I’m not a bah, humbug type of guy. . . .I actually love the holidays. . .all of them. However, shopping for a Christmas tree, dragging it home, and getting it set up is not one of my favorite things to do. I should be grateful because Angie does all the hard work like decorating the tree and the house. . . . my only jobs are to get the tree home and get the tree set up for her […]
As we told you yesterday, we are re-running our budgeting articles that received such good response from funeral home operators in November 2019. Budgeting is, well, budgeting, but there are always new wrinkles to account for. While we have, for our example, simply delineated our revenue numbers by cremation case or earth burial case, if we learned nothing else in this COVID-19 year, it is that death care cases will become more and more varied over time. There will be […]
I’m taking the time today and tomorrow to re-run articles from last November on funeral home budgeting. I posted these articles last year and had many positive comments and since we have many new readers since then, I figure that maybe my thoughts on budgeting — both the expense side and the revenue side — may be of interest to some. I like numbers, planning, and budgeting. It was always somewhat of a game to me and I always enjoyed […]
Now that I’ve finished reporting on the quarterly reports of the large “established” companies in the death care realm, I thought it would be interesting to give my insight on a couple of companies that I think have a great potential to “grow” into larger companies or services in the future. And while Tribute Technology reportedly just sold for over $1 billion, you will probably see that my short list is a little light in, what would generally be considered […]
I’m kind of tired of the word “unprecedented”. It seems every time that I turn around someone is using that term in relation to the world and times we have been living in since February in the United States. Yes, 2020 is different, but I’m not so sure that it is “unprecedented” for the upstaging of people’s lives. No doubt, for most of us living as adults in 2020 this is a year unlike any other we have probably faced. […]
The first thing I will comment on is that if you look at the image I have put on this article, it should come with a question mark at the end. If you have followed my writings for any length of time you know that I like to try to spot trends and then hypothesize on what those trends may mean in the future. Sometimes trends show the future and sometimes they sputter out and become short term changes of […]
I woke up this morning (Monday as I write this) to see the Dow Jones Industrial average futures up over 5% on the news that Pfizer has had tremendous success with its Covid-19 vaccination drug trials. It’s a rainy day in Minnesota so I did my daily run on the treadmill watching Jim Cramer on CNBC talk about this event. Cramer commented that even with Pfizer’s announcement of its trial success so far, all we have over yesterday is increased […]
Back in September we published this article about Providence Strategic Growth (Providence Equity) planning to put their funeral software firm, Tribute Technology, on the market. At that time. the article that we had read from Barron’s mentioned that Providence believed that they could get a $1 billion offer for their assemblage of companies that they have turned into Tribute Technology. This article, published the other day, from PE Hub (provide your email to PE Hub to get access the article) […]
We are in the period of public companies reporting their 3rd Quarter results to the world and it is only a couple of weeks before Hillenbrand, parent company of Batesville Casket Company, and Matthews International, parent company of Aurora Casket Company will give us those results. As most of you know, those businesses have generally continued to remain profitable even in the face of downward unit sales over the past several years as cremation has cut into the number of […]
So, I warned you earlier in the week that I would be doing a column on what was happening with Starbucks and why I thought there was enough general information in what I had heard that it would be useful to people who operate businesses in the death care realm. To refresh you, I had told you that last Friday I had heard Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson be interviewed by CNBC’s Jim Cramer on his morning show. Johnson went through […]
