Jason and Nicola Threadgold: How Two Funeral Directors Built a Growing Business on Empathy

It was the middle of lockdown when Jason Threadgold went food shopping for a bereaved family. An elderly woman had lost her husband. Her daughter was disabled, and the son who managed her finances lived in another country. She had no money for the funeral and nothing in the cupboards. Jason felt it was his duty to get them fed first. He admits he wasn't quite expecting the length of the shopping list she handed him.

A few years later, the same woman was dying in a local hospice with nobody to sit with her. So Jason and his wife Nichola went and sat with her themselves. She died the next day.

None of this appears on an invoice, and none of it was done with an eye on the balance sheet. Yet it sits at the centre of how the Threadgolds have grown their funeral business from a single home to five in 12 years, with a team of 30 and a customer service award along the way. Their argument, made across a long conversation on the ActionCOACH Business Growth Podcast, is one that business owners in any sector should hear. In an industry where nobody wants to be a customer and trust is hard to come by, growth comes from solving people's problems and keeping your word. Selling barely comes into it.

"It's not trying to sell a product," Jason says. "We need to solve their problem for them."

Why Solving the Customer's Problem Beats Selling the Product

Jason makes the point with a deliberately ordinary comparison. If you don't have a television, you have a problem, and you go and buy one to solve it. When somebody dies, the family has a problem too, and it is a far heavier one. They need someone to deal with it for them. The business that sees the problem clearly, and takes it off their hands, is the one they trust.

He is careful with the word, though. "Don't treat it as a problem," he says. "Treat it as a challenge that you need to meet and exceed." Once a business does that, people buy into it quickly, and something unusual happens. The Threadgolds have lifelong friends among the families they have served. As Jason puts it, they are selling people a product, yet those people still choose to be their friends.

Ask most owners what makes them different and they will say "our service". Saying it proves nothing. The Threadgolds' service has been recognised publicly, and that recognition was built slowly, one family at a time. Jason is clear that a reputation for care builds over time. Word of mouth is the best way anyone can come to them, and in a line of work where there is no repeat purchase to chase, every funeral has to earn the next recommendation.

Keeping Promises Is How Trust Gets Built in Hard Industries

Ask the Threadgolds how they earn trust and they give two answers that fit together neatly. Nichola starts with communication, and she means something specific by it. In their industry, communication is mostly listening. It is caring, understanding what they can actually do to help, and then going beyond what people expected.

Jason starts somewhere more practical: do what you say you're going to do. It sounds simple, and he knows it isn't. Families who have never arranged a funeral before are sitting at home not knowing what happens next. If a funeral director doesn't respond when they expected, that is where trust slips. "Don't leave people hanging," he says. Keep them in the loop with everything.

Then he goes further. Doing what you promised is the minimum. "People expect something maybe when they come to you," he says, "but what you should be doing is give them what they're not expecting, but what they deserve."

There is a deeper skill underneath all this, and Jason has spent a long career developing it. In a room with a grieving family, people often tell you what they think you want to hear while holding back what they actually need. His job is to read what isn't being said, in body language and tone, and work out how to ease some of the pain they are carrying. "It's not about you," he says. "If you make it about you, then you're the wrong person."

Empathy for Customers Has to Extend to Your Own Team

One of the more honest moments in the conversation comes when Jason talks about the early days of working with his wife. He said something to her in the wrong tone. The words were fine; the delivery wasn't, and it upset her. Nichola describes the lesson simply: they had to learn to work together as husband and wife, and as equals.

Jason describes himself as an "off the scale D" on the DiSC profile, and he has had to accept that not everybody else is. He always had empathy for the families he served. What he had to learn after opening his own business was how to talk to his team, and how they heard what he was saying. A lot of it came down to pace. Not everyone works at his speed, and recognising that was one of his biggest lessons.

This is the part many leaders miss. They save their empathy for customers and take their team for granted. The Threadgolds have turned it into a culture. Everyone in the business learns what everyone else does, an idea Nichola took from reading Southwest Airlines by Jody Hoffer Gittell, which encouraged staff to understand each other's roles and the pressures that come with them. In a business that reacts to events all day, that matters. You can plan your day, then arrive at work and forget the plan because things have happened. It wouldn't be the first time one of their administrators has stepped in as a hearse driver.

Jason's advice for any business with separate teams is to send someone to do work experience in another department. When they come back, they start explaining to their own team how to make things easier for each other.

There is also room for enjoyment, which might surprise people outside the profession. Nichola is careful about this. Nothing is done with any disrespect to the people resting in their care or to the families. But people come to work for seven, eight or nine hours a day, and they can't be sombre for all of it without burning out. The team is close, they have fun, and they support each other. Jason has worked for large companies where you took half the stress home with you. Here, people have been through the same situations and know what to say to each other.

How the Threadgolds Scaled From One Funeral Home to Five

If the first half of the Threadgold story is about empathy, the second half is about discipline. Nichola is the cautious one. She can take a long time to decide whether they should open another funeral home. Jason looks at the numbers, satisfies himself it will work, and wants to get on with it. Before Nichola agrees, he has to put a business plan in front of her. He admits he sometimes needs to slow down, because when he knows something will work, he wants to run headfirst into it.

Their scaling advice is unusually concrete. Do your research, because going in blind will cost you money. Jason describes himself as obsessive about census data: who lives in an area, the age demographics, everything. If an area is underserved for what you offer, he asks, why wouldn't you go there? From there, get the model right, and make sure the numbers and the cashflow mean you can actually afford to grow.

Then comes the tactic that stands out most. When they want a particular building, they knock on the door and ask. Jason's script is plain: if you ever want to come out of this building, please let me know, here's my card. They have done it three times, and all three buildings are now theirs. One took nearly a year to come through, once the owners realised their own business wasn't working. He had already researched that building, on a roundabout, down to how many cars passed it each year. You don't know what is happening inside someone else's business, he points out. They may be desperate to get out of a lease, and your knock could be the answer they needed.

Moving into a new area brings its own test. You open a sweet shop and people can walk in and buy sweets. You open a funeral home and nobody buys from you until somebody has died. It is a waiting game, and the only way through it is to be seen. The Threadgolds have a strong social media following, but the heavier lifting comes from time spent in the community and work for local charities. Jason sees it as a moral point. If you are taking something from a community, you should give something back. Much of it goes unpublicised, and as Jason says, it isn't only about physical things. It is time.

The Hard Lessons: Cashflow, Loneliness and Asking for Help

Asked for their hardest lesson, Jason goes straight to COVID. People assumed funeral directors were somehow insulated from the pandemic's effect on business. They weren't. Overnight, the way people bought funerals changed, and the business had to adapt to a new way of dealing with death and funerals quickly. It hit their cashflow in ways outsiders wouldn't expect. The lesson sits alongside his instinct to just go for things. You still have to be careful, and you still have to know your numbers inside out.

Nichola's answer is more personal. When they set up 12 years ago, her focus was on helping people who were grieving. She hadn't realised how much else came with running a business, from the numbers and the finances to marketing. Getting past the thought "I don't think I can do that" to "I can do this, but I need help to find out how" was the turning point. She also says something many owners feel and few admit: working in business is lonely. She finds it extremely lonely.

Part of their answer was bringing in a business coach, John McHale of ActionCOACH. Nichola says that if it were only the two of them, things might look very different. Having someone outside the business who can talk through the pros and cons, and hold them accountable, gives them a perspective neither can provide on their own.

Why Culture Is the Real Foundation of Growth

The couple's personal dynamic runs through all of this. Nichola is the reader, the one who takes notes on every business book and brings them into planning, because there's no point reading something and doing nothing with it. Jason is the doer, who takes in books as audiobooks sped up while he travels between sites. She describes him as a tornado, with her following behind picking up the pieces and making sure it's right. They respect each other's territory, Jason on the funeral side and Nichola on operations, and they don't argue. The team would know instantly if something was wrong between them.

When asked what any business can learn from theirs, Jason's answer is to be mindful of the people who work alongside you, because they are the ones promoting your business. Take risks, since the best things are on the other side of fear, but look after the people around you while you do it. Don't ditch people as you climb.

Nichola brings it back to where the conversation started. Communication, this time with your own team. It takes a lot of money and time to bring someone into a business, and if they aren't fulfilled and recognised, they will leave. For her, culture is the thing, and it starts with recruitment, because in their work there is no second attempt. "We only get one chance at conducting a funeral," she says. "We can't say, 'Oh, sorry, there was a problem. We'll have to do it again tomorrow.'"

When the right people are in place and enjoy what they do, it shows. Families walk into their funeral homes and feel welcome. That feeling is what brings the next family through the door, and the one after that. It is the reason a woman who once had nothing in her cupboards had company in the hospice, and it is also why the Threadgolds now run five funeral homes.

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