Axel Jean-Francois
on
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 like. The call where two partners who’ve been circling the same disagreement for months either find a way through it or don’t. The moment a buyer senses that something beneath the surface is unresolved and starts asking harder questions. Those moments don’t show up in a spreadsheet. But they show up in the outcome every time.
Here’s the pattern we’ve observed over and over: buyers rarely pay less because the earnings picture changed. They pay less because uncertainty increased. Every unresolved disagreement, every delayed decision, every relationship that begins to fray during a process creates uncertainty. Markets discount uncertainty. Buyers discount uncertainty. And the most dangerous kind in a funeral home transaction isn’t financial — it’s human.
A family disagreement that surfaces during diligence. A key employee who hears the wrong rumor and starts looking elsewhere. A partnership dispute that quietly turns into legal exposure. A month-long delay that changes financing conditions, shakes employee confidence, or hands a buyer leverage they didn’t have when the letter of intent was signed. None of those problems start in a spreadsheet. But every one of them eventually shows up in one. Value isn’t created only by improving your EBITDA. It’s also created by preventing the uncertainty that causes buyers to hesitate, renegotiate their offer, or walk away entirely.
That’s one reason our team recently spent an afternoon on something that might seem unrelated to deal work: leadership and conflict management. Not because we’re trying to become therapists. Because every transaction eventually reaches a point where leadership matters as much as analysis.
The conflict we navigate in these engagements takes different forms. An owner who can’t quite bring himself to address a difficult employee because these are community businesses built on relationships that go back decades. A family where the founder and the next generation have been circling the same unspoken disagreement for years, neither quite willing to name it. Two partners who built something together and now find themselves on opposite sides of something that matters, with no clear authority on either side to resolve it. The specifics change. The underlying dynamic rarely does. Unresolved human tension creates uncertainty. Uncertainty creates risk. Risk shows up at the closing table in ways that are very difficult to recover from once they appear.
The advisor who keeps their head down in the financials and waits for the humans to sort themselves out is usually the one watching deals fall apart for reasons that had nothing to do with the numbers. Owners almost never remember the hardest spreadsheet in a transaction. They remember the meeting where two family members finally agreed on what came next. So do we.
Selling a funeral home is one of the most emotionally complex things an owner will ever do. Most spend years preparing the business for that moment — the financials, the operations, the succession plan. Very few spend equivalent time preparing the conversations that will ultimately shape whether the transition succeeds.
Owners spend decades building businesses that deserve thoughtful transitions. Preparing the financial side of that transition is essential. Preparing the people involved is just as important. In our experience, the strongest outcomes require both.
Hiring an advisor is not just hiring someone to execute a transaction. It is hiring someone to manage the uncertainty that will emerge while that transaction is being executed. If they cannot do both, you are not buying full advisory capacity. If you’re beginning to think about what transition looks like for your business, we’d welcome that conversation. The earlier those conversations start, the better they tend to go.