Blog

July 25, 2025

Is Your Firm’s Health Helping or Hurting Yours?

Funeral and cemetery professionals are natural caregivers. They serve grieving families with empathy, walk alongside them during life’s hard moments, and ensure that every detail of every service is handled with care. But in the process of supporting others, those same caregivers can neglect their own needs and those of their firm. There’s a lot of talk about self-care these days – and for good reason. Burnout and compassion fatigue are real risks in funeral service. But self-care isn’t just about bubble baths and meditation. It’s also about financial clarity, operational stability and long-term peace of mind. In short, it’s about taking care of your funeral home, too. One of the most powerful means of professional self-care is something many funeral directors only associate with selling their firm: a business valuation. This article reframes that misconception and demonstrates that a […]
June 25, 2025

Announcing You’re Selling the Funeral Home: Don’t Let Staff Hear It from Their Casket Rep

There’s no perfect script for telling your team you’re selling the funeral home—but there is a wrong way. That’s not addressing it head on, keeping things vague, or waiting too long and letting your staff hear it from third parties like their casket rep. In a profession built on trust and relationships, that kind of surprise doesn’t just bruise morale—it can erode the culture you spent a career building. Selling your funeral home isn’t just a transaction. You’re handing over something deeply personal—a community institution, a brand your team helped shape, a space where families found comfort. When staff are kept in the dark until the last second, it stirs panic, invites rumors, and makes buyers wonder if they’re inheriting a team—or a time bomb. Here’s how to do it better. These aren’t just bullet points from a handbook—they’re lessons […]
June 25, 2025

Telling the Real Story of Your Business: Why Recasting Financials Matters

Most funeral home owners don’t spend much time digging into financial statements— and understandably so. Your focus is on families, staff, facilities, and the day-to-day operations that make your business what it is. But when the time comes to plan for retirement, transition ownership, or even apply for financing, the numbers matter. And often, they don’t reflect the full picture. Recasting financials is the process of adjusting your financial statements to show the true earning potential of your business. It’s not accounting manipulation—it’s about separating personal or one-time expenses from your actual operational performance so a buyer, bank, or successor sees the business as you run it, not just as it appears on paper. For many funeral home owners, traditional financial statements understate profitability because they’re built around minimizing taxes. You may run personal expenses through the business, like a […]
June 23, 2025

Colleagues vs. Competitors: Why Working Together Will Enable Us to Face New Industry Challenges

Written By Jennifer Graziano, Coxe & Graziano Funeral Home There are many seismic shifts that have rattled the foundation of funeral service in recent years.  The funeral consumer has changed; it’s all about getting the most while paying the least.  Couple this with industry challenges; a dire shortage of labor and a steady decline of qualified candidates seeking entry into the field, and the situation grows grimmer.  The challenges we face on both the consumer and labor fronts are not readily solvable but there are steps we can take to mitigate the impact. Among them, employing a cooperative and combined approach amongst funeral homes and working together to rebrand the industry by setting new norms and standards. On the consumer front, we can attribute this latitudinal shift behavior to the post-Covid societal trends of the world we live in.  Everything […]
June 23, 2025

Ask the Analyst: The Profit Playbook

Six Proven Plays to Lift Funeral-Home Margins — Without Losing Your Soul “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.” — John Wooden Running a funeral home today is like steering a tugboat through fog while speedboats zip past. You can’t keep jacking up prices, and you definitely can’t cut corners on care—families remember both. What you can do is run smarter. The six plays below come from live field data (and a few hard-earned scars). Margins may be math, but leadership is still about people. PLAY 1 — Master the Fundamentals “Excellence is achieved by the mastery of the fundamentals.” — Vince Lombardi Why the Middle Wins Offer three crystal-clear packages—Good, Better, Best. Behavioral economists call it the Goldilocks effect; we call it a license to boost average ticket. 51 % of families in our 2025 study chose the mid-tier […]
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