Axel Jean-Francois
on
“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 into a signed purchase agreement on a napkin. Over the next twenty-five years, Robert assembled a portfolio of nearly a dozen funeral homes scattered across the state not through strategy, but through relationships and timing.
He got his funeral director’s license somewhere along the way, though he’d tell anyone who asked that he never arranged a service. He was proud of that. He was a dealmaker, not an operator. The funeral homes ran themselves, more or less, staffed by local directors who’d been serving their communities long before Robert showed up.
When he turned seventy, Robert decided it was time to sell. He assumed the hard part was behind him he’d built the thing, after all. Selling it should be simpler.
It was not.
Three Deals, Not One
From the outside, Robert’s portfolio looked like a single business. From the inside, it was nearly a dozen funeral homes spread across a state with no operational center of gravity. The locations didn’t share staff. They didn’t share systems. Most of them didn’t even share a county.
That geography was the first clue. The funeral homes fell into three natural clusters: a single high-performing location in a college town, a standalone operation with dominant market share in a regional hub, and a group of seven locations concentrated around a mid-sized metro area. Each cluster served a different community, drew from a different demographic base, and carried a different financial profile.
So, we recommended splitting the portfolio into three separate offerings.
The logic was straightforward. A single-location funeral home in a college town appeals to an independent operator, maybe a funeral director looking to own for the first time. A seven-location cluster appeals to a regional group looking for scale. Forcing both of those buyers into the same process, competing for the same package, doesn’t create more competition. It creates confusion. And confusion suppresses price.
Splitting it did the opposite. It lets each business attract the buyers best positioned to value it. Three competitive processes instead of one. Smaller bites, more bidders, better outcomes.
Nineteen Buyers and a Lifetime of Promises
“I forgot. I told Ryan he’d get a shot at this.”
That was Robert, calling us mid-process with another name to add to the buyer list. It turned out Ryan had been told five years earlier, over a steak dinner, that he’d have the exclusive opportunity to buy one of the locations. There was no documentation. No written agreement. Just a handshake and a memory.
Ryan was not unique. Over twenty-five years of dealmaking, Robert had made verbal commitments to an astonishing number of people. One had been promised right of first refusal on a specific location. Another believed he had an exclusive opportunity to acquire the entire portfolio. Every few weeks, another name would surface, another promise from another decade that now had to be reconciled with a structured sale process already in motion.
We sent materials to nineteen prospective buyers across the three offerings. That’s a large number for us. In this profession, a targeted process with eight to twelve qualified buyers is typically more than enough. But every one of Robert’s commitments represented a real person who believed they had a deal. Navigating that honoring the relationships without derailing the process is as much a part of sell-side advisory as building the financial model.
In the end, most of the nineteen couldn’t get comfortable with the numbers. The pro forma margins were strong, legitimately strong but strong margins require confidence that you can actually operate at that level. The buyers who stepped forward were the ones already inside the buildings: the funeral directors who’d been running these locations for years and knew exactly what the business looked like from the inside.
Eight Weeks in Accounting Purgatory
This is where the deal was tested.
Two of the three transactions were financed through a bank that required a full Quality of Earnings review before approving the loans. A QoE is essentially a forensic accounting exercise, a third party tears apart your financial statements, re-derives revenue and expenses from source documents, and produces an independent assessment of what the business actually earns.
The problem was structural. Because the two subsidiary funeral homes had always reported under the holding company’s consolidated tax returns, there were no clean standalone financials for the lender to underwrite. Every number had to be extracted, allocated, and verified from scratch. The QoE firm spent eight weeks pulling it apart.
Eight weeks doesn’t sound catastrophic on paper. In practice, it’s two months where nothing moves but everything is at risk. Deals don’t die from one dramatic blowup. They die slowly, a buyer second-guessing the numbers, a spouse raising a question that chips away at confidence, an email unanswered for three days that both sides read into. Research from Harvard Business Review found that even a 30-day slip after a letter of intent costs an average of nearly five percentage points in deal returns. Time doesn’t just test patience. It erodes value.
That’s what was at stake during those eight weeks. Every day the QoE dragged on was another day of exposure to the forces that kill transactions not disagreement, but fatigue. The slow erosion of momentum, patience, and conviction that happens when a process loses its rhythm.
Meanwhile, the third transaction, the seven-location cluster was financed by a different lender who barely asked for anything. Same seller. Same advisor. Same deal timeline. One closing was grinding through forensic accounting while the other sailed through with a rubber stamp.
The lesson is not that one lender was better than the other. It’s that if your business has been reporting under a consolidated entity for years, you are adding months of work and uncertainty to any future sale. Clean, separable financials aren’t just good accounting practice. They’re a closing requirement that, if missing, will cost you time, money, and possibly the deal itself.
Parking Lots, Easements, and the Ghosts of Handshake Deals
The financial complexity was one challenge. The real estate was another.
At one location, the bank’s independent appraisal came in below the agreed purchase price. The gap had to be bridged with a seller carry note creative, but it added another layer of negotiation to a process that was already running long.
At another, the parking lot turned out to sit on a separate parcel that was also zoned residential because there was a house on it that Robert owned. County code required the residential parcel to maintain a minimum backyard setback. The backyard, of course, was the parking lot. Resolving it required a formal easement agreement between the parcels, which meant surveyors, attorneys, and weeks of municipal back-and-forth.
And across the entire portfolio, title work was a recurring problem. Robert had acquired many of these businesses through seller-financed deals over the decades, and in several cases the lien releases had never been properly filed. Clearing title meant tracking down prior sellers or, where they had passed away, their estates and heirs to obtain the documentation that should have been recorded years ago.
None of this appeared in the financial statements. All of it appeared at closing.
What a Real Succession Looks Like
All three transactions closed.
The funeral directors who’d been running some of the locations for years now owned them. They didn’t need a transition period or a learning curve. They already knew the families, the staff, the operations, the rhythms of their communities. Within a year, the businesses were performing well under new ownership not because anything dramatically changed, but because the right people were finally in the right seats with their names on the door.
The communities kept their funeral homes. The families who’d been trusting those locations for generations didn’t have to wonder whether new corporate ownership would change the character of the place. The people they knew were still there, still serving, now with the permanence that comes with ownership.
And Robert got to step away on his terms. After twenty-five years of acquiring funeral homes one handshake at a time, he handed them off not to a stranger, not to a consolidator, but to the people who’d been caring for those communities all along. That’s what a real succession looks like. Not a liquidation event. Not a fire sale. A deliberate, managed transition that preserves what matters while giving the builder the exit they’ve earned.
It wasn’t simple. It was never going to be simple. But it worked because the process was managed with the same care that those funeral homes give to the families they serve.