Every day funeral directors and funeral home owners work hard and diligently in taking care of the families that they are entrusted to serve. Sometimes it is a matter of just finishing with one family when the phone rings again and the funeral director/funeral home owner starts the cycle all over again. As your business profits from this type of back-to-back business it can get a little illusionary that it is just going to keep on doing so, profitably, into […]
One of the great things about beginning a New Year is that we have a chance to speculate where those next 365 days will bring us. That speculation also gives us a little perspective on where the trends are moving that will carry our profession into the future. So here’s my take on some of the issues that existing funeral service faces. . . . I think that there are five trends that are happening in society right now that […]
Busch Funeral and Crematory Services, based in Cleveland, Ohio, co-owner Mark Busch retired not long ago. According to a recent article that I read, he began work at the family firm in 1982 and retired in 2020. The family firm dates it origins back to 1905. Busch recently talked of his involvement as an owner and the decisions he made to help the company become a known leader in death care. He shared these insights with the NFDA’s Memorial Business […]
Security National Financial Corporation (SNFC) released this press release earlier in November which memorialized their operations for the 3rd Quarter of 2021 as well as the first nine-months of 2021. The Utah based company operates in three business segments with one of those segments being what they call their Memorial Segment. For the nine months ended on September 30, 2021, the Memorial Segment reported revenue of $20.5 million as compared to nine-month sales in 2020 of $14.8 million. . . […]
Batesville Casket’s parent company, Hillenbrand Industries, reported Fiscal Year 2021 and FY 4th Quarter 2021 results last week. In that report, that you can read here, they reported that the Batesville segment produced revenue of $623 million for the year. . . a 13% increase over FY2020. It should be mentioned here that FY2020 included the months of October, November, and December of 2019. . . a period in which no Covid deaths were reported in North America. In contrast, […]
Back in about 1990 I made funeral arrangements for a 55-year old who died of a sudden heart attack. His widowed wife eventually talked to me about an idea for our funeral home which was based on the premise of what we now call “Aftercare”. At that time our funeral home did not have a formal program, nor had we really thought about it. The widow, who later became our “Aftercare Coordinator” believed that we should be helping people — […]
Service Corporation International (SCI), the largest provider of funeral services in North America, recently released their 3rd Quarter 2021 results and following that company executives answered questions from stock analysts about the company and death care in general. You can read a complete transcript of that commentary here. If you are not interested in reading the entire transcript here are some things that Funeral Director Daily found interesting from the discussion and we center on the items of Covid deaths, […]
This is the week that Congress should act on the Biden Administration’s key piece of legislation, the $3.5 trillion “Human Infrastructure” bill. Regardless of what happens or how you feel about that bill, I thought it would be interesting to look back on how death care has fared from the other two large social bills passed in American history — the New Deal and the Great Society. The New Deal was passed by Congress under the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency […]
Security National Financial Corporation of Utah revealed their 2nd Quarter 2021 financial numbers earlier this month. Total revenues for the entire company were actually down about 2% overall as their Mortgage Division saw an overall 8% decline in revenues as compared to the same quarter of 2020. However, the company’s Life Insurance division, which included preneed insurance and its Cemetery/Mortuary divisions both saw an increase in revenues which lowered that overall revenue loss to only 2%. The Life Insurance Division […]
Every once in a while I will come across a survey on some aspect of the death care world that doesn’t quite jive with what I’ve been led to believe. Normally when that happens I’ll find out the survey was constructed and completed by some one from outside the traditional death care world. When that happens I always find it interesting to look at who commissioned the survey and who took the survey. That happened the other day when I […]
