Funeral Director Daily

Carriage Services Profit drops. . . management to fight back

By Funeral Director Daily / January 18, 2019 /

Death care consolidator Carriage Services issued preliminary 2018 results on Wednesday.  You can read a press release from the company here. In those results the company announced that they had grown revenue year over year from $258.1 million in 2017 to an an unaudited estimate of $268.0 million in 2018.  That would be an increase…

Foundation Partners adds Arizona Firm

By Funeral Director Daily / January 17, 2019 /

Earlier in January it was announced that Foundation Partners Group had acquired the Angel Valley Funeral Home & Old Pueblo Crematory in Tucson, Arizona.  According to a press release from Foundation Partners that you can read here, Mike and Dee Dee Orcutt had owned the business for about ten years prior to this change of…

Dignity PLC upgrades forecast on “Stronger than Expected” 4th Qtr

By Funeral Director Daily / January 16, 2019 /

In a brief update that you can read here, the United Kingdom’s largest funeral services provider issued a statement that says they expect profits to be higher than expected for 2018 due to higher than expected revenue while overhead has been kept lower than expected. Dignity plc also stated that their market share had remained…

Singapore sites Four new funeral parlours

By Funeral Director Daily / January 16, 2019 /

Funeral customs around the world are interesting to observe.  But, just as the customs are interesting to observe so are the challenges of those in funeral service for profit in the differing countries with differing values in funeral service.  I recently read an article in Channel News Asia that you can read here. Land is…

An opinion on Service Corporation International

By Funeral Director Daily / January 15, 2019 /

Just this morning I noticed an information piece on Service Corporation International from Zack’s Research.  It’s a short, but interesting look at how at least some people look at the death care industry as compared to the overall market and what they think about SCI. Interesting to note, is that according to the article, Service…

Being Efficient versus Cost Cutting

By Funeral Director Daily / January 15, 2019 /

So many things about business fundamentals cross over from one industry to another.  I’m writing this article on Sunday and thinking about a meeting I will have tomorrow in the role I play as Chairman of the Finance and Operations Committee of a Big Ten university.  We are working on the budget and tomorrow I’m…

“Hands On” Cremation

By Funeral Director Daily / January 14, 2019 /

I recently read an article from the Post Register of Idaho Falls, Idaho that pertained to the Wood Funeral Home of Idaho Falls and Ammon, Idaho building a 4,000 square foot facility to cater to cremation choice families.  You can read the article here.  My original intent after looking at the article very briefly was…

Trouble in Michigan Pet Cemetery

By Funeral Director Daily / January 11, 2019 /

In the 1970s the Heavenly Acres Pet Cemetery in Livingston County, Michigan, began selling burial lots, monuments, and markers, as well as interring deceased pets for clients.  Along with these charges, the cemetery collected fees for what was purposed to be perpetual care of the cemeteries. The cemetery has had some ups and downs since…

Know your vendors. . . an update. . . .perspective

By Funeral Director Daily / January 10, 2019 /

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…

Thinking outside the box

By Funeral Director Daily / January 9, 2019 /

Sometimes what seems like the obvious isn’t always the best.  Yesterday we wrote about trying to bring the volume of your services number to a larger number and how that could help by reducing your costs per service.  One way we suggested doing that was by an acquisition in the same geographic area of your…