Funeral Director Daily
According to this article from the Pine Journal, Bob and Karen Atkins operate the Atkins-Northland Funeral Home and Crematory in Cloquet, Minnesota. The couple is responsible for a business with a volume of about 160 deaths annually and when the cremation percentage started to rise they decided to put in a human crematory instead of…
Service Corporation International, the largest of the funeral service conglomerate public companies, reported 2nd Quarter 2018 financial results yesterday. You can read their press release and see the numbers here. SCI announced earnings per share of $0.44 versus analysts estimates of $0.43 per share. They also announced 2nd quarter revenue of $796 million as compared…
When I was younger the election night banter we always heard was as the title of this article, “As Maine Goes. . . So Goes the Nation”. What it meant under those circumstances was that the State of Maine had an uncanny history of always selecting the Presidential candidate correctly, so the commentators pointed out…
Matthews International reported its 2018 fiscal year 3rd quarter results last week. You can read the company’s press release and report here. As you may know the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania based public company operates in three segments: Brand Solutions, Industrial Technologies, and Memorialization. Their Memorialization segment is what we are concerned with in the death care…
Matthews International, a death care conglomerate with operations in crematory equipment, bronze memorialization products, and caskets, reported their 3rd Quarter 2018 fiscal year results yesterday. You can read their press release here. Their report can be summed up by increased total sales – albeit not to the extent that they had predicted, but a beat…
In an article that appeared in FastCompany.com that you can read here, Dutch architectural firm HofmanDujardin, described what it believes may become the new wave of funeral home ceremony establishments. The design, which has not been built, was inspired by their attendance at a death of a partner whose funeral was attended by the principals…
One of the advantages of getting older, grayer, and more experienced in business is that you get a lot of time to reflect on the many things that have happened in the past and then can try to understand how you can put that knowledge into today’s society. One of the terms I thought about…
I’ve told readers many times that while I owned and operated a small funeral home – one that grew from 140 calls to about 325 calls – I always learned by reading and watching what the “Big Boys” in our industry were up to. That meant, over the years, buying some stock and reading annual…
My wife’s 85 year old father died suddenly last February. He and his wife had lived in the small – under 3000 person – community that they were both born in for all of his years. Life in a community like that revolves around community activities that many times are centered around families – not…
