Today I was looking through some ideas and came upon three subjects that, while not all open for in-depth stories and opinions, I thought were interesting enough in their own right to just mention and let you take a look yourself if you wanted to delve deeper into the subject matter.

The first item that I came across comes under the subject “Know your vendors.”  It consists of a news video and story that you can see and read here from Toledo, Ohio.  Turns out that a county coroner driver was asked to deliver a body to an alley location that he deemed suspicious.  After delivering the body to this location he contacted police authorities that he didn’t believe that the facility could be licensed.

Officers investigated and then had the body turned back over to the coroner’s office, found out the facility was not on the Ohio database certified by the Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors, and now have an active investigation into what was going on.  The investigation has revealed, according to the article, that at least one of the people behind the facility have actually had Abuse of Corpse charges against them at one time in another Ohio city.

We at Funeral Director Daily don’t know any more about the operation, but surmise that it could be an operation set up for trade embalming and airline shipping.  We believe that, as a precaution, you should know who you are calling for an out of state death.

+++++++++++++

Secondly, if you have read FDD for any length of time you know of the case of the Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors in Montrose, Colorado.  As you are aware the owners of that facility also operated a body donation service out of the same location.  They have been accused of, and there is an active FBI investigation into, the idea that some bodies that were turned over for cremation were actually dismembered and sold as body parts with families allegedly receiving powder cement instead of the cremated remains.

This article details the third lawsuit being filed against Sunset Mesa and its owners.

++++++++++++++

Finally, I’m an active stock watcher.  More than likely if you have a retirement account you have been aware of the loss of value during the month of December.  One of the stocks hit hard was Apple as they announced that the sales of the premium product, the iPhone, did not reach the levels that they had predicted.

So, this morning I saw a quote from the CEO of Apple and it reminded me of some of the lean times when I was in the funeral business. Here is that quote:

CEO Tim Cook shared why he is optimistic about the tech giant’s future. “I think Apple is not well understood in some of Wall Street. For example, I think there are several people that believe the most important metric is how many iPhones are sold in a given 90-day period or what the revenues is… I want the customer to be happy. Because if they’re happy, they will eventually replace that product with another. And the services and the ecosystem around that will thrive.”

Now, bankers and accountants will tell you that the “law of large numbers” will always play out, but there are times when the raw numbers just get out of whack for a short period of time.  The funeral home I used to manage averaged about 25 death calls per month.  I can remember one November when we did only three calls.  Of course, I worried about all of the financial obligations that I had.  I can vividly remember my wife saying to me, “My goodness Tom, you act like nobody is ever going to die again.”

The quote I saw today just made me chuckle a little because not long after my wife said that, calls returned to normal and I’m sure that we had some 35-40 call months, but the law of large numbers always brought us back to the 25 call average.  My point, and that of Apple CEO Tim Cook, is to remember the perspective. . .keep it long term. . .  just continue to keep the customers that you do serve happy and if you have the right business model, services, and ecosystem in place the law of large numbers will eventually return you to normalcy.

[wpforms id=”436″ title=”true” description=”true”]