the johnny renaissance files

The Old Story About AI Is Already Dead

I had a conversation recently with one of the leading website providers in death care. He told me they’re doing four months worth of platform development in two weeks. Directly because of AI. Let that sink in. Four months. Two weeks. That’s a signal. And if you’re a funeral home owner and you’re not picking up on it yet, this post is for you. Your website was never just a website. When I first got to Frasier Consultants, I called it what it actually was — online real estate. Not a brochure. Not a digital business card. Real estate. Something you own, something you build equity in, something that works for you when you’re not in the room. That framing was true then. It’s more true now. Because everything that platform touches — your marketing, your lead generation, your preneed program, your ability to connect with families before a death call ever comes in — all of it runs through that digital foundation. And the ground beneath it is shifting fast. The fear narrative is a distraction. The media has one gear when it comes to AI: fear. AI is taking jobs. AI is replacing people. AI is the end of everything. Some of that will prove true in some corners. I won’t pretend otherwise. But the fuller story…the one the reports are actually telling, is that AI is going to create more opportunity than it destroys. More jobs. More leverage. More ways to build something that actually scales and produced more growth. In your business. Inside your career. And in the economy itself. I mean that’s already happening. The funeral homes paying attention right now are going to have an enormous advantage over the ones who waited for permission to act. The danger isn’t the technology. It’s the wrong partner. Here’s where I want to slow down, because this is important. There are a lot of people selling AI solutions right now. Some of them know what they’re doing. Many of them don’t. The space is full of noise, and making the wrong call here doesn’t just cost you money, it costs you time, it costs you momentum, and it can genuinely set your operation backwards. You need someone who understands the death care profession. Who understands preneed. Who understands what it actually takes to drive growth inside a funeral home and build the kind of systems that produce consistent results. Not a generalist with a deck. A partner with context and a track record. What I’m seeing in the field. Some of the accounts I’ve taken on over the last year and a half, two years — their growth has been real. The work has been real. And a big part of that growth has come from building the right technology foundation underneath everything else. Lead generation systems. Marketing infrastructure. Appointment setting. Preneed program development. All of it connected. All of it working together. That’s what’s available to you right now. That’s what’s possible. But you have to start somewhere. The move. If you’re sitting on this and thinking about it, knowing you need to do something, just not sure what the next step looks like, that’s exactly the conversation I want to have with you. Send me a DM over on LinkedIn [https://linkedin.com/in/john-ashworth]. And I’ll keep dropping content here on the ash flash as it develops. More podcasts are coming on this subject soon. This one was just the opening shot. Don’t wait on this. -Johnny Renaissancetheashflash.com #PreNeed #FuneralHome #DeathCare #FuneralIndustry #CommandPreneedOps This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theashflash.substack.com/subscribe [https://theashflash.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Time Integrity Code

You don’t have a time problem. You have a space problem. And until you understand the difference, no productivity app, no morning routine, no motivational quote pinned above your desk is going to save you. Here’s what I mean. Most people…funeral home owners, preneed agents, directors wearing seventeen hats, spend their days convinced that more time is the answer. If I just had one more hour. One more day. One less fire to put out. But time really isn’t the constraint. Space is. The mental and operational space to actually pursue what matters. Most people don’t have a shortage of hours. They have a shortage of intention about what those hours are for. We all get the same 24. That’s not a motivational slogan. That’s math. What separates the people who build something remarkable from the ones who stay perpetually busy and perpetually stuck isn’t access to more hours. It’s what they do with the ones they already have. And in this business especially, where death calls don’t ask for your digital calendar link, where families show up in crisis without warning, where the at-need world can flip your day upside down before your coffee gets cold, the temptation to just react is overwhelming. Most days it wins. But here’s the shift I want you to make. Stop jumping into your day as a responder. Start entering it as a builder. That’s the foundation of what I like call the Time Integrity Code. It starts with two questions. They sound almost embarrassingly simple. But simple isn’t the same as easy, and the gap between knowing something and actually doing it is where most ambitions go to die. Point A: Where am I right now? Point B: Where do I want to go? If you can’t answer both of those clearly, you’re not managing time. You’re just spending it. And like any currency you spend without a budget, it disappears faster than you think and you have very little to show for it at the end of the day. “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” That quote has been attributed to everyone from Lewis Carroll to Yogi Berra. Doesn’t matter who said it. It’s true. And in the context of building a preneed program, growing a funeral home, or trying to actually lead an operation instead of just survive one, it’s critical. Busy does not equal productive. Write that somewhere. Say it out loud if you have to. Busy is easy. Productive is hard. And in this industry, we have an almost pathological attachment to being busy, as if the busyness itself is proof of value. It’s not. It’s often just proof of poor systems and an inability to protect your time from people who haven’t learned to protect their own. So where do you start? The same place every good system starts. With data. Spend one week — just one — tracking where your time actually goes. Every hour. Every task. Every interruption. You will be uncomfortable with what you find. I promise you that. The emails, the scrolling, the meetings that didn’t need to happen, the “got a minute” ambushes that somehow ate forty-five minutes of your morning before you even had a chance to think. Chet Holmes wrote about this. The “got a minute” meeting is one of the most destructive forces in any business. Your staff, your colleagues, your well-meaning acquaintances…they are happy to spend your time. They don’t mean harm by it. But harm is what it does. My answer to “Got a minute, John?” is no. Get your thoughts organized. Put something on my calendar when there’s an opening. Come ready to work. Gary V put it more bluntly, “I don’t want to eat bagels for fifteen minutes before we get to the point. Let’s just get to the point.” That sounds harsh. It isn’t. It’s respect for your time, for their time, and for the work that actually needs to get done. Once you’ve tracked a week honestly, plan with intention. Every hour. Yes, even your relaxation time. This isn’t rigidity. It’s awareness. When you assign a purpose to a block of time, you change your relationship to it. You stop drifting into it and you start showing up for it. Work time, rest, family, business development, spiritual practice, and learning — all of it earns a block. All of it matters. And when you can see it mapped out, you can also see where you’ve been lying to yourself about priorities. Then build in flex. Murphy was right. Things go sideways. In funeral service, they go sideways more than in most industries. Think of flex time like the shoulder of a highway. It’s there when you need it, but it doesn’t slow down the main flow of traffic. You can use it strategically when you need to. Block ten to twenty percent of your day for the unexpected. On some days, especially in this business, it’ll eat more than that. When it does, get back on track as fast as you can. Follow the money. Follow your Point B. There’s a trap that catches most people right around the time they start to get things under control. It’s the productivity trap, and it’s seductive because it feels like progress. You can answer every email. Attend every meeting. Check every box on your to-do list. And still end the day having moved nothing meaningful forward. That’s not productivity. That’s performance. You performed busy. You didn’t build anything. The question worth asking every single morning is this: what is the one thing I can do today that will have the biggest impact on where I’m trying to go? Not the five things. Not the ten. The one. Do that first. Everything else lines up behind it. Most of us can genuinely focus on three to five real priorities in a day. Beyond that, everything else is noise. It competes for attention and it usually wins, because distractions are engineered to be compelling and our goals require something distractions don’t. That’s called discipline. That sixth thing will always feel justified. It might be a long-standing client who needs something. A colleague with a request. An opportunity that feels urgent. It could be anything. But it’s the thing you have to learn to ignore. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because you’ve already committed to what matters more. When you protect that space, you get the time back. When you don’t, it’s gone and you feel the weight of it at the end of every week, wondering where everything went. Warren Buffett doesn’t spend time on his second tier. He’s famous for this. Twenty-five goals, circle your top five, avoid everything else like the plague. Ruthless? Absolutely. But Buffett didn’t build what he built by being agreeable with distractions. Technology belongs in this conversation, and I want to be direct about it. It can be your greatest asset or your biggest enemy. Your phone is the most powerful distraction delivery system ever created. If it buzzes every five minutes, you are not in control of your day, your notifications are. Turn off what doesn’t need your immediate attention. Treat your calendar like appointments with your most important client, because that’s what they are. Automate what’s repetitive so your brain isn’t burning energy on tasks that don’t require it. And find a system to organize what you’re building. I use Notion. I couldn’t run what I run without it. The more preneed partners I take on, the more I need a single place where everything lives and nothing gets lost. If you’re a smaller funeral home sitting on the fence about a full case management platform, before you make that leap, try Notion. You might find it’s all you need to get organized and start moving. So let me bring this back to where we started. You don’t have a time problem. You have a space problem. And space isn’t created by working harder or finding extra hours. It’s created by getting ruthlessly honest about Point A, crystal clear on Point B, and building the structure between them with real intention. A good plan today beats a perfect plan tomorrow. I know how that sounds. A little cheesy, maybe. But the truth embedded in it is real. Perfect is always the enemy of done. And done…actually moving, actually building, actually getting somewhere…is what creates the compounding results that change a business. What’s your Point B? If you’re still figuring that out, or you know where you want to go but the system isn’t there yet, that’s exactly what I built Think Different for. The digital copy drops at the end of this week. Everything I’ve put into the CommandPreneed Ops framework, the preneed infrastructure, the marketing and sales systems…it’s all in there. Subscribe to theashflash.com [https://theashflash.substack.com/subscribe]; and I’ll send you an email with the link where you can download it. Get on the list. Be there when it lands. — Johnny Renaissance This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theashflash.substack.com/subscribe [https://theashflash.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Everybody’s a Salesperson. Most Just Haven’t Figured That Out Yet.

I was driving down to Chicago Saturday. West Loop. Going to see my kids. Seventy degrees, which in Wisconsin in the spring feels like somebody handed you a gift you didn’t ask for and couldn’t be more grateful to receive. And as I’m cruising through Illinois, what am I thinking about? Sales. Obviously. 🤓 Because over the last month I have run into an almost comical parade of bad salespeople. And before you hit me with the AI is going to replace everyone speech, let me stop you right there. You would not say that if you had spent time in the field lately. You would not say that if you’d watched a real salesperson walk into a room, read it in about 30 seconds, and walk out with a signed deal and a customer who is already planning to refer their friends. AI is not doing that. Not today. Not ever, if we’re being honest about what sales actually is. The Real Job Here’s what I believe about sales, and I’ve believed this for a long time. Every single day, as a salesperson, you have the opportunity to create the best interaction another person has had all day. That’s the job. That’s the whole job. Not the close, not the commission, not the quota. The connection. People are terrible listeners. That is not a cynical observation, that is just the truth. Most people in any conversation are waiting to talk, not actually hearing what’s in front of them. As a salesperson, that is your competitive advantage. Shut up. Listen. Actually hear what the person across from you is telling you. Pick your moments. Let them talk. Most of the time, the sale is sitting right there in what they just said, if you were paying attention. My late friend Eric used to say, John, you could sell anything. He was right. And the reason isn’t some magic trick or a silver tongue. It’s because I genuinely want to know what’s going on with you. What do you need? What are you worried about? What would make your life better right now? If you can get to that, you can sell anything to anyone. The Commission-Only Crucible I spent about 25 years in health and fitness. Clinical exercise physiologist, master’s degree, the whole thing. I was good at it. I was also burning out, and I knew I wasn’t doing it until I was 80. I’m going to work until I’m 80, but it was not going to be that. So when we bought a Toyota Highlander from Smart Toyota here in Madison, and the experience was genuinely excellent, I thought to myself, I want to be inside that system. I want to learn how this works. So I went and sold cars. And then I moved to Lexus of Madison, where I spent three years learning things about people, about selling, and about myself that I could not have learned any other way. The other day I was talking to a young guy who was thinking about getting into car sales. I told him something that stopped him cold. I said: every single person, you included, should have to go work 100% commission for at least a year or two. He looked at me like I’d told him to jump off a bridge. I meant every word of it. Because here’s what 100% commission does to you. It removes the safety net. When you have to sell in order to eat, you get serious about selling. You stop overthinking the approach and start actually engaging. You get your nose bloodied. You feel like you got beat up on the drive home. You come back the next morning anyway. Picture this. It’s the last day of the month. You need 10 cars to hit the bonus. You’re sitting at 9. You’ve got 8 to 12 hours, no prospects on the books, and the whole thing rides on what happens today. That is pressure that will either crack you or forge you. There is no in-between. I came out the other side of four years in car sales saying it was the best part of my career. Not in spite of how hard it was. Because of it. You’re Already Selling Here’s what I want you to take away from all of this. You are already a salesperson. All of us are. You sell your way into jobs. You sell your way into relationships. You sell ideas to your team, your partners, your kids. The question isn’t whether you’re selling. The question is whether you’re any good at it. And if you’re not working on it, you’re not getting better at it. It’s a skill. It sharpens with practice and attention. Most people treat it like a personality trait you either have or you don’t. That’s wrong. I’ve watched people transform themselves into genuinely great salespeople because they decided to take it seriously and actually do the work. You don’t have to be as obsessed as I am. Most people aren’t, and that’s fine. But you cannot ignore it and expect to advance. You cannot sidestep it and expect to build the career or the life you actually want. AI is not coming for the great salespeople. If anything, it’s going to make them more valuable, because when everything is automated and commoditized and delivered through a screen, the person who can sit across from someone, actually listen, and build a real connection is going to stand out like a searchlight. That person can be you. Go sell something today. johnny renaissance This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theashflash.substack.com/subscribe [https://theashflash.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

You’re Fixing the Wrong Part of Your Marketing

Most funeral homes are trying to fix their marketing at the top of the stack. Campaigns. Postcards. Facebook ads. All surface level stuff. And I get it, because that’s where the visible problems are. Leads aren’t coming in. Pre-need contracts aren’t getting signed. So you go looking for the next campaign, the next vendor promise, the next silver bullet. But the real opportunity isn’t up there. It’s in the foundation underneath it. Why Pre-Need Keeps Feeling Unfulfilling Here’s the pattern I see over and over again. You bring in a pre-need vendor. They make big promises. Things start okay. And then slowly, quietly, the results fall short. Again. And you’re left wondering why. It’s not always the vendor’s fault. The real problem is that nobody, not the vendor, not you, not your team ever built the infrastructure that needs to exist underneath the program. Without that foundation, every campaign you run is just noise. Expensive, exhausting noise. Sure, you’ll produce some sales, but you’ll never have the system you need to crush it. The Information Is Already There. It’s Just Stuck. Here’s what’s wild about most funeral homes I work with. The foundation already exists. It’s just locked inside the heads of the owner, the funeral director who’s been there 25 years, the office manager who knows every family by name. It lives in Excel spreadsheets, in filing cabinets, in someone’s memory. And when that person walks out the door? So does everything they know. That’s the real crisis. Not your Facebook ad performance. The Questions Your System Should Be Able to Answer When you build the right infrastructure, something powerful starts to happen. You can suddenly answer questions like: * Who in this community has shown interest in funeral planning at our funeral home, and when? * Who attended a seminar three years ago, and why didn’t they fund their pre-need contract at that time? * Who downloaded a planning guide, and when? * Who should hear from us this month, and how? * Who is connected to which families? When you can answer those questions, marketing stops feeling like promotion. It starts feeling like stewardship. That’s not a small shift. That’s everything. This Is Where AI Actually Makes Sense for Your Funeral Home Everyone’s using the obituary writing tools. A lot of you are using ChatGPT or Claude for your own writing and thinking. But the question I keep getting is: What should I actually be working on, John? What’s going to make the biggest difference for my funeral home? Here’s my answer. Build the database first. Not the website. Not the new case management platform. Not the pre-need automation tool you saw at the convention. The database. The vault. The library of everything you know about your community, your families, your history, your relationships. Because once that infrastructure is in place? AI becomes a multiplier. Without it, AI is just another shiny object. The Problem With Outsourcing Your Pre-Need Program There are companies that will take control of your pre-need program and run it for you. And honestly? They can be effective. But ask yourself this: how does that secure the future of your funeral home? You get the contracts. You get the future business. But you miss the larger opportunity of building an infrastructure that gives you leverage and independence as the industry changes. And it is going to change. Drastically. Faster than most people are ready for. The funeral homes that are going to win aren’t the ones that outsourced everything and hoped for the best. They’re the ones who took the time to build the foundation. Start Here Your database matters right now. Not someday. Not after you figure out the tech stack. Not once you’re less busy. Right now. Start getting what’s in people’s heads into organized systems. Excel spreadsheets, a simple CRM, Notion — I don’t care what you use to start. Just start. Because the first step in taking advantage of AI for your funeral home isn’t buying a new tool. It’s building something worth connecting a tool to. If you’re not working on this yet, reach out. And make sure you’re subscribed here on The Ash Flash. The book is coming, the frameworks are going in it, and subscribers get first access. John Ashworth — Johnny Renaissance — Pre-Need Growth Expert This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theashflash.substack.com/subscribe [https://theashflash.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The light bill no one saw coming...

A Sunday morning riff sparked by a Barron’s piece: AI is not just a “tech story.” It is a civilization-scale infrastructure buildout already underway. Data centers under construction are projected to consume electricity on the scale of an entire country, and the long-term winners may be the quiet regional utilities signing decade-plus contracts with the largest tech companies. Meanwhile, consumers are already feeling the pinch as electricity bills climb, and politics is heating up. For funeral home owners, the message is simple: the AI infrastructure is being built right now, leverage is real, and small, practical AI use can give a small team the output of a much larger one. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theashflash.substack.com/subscribe [https://theashflash.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]