This week I was joined by Vince Roberge, Senior Business Consultant at Johnson Consulting Group, to talk about Johnson Consulting Group’s Leadership and Management Program, taking place October 13–15 in Scottsdale, Arizona. Vince has been a facilitator with the program since it’s inception in 2019. Since that debut, Leadership and Management continues to evolve to and sharpen the content as the profile of participants is a wide range. As Vince says, “It’s forcing up to deliver our best.” This fall, he welcomes Jim La Mar, Senior Business Consultant, to join him as co-facilitator. The mix of new voices keeps pushing the material forward.
I asked Vince the biggest shift he sees in leaders following the program. It isn’t a single metric, it’s confidence. Participates have clarity on what changes need to happen and a timeline for implementation. The ongoing coaching and relationship with Johnson Consulting Group help to provide accountability. It’s not uncommon for many firms represented to use the program goals as part of larger succession plan, building capability in both current and next generation leaders.
When it comes to hard numbers, Vince pointed to a handful of levers including average contract value. Once a firm starts actually watching a metric, it tends to improve. Vince has also seen real movement in cremation-with-service percentages, tracking how many at-need families who select cremation choose some form of memorialization versus none at all. Vince stresses that looking at that number by individual arranger, not just by location, often uncovers surprising gaps in confidence or experience in the arrangement room.
Less flashy but just as impactful, in Vince’s view: structured, frequent communication. Participants who go home and start doing regular one-on-ones with their teams see downstream effects on everything from customer satisfaction scores to financial performance.
I asked Vince to walk us through the program process for someone who arrives with poor financial visibility. Often it starts with simply getting the right tools in place. That could be Performance Tracker or an improved and cleaner approach to accounting. From there, the real “aha” tends to be around coding: how a firm classifies a traditional burial versus a cremation with memorial service, and how it treats pre-funded contracts when budgeting revenue. Vince shared an important benchmark to consider: if a participant leaves with a basic ability to build and manage an operating budget, the financial half of the program has done its job. When people get lost, Vince brings them back to the simplest equation there is; profit equals revenue minus expenses.
When I asked for advice that’s simple on paper but hard in practice, Vince didn’t hesitate: holding employees accountable. Funeral directors, he noted, tend to be wired for agreeableness rather than confrontation, which makes tough conversations easy to avoid. The program uses the DISC/Talent Insights assessment on day one, partly as an icebreaker and partly to help leaders see their own tendencies clearly, including whether they lean toward avoiding hard conversations, and what that costs a team’s culture over time.
We talked in depth about implementing new pricing strategies. One of the most concrete examples Vince shared involved a client with strong brand awareness that was hesitant to raise prices on its low-cost cremation offering. After calculating the numbers comparing the revenue impact of losing some price-sensitive families against the gain from a modest price increase — the firm moved forward with a couple-hundred-dollar increase. A year later, volume was still strong; the fear of losing significant business simply didn’t materialize, because service experience and reputation mattered more to families than price alone.
Closing out, Vince addressed the leadership gaps he’s watching heading into next year: keeping leadership teams aligned in an era of information overload, and preparing for the wave of ownership transitions expected over the next five to ten years. His take is ultimately an optimistic one; success will come from pairing the institutional knowledge of exiting owners with the energy of emerging leaders.
If this conversation resonated, there’s no substitute for experiencing it firsthand. The Fall 2026 Leadership and Management Program runs October 13–15 in Scottsdale, and this session includes a new addition: cremation phone training, which I’ll be facilitating using a train-the-trainer approach so participants can bring the tools straight back to their teams.
Join us next month when we sit down with Taylor Clifford, JCG’s Program Manager for Client Engagement, to talk about what your funeral customer data can tell you heading into 2027.
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