Horan & McConaty

Horan & McConaty (H&M) was founded by John Horan, who believed that his funeral home's most valuable asset was its strong reputation for providing high quality service to families of the deceased. Leveraging this reputation, H&M grew from two locations in 1986 to seven locations serving the entire Denver metro area.​

Scaling Broke What Made Them Successful

As H&M opened new locations, expanded its geographic footprint, and hired additional employees, it encountered difficulties in scaling its culture, processes, and management leadership training. With these challenges came poor communication, conflict between departments, functional silos, and employee dissatisfaction. Valuable employees became frustrated and left the company.​

Not surprisingly, these problems hurt the quality of H&M's service to its customers, dragging down customer satisfaction and, along with it, H&M's reputation. As a result, H&M's costs rose while revenues and profitability fell. The pressure of the work compounded the dysfunction. "When you think of planning a funeral, think about planning a wedding. But wedding and funerals, you know opposite ends of the spectrum, I get it. But most people take anywhere from four to nine months to plan a wedding—we're planning the same amount of detail for you in three to five days," one funeral director explained about the intensity.​

Panicking Every Day, Serving Families Poorly

"Just imagine sitting in front of a family, who they've lost their loved ones. We are seeing a family when they come in at their very worst. A lot of people don't know, you know, they don't experience death every day," a director described the emotional stakes. Yet the organizational structure made it impossible to serve families well consistently. "We can't determine when death is going to occur. We can't determine when instead of serving two families, we're going to serve 20 families. You want every family to be served well. But sometimes we couldn't," an employee admitted.​

"We are a funeral home that panics every time we take the new call. We recognize it, but we didn't do anything about it because we didn't know what to do about it," one team member confessed about the helplessness.​

Three Functions at War

The internal conflict came to a head in 2013, when the three core functions—funeral directors, scheduling, and operations—stopped working effectively with each other. The funeral directors complained that they were not in charge of their own schedules; the scheduling team blamed the funeral directors for providing poor service; and the operations team blamed the funeral directors for all the company's problems.​

"I refer to the way we were as this one team. One, you know, one company one team, which sounds great except what it was like was keeping track and the busiest person won," one leader described the competitive dynamic. The geographic spread created impossible conditions: "We're a large organization. We have seven traditional funeral homes here in the Denver Metro area. The way we did things it required funeral directors to travel every single day. You came in rushed for the meeting—when you maybe came in late. You came in not ready. Or were ready 30 seconds before they walked in the door."​

The rushed approach prevented the care families deserved: "Takes time to actually go in and visit a person's life," one director noted about what they couldn't provide. "Every day that you come into the funeral service is an unknown," another explained about the unpredictability.​ 

Two-Day Workshop and Internal Facilitators

Realizing the risk such problems posed for the organization, H&M's leadership turned to Arbinger for help. After conducting exploratory work to assess the situation, Arbinger proposed an initial two-day workshop for management leadership training. Afterwards, two of H&M's leaders were selected to become internal facilitators who could train and support the rest of H&M's employees.​

"That's when we brought in Arbinger. We did the full training. It was like kind of drinking from a fire hose. And to see people as people, to understand their hopes dreams and desires, I'd never considered that before," one leader recalled about the workshop. The training sparked a fundamental shift in perspective: "I was thinking about the outward mindset from my own personal relationships, my one-on-ones, but I never considered the outward mindset in terms of our organization. As I considered that, we started to think differently."​

Systems Inviting Inward Mindset

The management leadership training had a significant impact on H&M's leaders. They began to systematically apply Arbinger's self-awareness, mindset-change, and collaboration tools. These tools helped them re-examine the persistent conflict among scheduling, operations, and the funeral directors. Leaders in each function began to ask how they themselves might be contributing to the problem and to start looking for ways that they could better support each other.​

"And I realized that the way we've been set up, the way we were organized, it does invite inward mindset behaviors. There really wasn't this collaboration, there wasn't this coordination," one leader explained about the structural problem. Another reflected: "I thought, 'I wonder what I'm missing here, and how I can truly help others be successful?'"​

Listening Revealed Hidden Data

H&M's leaders also started to carefully listen to the needs of employees across the company, learning things that they had never known about their employees' day-to-day work. This newfound understanding led them to reconsider policies, procedures, and common practices as well as examine data that they had previously ignored.​

The leadership team was surprised to discover that the funeral director with the highest customer satisfaction scores and greatest revenue generation was the newest in the company. After digging deeper, they realized that this high performer was working with two funeral homes located 20 minutes apart from each other. Other funeral directors were responsible for multiple sites that were more widely dispersed.​

When asked what made her so effective, the new funeral director confirmed that she benefited greatly by having only two locations and minimal travel time. This setup had allowed her to quickly develop positive relationships with the staff at both locations, become intimately familiar with the differences and specific needs of each location, develop long-term relationships with families, and to oversee more funerals per day.​

Radical Reorganization

Upon receiving this new information, H&M implemented a companywide change so all funeral directors would work with two funeral homes and have more autonomy over their own schedules. This enabled them to better meet the needs of grieving families while building a more cohesive, concentrated team culture.​

"I think that it was kind of immediate relief. And it seemed so obvious! Let's get right into it. Let's start now," one team member described the reaction. The change transformed daily dynamics: "Now you see these teams that are two ends of the spectrum. But they're on the same team. They take care of each other. But now they're like, 'Nora I know this affects you and what you do.' It's all very much collaborative. Makes a huge difference."​

By placing funeral directors in charge of their own schedules, H&M increased how promptly funerals could be scheduled. They were also able to streamline their company and reduce operating costs by eliminating the scheduling function entirely. Because funeral directors were helped to view their work in terms of how they impact others, and because they spent less time driving between facilities, directors experienced greater empowerment and motivation.​

From Avoiding Calls to Welcoming Them

Rather than avoiding calls from bereaved families, they now welcomed those calls. They also began volunteering to help colleagues and train new hires—tasks that had previously been neglected. "It's not about the 'busiest person wins' any longer, it's about taking care of the work and getting the work done and doing it really well," one employee described the shift.​

The cultural change created lasting buy-in. "And I've been here a long time and I've seen concepts come and go. And I just don't think that there was a lot of buy-in. This one has buy-in," a veteran employee emphasized about the difference.​

Company-Wide Collaboration

The positive change wasn't limited to management leadership training for funeral directors alone. With Arbinger's help, H&M experienced a cultural shift where employees across the company began seriously evaluating their impact on coworkers and customers. Teams began spontaneously collaborating to meet the needs of families and each other.​

The reorganization enabled directors to truly serve families: "They can focus on this family, and they will less likely actually see this family as an object," one leader noted about the shift from rushed transactions to genuine care.​

Measurable Improvements

Key indicators tracked by the firm improved from these changes. Clients' ranking of H&M's "Support and Follow-up" improved by 10%, and H&M's Net Promoter Score (NPS) showed a commensurate increase of 10% as well. Tangible benefits were also experienced within the organization. As a result of providing improved service through increased collaboration, employee satisfaction, and engagement improved while overtime and employee turnover were significantly reduced.​

According to H&M's CFO Dan Frakes, "We discovered that there is a direct correlation between collaboration and decreasing costs." With lower costs and higher revenues, H&M is now more profitable than ever and is growing the collaborative culture that the families they serve depend upon.​

Horan & McConaty proved that you can't solve operational dysfunction by adding coordination layers—sometimes you need to eliminate functions entirely and trust people with autonomy. When growth from two to seven Denver funeral homes created departmental warfare, the company panicked with every new call, directors rushed into meetings unprepared, and service quality collapsed. Funeral directors blamed scheduling for controlling their calendars, scheduling blamed directors for poor service, and operations blamed directors for everything.

Traditional management would optimize the scheduling function—instead, Arbinger's two-day workshop helped leaders ask what they were missing about employee needs. Examining previously ignored data revealed the newest director had highest satisfaction and revenue because she only served two nearby locations, enabling relationship-building and focus. This insight prompted radical reorganization: give all directors two-location territories and schedule autonomy. The result: H&M eliminated the scheduling function entirely, reduced operating costs, increased NPS 10%, improved "Support and Follow-up" ratings 10%, and transformed directors from avoiding family calls to welcoming them and volunteering to help colleagues. CFO discovered "direct correlation between collaboration and decreasing costs."

The lesson: you can't fix dysfunction caused by organizational structure through better coordination when the structure itself invites inward mindset behaviors. Reorganize to shrink people's scope, reduce travel, enable relationships, and give autonomy—and collaboration, costs, and customer satisfaction follow naturally.