Funeral Director Daily
Over the years that I hired funeral directors to work at our funeral home I looked for various traits that I felt would help a funeral home in a community of my size. I certainly knew that I needed professional staff that was excellent in the preparation room. But, I also needed staff…
The Washington Post recently printed this article which in part said, “. . . .a distinct shift is underway in how we approach death. More than half of Americans are seeking greener funerals, according to the National Funeral Directors Association, and the percentage is rising. The funeral industry is responding: You can now be entombed in a…
The largest funeral home and cemetery operator in North America, Service Corporation International, reported 4th Quarter 2022 and Year End 2022 financials earlier this week and one of the things we noticed is that quarterly and yearly revenue was less than 4Q2021 and less than Year End 2021. However, that is not unexpected…
We’ve touched on the subject in this forum before — when is the proper age, as a consumer, to look into getting a preneed funeral/cremation account? I’ve opined that our funeral home used to look at Social Security age and then lowered that to age 55 and over. Lately, according to all that I…
It’s pretty common place to read in Funeral Director Daily and other Death Care publications about the national and regional funeral home and cemetery consolidators announcing another acquisition. However, when we were catching up with our reading a few days ago we noticed an acquisition. . . .that was “going the other way”.…
Sometimes I just come across ideas for Funeral Director Daily articles by accident. On Saturday I was going out for my weekly “reward” of a time at a coffee shop and stopped to buy a newspaper to read while there. Since the local Naples Times-Herald was out, I had a choice of the…
Most businesses that I know of are transactional in nature. They take a fee and give their customer a product or service in return for that fee. Funeral homes tend to be transactional — we charge a family for the services and merchandise we render and then we provide those products and/or services…
Funeral Director Daily’s Death Care Index (DCI), which is reflective of Death Care public companies public stock prices, has grown at a pace of about 9.7% for the first six weeks of calendar year 2023. That rate of increase surpasses both the Dow Jones Industrials and the S&P 500 indexes during the same…
We will end this week with news of another acquisition in the Death Care space. This press release from earlier this week announced Park Lawn Corporation’s definitive agreement to acquire Kansas City metro area based businesses that include substantially all of the assets of Carson-Speaks Chapel in Independence, Missouri; Speaks Buckner Chapel in Buckner,…
The last year has brought many changes to Death Care as it pertains to those companies that have been operated in the public markets. Both StoneMor and Dignity plc have been taken out of the public realm and into private ownership space and Batesville has been spun-out of Hillenbrand Industries and purchased by…
