Axel Jean-Francois

Most owners expect selling their business to be a financial exercise. You get a valuation. You find a buyer. You negotiate the terms. The numbers determine the outcome. In our experience, that’s only half the story. The best advisors don’t just negotiate transactions. They manage uncertainty. And the uncertainty that determines whether a good deal becomes a great one — or quietly falls apart before it gets there — almost never originates in the financials. The numbers matter. They always matter. But in the transactions we’ve been part of — across hundreds of engagements in the funeral and cemetery profession — the financials rarely determine whether a deal succeeds or falls apart. More often, it’s the conversations surrounding those numbers that make the difference. The meeting where a founder and his son finally get honest about what transition actually looks […]

A few months ago we sat down with the balance sheet of a single-location funeral home we’ll call “Holloway Family Funeral Home”. By every measure that matters, it was healthy. Cash sitting well over 150 percent of plan. A current ratio north of six. Debt flat, untouched, exactly where it was the year before. If you read Part 1 of this series, you know what that means. Holloway had the foundation. The chassis was solid. They had room to breathe, room to make a decision instead of being forced into one. Then we looked at the income statement, and the illusion broke. The Collision The plan called for around 160 calls in the quarter. Holloway came in around 110. That’s not a miss you shrug off. It collided directly with the one line item that can ruin an owner’s sleep. […]

“Robert Crane” never set out to build a funeral home empire. He started in the preneed business selling pre-arranged funeral contracts across a handful of Midwestern states in the late 1980s. It was honest work. It paid. And over time, it put him in rooms with the kind of people who would matter later: independent funeral home owners in small towns across the region. He was good with people. The owners liked him. He remembered their kids’ names, showed up to their community events, and never oversold. When one of those owners passed away unexpectedly in 1997, his widow called Robert before she called an attorney. He bought the funeral home that month. Then it happened again. And again. An owner retiring with no succession plan. A family that didn’t want the business. A handshake at a dinner that turned […]