The company has shifted from once having ambitious growth plans to now repeatedly lowering targets and still struggling to achieve them. It remains stuck in a 20th-century mindset when it comes to marketing and customer communications, particularly over the phone, while placing far too much faith in a “game-changing” app that has taken over two years to develop. At the same time, there appears to be little interest in exploring far simpler and lower-cost opportunities such as webchat, which could drive incremental sales with minimal investment.
There is also a continued willingness to outsource sales activity and pay significant commissions to third-party providers and panel sales companies, while showing little appetite to invest internally in building an in-house sales function that could likely operate more effectively and at a lower long-term cost.
The recent advertising campaign was heavily promoted internally, yet failed to acknowledge a fundamental issue: the messaging is overly complicated for the target customer base to easily understand. Even the CEO admitted during an employee update that he did not initially understand the adverts himself, which perhaps should have been a warning sign from the outset.
Progress on key growth opportunities has also been painfully slow. Despite knowing for years that the funeral product offering represents one of the clearest opportunities for meaningful business growth, it has taken nearly three years to get the package anywhere close to market-ready.
Internally, there is also a growing disconnect between leadership expectations and operational reality. Employees are now expected to attend the office three days a week despite there not being enough desks available on many days, while meaningful project work and innovation continue to rely on the same small group of people rather than being more broadly supported across the business.
