First it was the rise in cremations. Now Bill Backman III and his clients at Aurora Casket Co. Inc. are competing with mass retailers like Wal-Mart, Costco and even Amazon.com for casket sales.
You would think trends like these would be difficult to deal with for the nation’s largest, privately held casket manufacturer, but it’s all about how you approach it.
Backman has embraced the climb in cremations and spun the big-box competition to its advantage by not only supplying a product but spotlighting the additional support services it and its clients offer.
The result is an uptick in Aurora’s revenue, and casket manufacturing accounts for 20 percent of that growth.
“If you view it as a challenge, you become stale, you become stagnant and you become ineffective,” says Backman, president and one of the company’s owners. “When you view it as an opportunity, you’re thriving, you’re moving forward, you’re a winner.”
But before you can take your best shot at creating opportunities from changing trends, you have to spot them.
A family-owned company established in 1890, Aurora puts value on the fact that it doesn’t want to be a vendor — it wants to be your partner. And it’s those strongly developed customer relationships that help it identify trends.
“You have to have that partnership relationship with them,” Backman says of customers. “You have to understand where they’re going, what their goals are, what they want to accomplish, and you have to be able to execute the things that are pertinent to them. It’s a very delicate balance because you have to stay within what your strategy foundation is, what your vision and what your mission is to do that.”
If you are collecting the right data from your customers and the market, you can position your company to stay one step ahead of industry-changing trends that could threaten your company.
