By Thomas A. Parmalee
Lisa Baue’s book “Wake-Up Calls: A Journey of Learning to Lead and Succeed in the Funeral and Deathcare Profession” lives up to its name, with the author candidly sharing moments in her life that allowed her to grow as an individual and leader.
Like all good memoirs – especially those geared for business owners and professionals – hers takes readers into territory that she wishes she never had to explore.
Fittingly, it starts with a literal wakeup call that came at 2 a.m. April 11, 1987, when she learned her father – the owner of Baue Funeral Homes, Crematory and Cemetery in St. Charles, Missouri – had died unexpectedly on his birthday.
When she received that call, she was only 30 years old. While she had been working at the funeral home, she had never run a company before.
“I didn’t know whether the company would continue and we’d all keep our jobs,” she writes. “If it did, would I be the one running it? I didn’t know how I could possibly run this funeral home that had, up until then, been ‘all Dave Baue.’”
Her father did not leave detailed prearrangements, but he had left a letter for her and her brothers to open in the event of his death. Its contents, however, took her off guard.
Of the business, “He told us to sell it, take the money and go live our lives,” she shares.
It was advice she decided not to take.
“All I knew was how to be a funeral director,” she writes. “I didn’t know how to run a business, manage people, or handle the financial side of things. Yet while I knew I had a lot to learn, I wanted the challenge. I wanted to step into the new role.”
It was under those circumstances that Baue took over the business that her grandfather, Arthur Baue, founded in 1935.
At first, she was worried her father’s advice to sell was because he doubted her ability to run the business, but it slowly became clear that death weighed on him in a manner she did not fully appreciate.
As her mother told her later, “This business killed your dad.”
But she was not her father. “It didn’t seem to wear me down emotionally,” she shares. “Except for some of the babies and little children who died, I had been able to handle just about every kind of death we experienced, even the horrific ones – the fires, the accidents, the suicides, the murders. I was more like my mom inside, a doctor and nurse’s daughter who cared for others but was able to do it without fully taking on their grief and mourning.”
After a couple years of running the business, she took steps to buy it, even though when she was initially presented with the price, she thought there was no way she could do it.
“I was a mom of a six-and-a-half-year old, my savings were slim , and my husband and I were just making enough to pay our bills, set aside some in our retirement account, and maybe take a weeklong vacation once a year, but it was usually to our family lake house or combined with a funeral convention,” she writes.
But with her mom holding the note and a bank providing financing, she found she could afford the debt, with the company’s assets tied up as collateral.
“I set off on a new chapter of my life as a funeral-home owner with more than $2.5 million in debt and working to turn an upside-down cemetery around, so I could eventually buy it too,” she writes.
The business became hers in late 1989.
A Series of Business Lessons
While Baue may have been better suited for working in funeral service on a day-to-day basis than her father, she had a lot to learn about running the business.
In “Wake-Up Calls,” she celebrates a series of mentors, particularly the women who helped her get her bearings in a profession that was then – and in many ways still is – very much dominated by men.
She also found support from men, including members of different study groups that were great sources of mentorship. On one occasion, she was invited to go pheasant hunting with a group of funeral-home owners and professionals.
So, she journeyed to South Dakota, where she woke up at the crack of dawn, put on an orange vest and hat and then did some shooting. She also learned to scuba dive, joining members from another study group and gaining the respect of her peers along the way.
“Seeking to become accepted in a male group and a man’s world is never easy for women,” she writes. “It was not easy then, and it still is not easy now. On a state and national level, our profession was, and still is, male dominated, and if you look at the majority of the state and national associations and their boards today, although it is slowly changing, it is still composed of about 70 percent men.”
Throughout her book, Baue highlights lessons on leadership, supporting employees and helping them hone their own leadership skills.
One of the best chapters in the book is on “Overcoming Failures and Challenges” in which she reveals the wisdom of an old Russian proverb, “Trust but verify.”
For instance, she shares what happened when she discovered that her chief financial officer had not been making the required deposits from preneed insurance policies. While he blamed stock market turbulence in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and needing the money to meet budgetary needs, she knew he was not abiding by the law – and she immediately sought to fix the problem.
To her great credit, she parted ways with the CFO and also answered questions from the state board as well as the state attorney general’s office, sharing recommendations to prevent what happened at her funeral home from happening elsewhere. But it was a scary time that involved an uncertain outcome.
She also shares another doozy of a situation: “One day during my early ownership years, I received an urgent message from my general manager to call him back,” she writes. “He told me that he had left his wife and had moved out the day before, on Thanksgiving Day. He also went on to tell me he was in love with one of our staff members, his administrative assistant.”
How did Baue respond to such a shocking call?
You’ll have to read her book to find out.
A Book for Everyone
Baue’s book hits upon a number of other themes and struggles that make it required reading for any business professional or business owner – certainly not just women and certainly not only for those in the funeral profession. These include:
- How her funeral home dealt with a vote to unionize not just once but twice, which is a challenge her father and grandfather also had to overcome.
- How working at the funeral home with her then husband took a toll on her marriage – and the challenges that came with having to continue the business on her own after their divorce.
- How she struggled on finding a work-life balance, and how that is a challenge that people in the profession – particularly women – continue to confront.
- What it felt like to realize that her children did not want to continue operating the business when she wanted to retire, and why it made sense to sell the company to a corporation instead of an independent buyer.
- How she found love and married again and moved to Colorado.
“Throughout all of our lives, we each have wake-up calls,” she writes. “My question to you is this: Are you listening to them? Learning from them? … Are you finding others, like mentors and coaches, to help you with them?”
If you’re a woman struggling with such wake-up calls, you can certainly look to Baue for help, as she decided to give back to the profession after selling her business to Park Lawn Corp. in 2019 by starting Funeral Women Lead, which is dedicated to advancing women’s leadership in the funeral profession, recognizing that their presence is vital to its future.
As she shares in her introduction, “Too often, I see women in our profession remain silent because they don’t want to be seen as difficult. But it’s time to speak up. I want to see them tap into their self-confidence, learn how to be more resilient, advocate for themselves, and help their employers understand their needs – all in a professional and empathetic manner.” She continues, “I want to see them not just survive but thrive – and, in doing so, contribute in meaningful ways to the future success of the profession.”
Buy the Book
Every order of “Wake- Up Calls” is more than a book purchase. It is an investment in the future of women in funeral service and deathcare.
Proceeds go directly to scholarships and leadership opportunities that open doors for women who are called to serve but often face barriers in their careers.
