Most owners I sit with in eastern NC and the Triangle can tell me their at-need call volume down to the month, but when I ask how many preneed contracts they wrote last quarter, there's a pause. Then someone opens a drawer, pulls out a folder, and starts counting. That pause is the whole reason for this article. A preneed program either compounds quietly in your favor for the next decade, or it quietly erodes — and the difference usually shows up long before the numbers do.
You do not need to hire a consultant to figure out which direction yours is heading. You need about two hours, access to your contract files, and the willingness to answer five questions honestly. Here is the same framework I walk through when an owner asks me to look at their program — except you can do it yourself this week.
Question 1: How many contracts did you write in the last twelve months, and who wrote them?
Pull the actual number. Not an estimate. Then break it down by the person who wrote each one. In a healthy independent firm doing 150 to 250 calls a year, I typically expect to see preneed contract counts land somewhere in a reasonable ratio to at-need volume — and I expect to see the work distributed, not stacked on one licensee who is also running arrangements, embalming, and half the funerals.
When 90% of your contracts trace back to one person, you do not have a program. You have a dependency. If that person retires, gets sick, or leaves for the firm down the road, your production goes to zero in a week. I have watched it happen in Wilson, in Greenville, in the Piedmont — same story every time.
What healthy looks like: At least two licensed people writing regularly, with no single person accounting for more than roughly two-thirds of production.
Question 2: What is your average contract value, and has it moved with your general price list?
This one exposes more programs than any other question. Take the total dollar value of contracts written in the last twelve months, divide by the count. Now compare that number to your average at-need call value over the same period.
If your preneed average is significantly lower than your at-need average, something is off. Either your arrangers are defaulting to your least expensive package because it is easier to close, or your GPL updates never made it into the preneed conversation, or families are being shown a stripped-down version of what your firm actually offers. All three are fixable, but you have to see the gap first.
I also want you to look at the trend. Pull the same numbers from two years ago. If your at-need average has climbed 8% and your preneed average has climbed 1%, you are writing tomorrow's funerals at yesterday's prices, and growth in your trust or insurance funding is not going to close that gap on its own.
Question 3: Can you produce any single contract in under five minutes?
Pick a family name at random — someone who signed a contract three or four years ago. Ask your staff to bring you the file. Time it.
If it takes fifteen minutes, if it requires two people looking in three places, if the funding paperwork is in one folder and the statement of goods and services is in another and nobody is quite sure whether the beneficiary was ever updated after the spouse died — you have a records problem, and records problems become compliance problems the moment someone from the state walks in the door or a family shows up to fulfill.
NC preneed record-keeping expectations are not casual. When a contract comes due and the family sits across from your arranger, that folder needs to tell a clean, complete story. If it does not, you are going to eat the difference or fight with the family. Neither is good.
Question 4: When was the last time you reconciled your active contract list against your funding statements?
Every active preneed contract in your firm should correspond to a funded policy or trust account you can point to on a statement. Every one. If you cannot sit down today and match your active contract list line-by-line to funding, you have drift. Drift is contracts marked active that were fulfilled two years ago and never closed out. It is policies that lapsed for non-payment that nobody caught. It is transferred contracts still showing on your books.
I recommend this reconciliation at least once a year, and honestly quarterly is better for firms writing more than fifty contracts annually. It is tedious work. It is also the single most important audit step you can take, because everything downstream — your reporting, your fulfillment forecasting, your ability to answer a state inquiry without breaking a sweat — depends on that list being clean.
Practical tip: If you have not reconciled in over two years, do not try to fix everything in one sitting. Work through it in batches of twenty-five contracts. You will find things. Plan on it.
Question 5: Do you know why families are choosing you — or not choosing you — for preneed?
This is the softest question and the one owners most want to skip. Do it anyway. Talk to the last five families who signed a contract with you. Ask what made them decide. Then — harder — think about the last five at-need families you served who had no preneed at all. Had anyone from your firm ever spoken to them about it?
In most of the independents I work with across NC, the answer is no. Not because staff are unwilling, but because there is no rhythm to it. Preneed becomes the thing you do when someone specifically asks. That is not a program. That is order-taking. A healthy program has a repeatable moment — after aftercare follow-up, at community events, during specific arrangement conversations — where preneed is offered in a natural, non-pressured way.
If you cannot describe your firm's rhythm in one sentence, you do not have one yet. That is the honest finding, and it is the most valuable thing this self-audit can surface.
What to do with what you found
If you answered all five questions cleanly and the numbers look reasonable, your program is probably in better shape than most in the state. Keep doing what you are doing, and put these five questions on your calendar for the same week next year.
If two or more questions gave you a sinking feeling, that is useful information — not a crisis. Preneed programs do not fail overnight and they do not get fixed overnight either. Pick the one issue that would hurt worst if the state walked in tomorrow — usually records or reconciliation — and start there. The other pieces get easier once your foundation is honest.
Duane Cutlip is a Licensed Preneed Funeral Director serving independent North Carolina funeral homes. This article reflects his field experience working with programs across NC.