Page A6
SEPTEMBER 2015
FUNERAL HOME & CEMETERY NEWS
S ec t i on A
By Christopher Kuhnen
There’s More
To It...
Advance
Funeral
Planning
A Pre-Need Policy for Your
Pre-Need Insurance Company
Christopher Kuhnen of Edgewood, Kentucky is a 29 year vet-
eran of funeral service. He is perhaps best known as an industry
go-getter and progressive leader. As an insider into excellence,
he is a trustworthy advisor to many funeral home and industry
professionals.
Kuhnen spent a good portion of his career working for a family
owned and operated funeral home and national pre-need sales
and marketing organization. He additionally was the architect and
founder of Funeral Profit Protectors, LLC. Currently he serves as
Vice President of Pre-Need Marketing for the Unity Financial Life
Insurance Company, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Chris is a Kentucky Licensed Funeral Director, Life Insurance
Agent, Certified Pre-Planning Consultant (CPC), Insight Institute
Certified Funeral Celebrant and Certified Marketing Specialist, as
bestowed by the former American Marketing Academy.
Chris can be reached at (859) 307-7223 or cpkuhnen@gmail.com.
By Jay C. Hardy
It’s a scenario not many of us give a second thought to. What
would happen if your pre-need insurance company should be
hit by a major fire, flood or devastating tornado? Are your
pre-need policies safe? Can your pre-need insurance company
continue to do business as usual? To help answer that ques-
tion, I turned to Mr. Jay C. Hardy, President, Unity Finan-
cial Life Insurance Company, Cincinnati, Ohio and asked
him to share what special precautions any pre-need insurance
company should take to be properly prepared.
What happens if, overnight, the Home Office of your
pre-need insurance company is destroyed by a tornado,
fire or flood?
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are major con-
cerns for all insurance companies, including your pre-need
carrier. Most insurance carriers should be able to recover
from any disaster in 24 hours. This means more than just
being able to answer a phone – it means having the full ca-
pability to issue policies, pay claims, transact with the bank
and provide service to customers. How is that possible?
It really comes down to two primary concerns: work-
space and office systems. If your insurance company is
truly prepared for a disaster, they know exactly where they
can relocate and how to activate all of the hardware and
software needed to run the office.
If you were to ask your pre-
need carrier “what happens af-
ter a disaster?” the answer should
be clear and complete. The ide-
al back-up space should be far
enough away from the Home
Office that it is likely to survive
whatever disaster affected the
Home Office, but it needs to be
close enough to the Home Office
that employees can get there in a
couple of hours. Some employ-
ees may end up working from
their residences, but many of the
collaborative functions that take
place in an office benefit from a
cesses. There are many ad-
vantages associated with new
technology like hosted solu-
tions and cloud computing.
These new services can ben-
efit how quickly your compa-
ny can recover and minimize
the amount of data that could
potentially be lost.
Planning for disasters is
expensive, both in terms of
time and resources. The costs
of maintaining a business
continuity plan are borne
by your carrier every year.
The good news is that a well
true office environment.
The more difficult part of the equation is often the timely re-
covery of data and systems. This process is one that is greatly
aided by professional disaster recovery institutions. Many small
companies try to manage their own disaster recovery platforms,
which by industry experience is a very bad idea.
In the language used by professional recovery engineers, the
two important metrics for information recovery are known as
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective
(RPO). RTO addresses how long it takes to recover after a di-
saster; RPO addresses the possible window of lost information.
Your pre-need insurance company should be addressing both
their RTO and RPO, and they should be able to clearly measure
how large or small those time periods are. Companies should ei-
ther have a full back up system that pushes all data off site every
day, or even better, redundant servers in a remote location. Re-
dundant servers reduce the risk of losing data between transfers
and eliminate hours of “spin-up” time in recovery.
How does your pre-need insurance company know if their
Disaster Recovery Plan will actually work? The only way to
truly know is to shut down the Home Office and see how
long it takes to turn every software system on somewhere
else. A strong plan involves mock disasters every year be-
cause software updates often trigger glitches the first time
they are installed on new machines.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery should be a vi-
tal part of your pre-need insurance company’s thought process
when they establish new relationships regarding their data and
telephone services, when they make changes to their existing
IT landscape, and when they change their daily business pro-
thought out plan, when needed, really can work well. In
2003, a pre-need insurance carrier in New Orleans, Loui-
siana was forced to evacuate a day ahead of Hurricane Ka-
trina. The company had a solid plan in place and followed
it just the right way. The entire office moved to Cincinna-
ti, Ohio and set up in prearranged office space. Customers
and agents were amazed that the company was operating
in a “business as usual” way the next day. Can your pre-
need insurance company do that?
A Disaster Recovery space in Columbus, Ohio…just in case.
Eternal Reefs Relocates to Sarasota
Michael R. Gray Funeral
Home takes Delivery of
New Dodge Van
SARASOTA,FL—
Eternal Reefs
has relo-
cated from Decatur, GA to Sarasota, FL.
After 15 years in Georgia, being in Sara-
sota allows the company to be closer to
their strategic partners,
Reef Innovations
and the
Reef Ball Foundation
. For the
first time most of the employees are work-
ing under the same roof, with a new sense
of collaboration. The move has long been
in the works and was finalized this past
June when founder
Don Brawley
relo-
cated to Sarasota, joining CEO
George
the United States Government.
If you have any documentation for fu-
ture plans with Eternal Reefs, please up-
date your records to: Eternal Reefs, Inc.,
PO Box 3811, Sarasota, FL 34236. Eter-
nal Reefs would love to give you a person-
al tour of the new facilities, explain how
Reef Balls are made and show how they
help to preserve and protect the environ-
ment. For more information, call 888-
Frankel
, who made the
move in 2014.
Being in Sarasota will also
make the great service they
provide even more seam-
less, as well as putting the
company closer to the
most popular placement
locations.
Eternal Reefs, Inc. pro-
vides a creative, environ-
mentally enhancing way
to memorialize the cremat-
ed remains of a loved one.
The company incorporates
cremated remains into a
concrete mixture used to
cast artificial reef forma-
tions. The artificial reefs
are dedicated as perma-
nent memorials while also
bolstering natural coast-
al reef formations. Since
1998, the company has
placed more than 1,500
memorial reefs in 20 loca-
tions off the coasts of Flor-
ida, South Carolina, North
Carolina, Maryland, New
Jersey, Texas and Virgin-
ia, substantially increas-
ing the ocean’s diminish-
ing reef systems. Memorial
reefs can only go in prop-
erly permitted locations by
MOREHEAD,KY—
AndrewOwens
(top left),
Mike Gray
(top middle),
Sarah Gray
(bottom left), and
Lisa Gray
(bottom right) of
Michael R. Gray Funeral Home
take
delivery of their new Dodge First Call Van from
John
Muster
(top right) of
Muster Coaches,
Calhoun, KY.
Michael R. Gray Funeral Home, established in 1934
as
Lane Funeral Home,
is a family owned and operated
business by Mike Gray, whose goal is to provide the fam-
ilies throughout Morehead and Rowan County with the
utmost care, respect and dignified service.
