Business
All businesses that want to grow and prosper need to acquire new customers. That is a pretty simple concept. But one thing I’m always amazed at is how so many times business take for granted the customers that they have already acquired. Think about that for a moment. . . . if you can continue…
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…
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…
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…
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…
A really nice article about Leo and Jeff Marshall, the father/son team that has owned and operated the Marshall Funeral Home in Greenville, Michigan since 1967 was published in the Daily News of Montcalm and Ionia Counties of Michigan the other day. You can read the article here. It is a really fine article that…
Great funeral homes and cemeteries don’t just pop up and start making lots of money overnight. Matter of fact, it is very rare that a death care business can open in a new locale served by others and make a profit within the first couple of years. New operations have to be ready to spill…
One of the things that I find interesting about the death care industry is the continuing consolidation and spin-offs that seem to always occur. Get a few funeral directors together and they are always talking about who is acquiring who. I’ve been around long enough to see upstart Prime Succession grow fast and then be…
It was back in April 1977 that I remember losing my father to a sudden heart attack while he was serving at a funeral. As a teenager you remember where you were when you were first told and then the rest of the visitation, funeral, and following time is somewhat forgot except for a few…
