owens points out, though, getting people to buy things online isn’t really a problem that needs solving. Before the pandemic, it made sense for deathcare in general to hedge on online sales technologies. After all, setting aside children or caregivers, the bulk of deathcare services purchasers were still older folks.
In 2019, Boomers’ relationship with online purchases was much different than it was by 2023. Today, there’s at least the expectation of being able to engage in online commerce up and down the demographic spectrum.
“Before COVID, my mom never shopped online. A couple weeks into COVID, she’s like, ‘Wait. I can order groceries online and have them delivered to my house for $10?’ I mean, all of a sudden, my mom’s an internet wizard,” Cooperman said. “So, so you have this entire generation of consumers that was forced overnight to start shopping online, and that’s made a massive difference. It might have taken them another 10 years, or maybe they would never have shopped online, but now they’re doing it.”
Guidant isn’t just about selling online. It’s about recognizing that the modern consumer’s expectation of convenience has fundamentally changed. Guidant isn’t replacing the salesperson. By acting as facilitators rather than disruptors, they’re just making sure the salesperson has more people to talk to.