Author: Funeral Director Daily

Finance Preneed

SCI sees 2Q 2021 Revenue per Service jump over $600 per case

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Earlier this week the largest funeral home and cemetery operator in North America, Service Corporation International (SCI), revealed their results for the 2nd Quarter of 2021.  It was a much anticipated report as it would mark a comparison with the 2nd Quarter of 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic was flourishing and funeral homes and cemeteries were operating in a much more difficult and different world. As you might expect SCI’s “comparable funeral services performed” dropped 6.0% to 84,449 cases as […]

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Regulations

American Life Expectancy drops in 2020

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It will surprise no one that in the Covid-19 pandemic year of 2020, that life expectancy for Americans dropped by the largest decline since World War II.  This article from the Associated Press also indicates that the life expectancy drop for Black Americans was the largest since the Great Depression and for Hispanics it was the largest one year drop in recorded life expectancy history. What might surprise you, and we have brought it up on this forum before, that […]

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Preneed

South African preneed market exploding

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I can remember back to a time when I thought sending out direct mailing pieces for preneed funeral planning was too forward and bordered on being in bad taste.  At that time we were always worried about offending someone who had an illness in the family or who recently had a death in the family.  Our perception was that the family receiving the mailer would think we were insensitive to them. Well, we’ve came a long way since that time. […]

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Business

Meet Singapore’s all female embalming team

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Every once in a while I come across an article which reminds me how much the actual inner workings of a funeral business has changed.  And sometimes paradoxically, the same article or articles can point out that what I’m looking at is not so much a change as it is an evolution. Today I will highlight two articles on female funeral directors.  The first one, about a group of female funeral directors at Singapore’s Serenity Casket & Funerals seems to […]

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Business

How will death care fare in an “upside down” world?

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I read this interesting short article (and video news story) authored by Myles Udland at Yahoo Finance the other day.  In the article, he surmises about “the role that demand is playing in the economic recovery.”  According to Udland, you can “throw a dart at just about anywhere in the economy and you’ll find unmet demand held back by some version of a supply bottleneck.” And, it is happening in funeral service as I discovered when reading this article from Massachusetts.  […]

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Business

The value of non-conventional marketing

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It’s hard for me to believe that I now call Direct Mail, Radio, and Newspaper advertising “non-conventional”.  When I started in the business that was about as “conventional” as it got. However, when I am looking online for products to buy I’ve become accustomed to looking at the “Reviews” or the “Star Ratings” now.  I don’t want to order something from someone who others might, for instance, say is tough to return merchandise to.  Or, is slow to receive the […]

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Business Regulations

Congress working to stop “Body Brokers”

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It was probably ten years ago when I, as a funeral director, received a phone call from a member of a family whose father was on hospice care.  The family member told me that his father “wanted his body donated to science” and had made arrangements for a private company to help them do that.  He also told me that the company would be calling me to give me advice on how to prepare the body for air cargo shipping […]

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Business

Hospice provider to give “assistance with funeral arrangements”

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I’ve been on this bandwagon a long time and I can see it coming down the road.  The bandwagon I’m talking about is “hospice providers becoming part of the death care profession”. In this article from Hospice News you can read about hospice provider Compassus beginning a pilot progam to, among other things, “assist with funeral arrangements”.  Compassus, who have 200 locations in 30 states recently announced that it is partnering with technology platform Empathy to “help the families of […]

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Finance

An opinion from Seeking Alpha on Service Corporation International

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Yesterday, July 19, Seeking Alpha published a pretty in-depth investment article from Livingston Investments on funeral home and cemetery operator Service Corporation International.  The article is entitled, “Service Corporation International:  Crisis reslient business with a premium to fair price”.  You can access the article here. There was a couple of statements in the article that caught my eye: “Significant revenue growth was driven by the temporary impact of the coronavirus” “We have determined that the company’s weighted average cost of […]

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Business

Funeral service. . . . .by the numbers

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Funeral Director Daily published this article last week that we titled “We saw a lot of deaths in 2020”.  The article tried to put a number to the number of death care cases across the United States in our Covid-19 pandemic year.  We came up with the number of 3,427,321 which was a 20% increase in the number of deaths from 2019 — 2,854,838. That article captured my interest on other numbers, or data, which may be of interest to […]

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