Marlan Gary started his first funeral home in 2007. By 2016, his business was growing, but he knew he needed better technology to manage his operations.

Since partnering with Passare, Marlan’s business has grown from a single rooftop to 5 locations across Ohio, including a recently opened crematory.

Today, Marlan Gary Funeral Homes serves nearly 900 families a year. By connecting Passare’s collaboration tools and deep integrations with Funeral Directors Life, Marlan moved away from his self-described "hot mess" of disconnected systems to a professional operation that puts families first.

How has your experience been with Passare over the last decade?

I could not imagine running my business without Passare. Just the whole collaboration is great. But more than that, I love that no matter where I am, whether I'm at one of our locations, at home, or in my car, I can access information at the drop of a hat.

If I'm talking to a family and I'm at home, I can have productive conversations with them without saying, “Can we wait till 9:00 in the morning?” It's definitely a godsend.

How does Passare help you maintain transparency with your families?

Passare makes the arrangement process seamless. Everything is at the tip of my fingers. What I love most is that Passare allows us to be transparent with the families.

We're entering the information into Passare as we make the arrangements, so families can see if we make a mistake. We pull up a package, and families can see that their price matches our general price list. There's no bait-and-switch, so just being very transparent with families is a plus.

Why is it important for funeral homes to innovate, and how does Passare help you do that?

I believe Passare has a really good pulse on the funeral service industry. Passare doesn’t just handle one area of the business. They handle every part of our funeral home business.

Passare works with funeral homes from all over the country, and you're able to take experiences from every funeral home that you do business with to help improve the experience. Just finding that we're not going through anything different here in Ohio than a funeral home is in North Carolina is comforting. I know the relationships Passare has with other funeral homes help my business as well.

What are your favorite features for managing multiple locations?

I would probably say the tagging feature, notes, and checklists. Those are probably my 3 favorite features.

While I'm meeting with a family, we have our own in-house floral shop, event center, and print shop. As I'm meeting with them, I'm tagging my media team. That entire team knows what kind of program the family wants, the color scheme, and who the contact person is.

Same with our flower shop. It’s done in real time, and I don't have to think about it anymore. I don't have to sit there days later saying, “Did I order those flowers?” I know I did because I was able to tag them right then and there, and they were immediately notified.

How do the integrations with Tukios and ASD impact your daily operations?

I love the integration with Tukios and our website. It is so convenient to sync obituaries and updates. As soon as I finished meeting with a family today, I synced to Tukios, and all I need to do now is go to the website's backend and make it live. It takes 2 minutes to do.

With ASD (Answering Service for Directors), we put a service in Passare, and if a family calls late at night, ASD can answer a lot of those questions.

How has the integration with Funeral Directors Life changed how you manage your business?

Specifically, our accounting process was a hot mess before partnering with Funeral Directors Life.

We had several people who didn't work with us full-time, and we were reaching out to pull reports together for the end of the year. It was stressful.

Now, I don't even think about it. I have people working for and working with me. I look forward to the Zoom meetings to see the growth over the years. We can look and say, “This is where I was this time last year,” and make adjustments quickly.

How has your experience been with Premium Support?

I love Premium Support. I emailed a request yesterday and 2 others today, and the team was right on it. I rely heavily on the responsive team, who understand what I'm looking for and get me what I need in a timely fashion.

Premium Support also helps us when we hire new people at the funeral home. It reduces onboarding time because we have someone at Passare who can sit down and train them.

Passare and FDL seem to work well together for your funeral home. Would you recommend them to a colleague?

Why work with a marketing team across town, an accountant in another city, and a software company across the country when you can have all of this in one place? You have access to marketing, financing, and analysts at the tip of your finger.

If you have more than one funeral director or more than one rooftop and you're trying to grow your business, why not work with a team that has all of that?

After you make the decision to partner with Passare, you won’t second-guess it. You will soon realize the amazing range of features at your fingertips, and then you won’t remember how to operate without them.

About the funeral home:

Marlan Gary Funeral Homes is located in Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, and serves around 900 families each year.

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