Ohio funeral home expands by purchasing a neighbor

February 2, 2023/Business, Finance/

This article from the Canton Repository announced last week the purchase of Canton, Ohio, based funeral home Kreighbaum-Sanders Funeral Homes by Alliance, Ohio, based Cassaday-Turkle-Christian Funeral Home.

Cassaday-Turkle-Christian’s Adam Christian made the following comment, according to the linked article, “We are honored that the Sanders family has given us the opportunity to serve the community and carry on their legacy of service. The decision was easy. We felt that the way Kreighbaum-Sanders Funeral Homes served their families and communities was very much in line with how we run our funeral home and cremation service in Alliance.”

Scott Sanders of Kreighbaum-Sanders said this about the acquisition, “We are privileged to turn the operations over to John and Adam. They were carefully selected as our successors as we felt the community would continue to be well cared for and our family-owned business model would stay intact.”

Kreighbaum-Sanders operated two funeral homes, in Canton and East Canton, and, according to the article, the Sanders family will still be involved in the operation of those locations. Again, according to the article, the acquisition closed on December 22, 2022.

Here is the website of Cassaday-Turkle-Christian Funeral Home.

Here is the website of Kreighbaum-Sanders Funeral Homes.

Funeral Director Daily take: There are a lot of people, both in the profession and outside the profession, that believe family funeral homes serve the public and their communities with a certain level of “community investment and involvement” that regional or national operators simply cannot. I will point out that feeling is also common with grocery stores, automobile dealerships, and other businesses.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

To those who feel that way, the type of ownership consolidation apparently done in this transaction is a blueprint to follow. While there is always a certain amount of marketing in a press release or newspaper article, the parties in this transaction seem sincere that this transaction was able to be completed. . . . it probably served the purposes of both parties.

The family funeral business can be competitive. . . but we should also be collaborative with our peers. And, there are going to be a lot of acquisition opportunities coming up in the next several years as many funeral director/owners are coming to the age where they will be retiring from the profession.

Over my career as a 33-year funeral home owner I was really competitive as that is my nature. As I look back I wonder if being more collaborative would have brought me more opportunities.

If you are a funeral director/owner and wish to expand I would suggest you take a day a month and just visit those funeral homes in your area that will have retiring owners in the next decade. Be a friend, find out if there are ways that you could help each other today, but also let them know that, within their time frame, you would be interested in a potential ownership situation in their funeral home. My guess is that approach will lead to opportunities.

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