Funeral Director Daily
Since about 2010 I’ve been associated with a couple of non-profit Senior Housing, Home Care, and Hospice businesses, Knute Nelson and Ethos Home Care and Hospice. I’ve chaired both organizations which have a combined revenue of about $60 million. I tell you that only because I try to stay up to date with those industries…
The longer I am affiliated in the death care profession it seems the less I know. I know that is not true, but I am always amazed when I find some type of business out there in the death care profession that I did not know existed. There are a lot of concepts and a…
A big part of our mission at Funeral Director Daily is to look around the death care industry and report what we see happening in the profession back to our fellow funeral directors. Our thought is that those fellow funeral directors were much like I was in my 35 year front-line funeral service career —…
StoneMor, Inc., the Pennsylvania based consolidator and operator of cemeteries and funeral homes, has had a busy April. We’ve seen Moody’s upgrade their credit rating, we’ve seen insider trading purchases of the stock, and we’ve seen an announcement of refinanced debt. That and more leads a press release from Moody’s to state, “. . .…
I visited, as I often do, with a former Senior Level Executive this week just to catch up on what was happening in his world and visit about a story Funeral Director Daily had recently ran. We talked about a lot of things — including COVID-19, and because of it, we had not seen each…
It’s not only funeral homes and cemeteries that are in the business of growing their businesses to better serve clientele. Last week we received word that Wilbert, Inc., the nation’s preeminent burial vault company, made an acquisition to bolster their presence in the Northeast corridor of the United States. Here is the information that we…
Former Vice-President Walter Mondale died Monday night at age 93. Being a Minnesotan like Mondale put me into a reminiscing mood and I thought of the 1970’s when Mondale was our state’s U.S. Senator and elected with President Jimmy Carter as Vice-President in 1976. It also reminded me of a lesson from my dad about…
I’ve noticed with much interest over my career in funeral service that most funeral home owners are really up to date when it comes to market share percentage as compared to the competitor(s) in their market area. They all either watch the local obituaries or have someone else watch and count death numbers on their…
I was visiting on the phone with the CEO of one of the funeral home consolidation companies on Friday when he asked me how long I had been out of direct management of our business. I replied that it is just over seven years and I was happy not to have been there during the…
There has been a lot of talk at the federal level about creating a limit to liability law for those essential businesses that had to operate over the timeline of the Covid-19 pandemic while knowledge of the virus was becoming better and better every day. The thought process has been that businesses should not be…
