A random rant on a Tuesday morning...

market brief...Funeral homes are doing the same volume they did two years ago, and the checks are getting smaller. That is the story right now for independents and for the big consolidators alike.

SCI's funeral gross profit margin dropped from 24.4 percent to 21.4 percent. Three hundred basis points gone at the largest funeral company in the country. If it is happening to them at that scale, with all that capital and infrastructure, you do not get to assume you are immune.

Cremation keeps taking share. Inflation pushed your costs up and pushed families toward cheaper options at the same time. Families are arriving at your door having already looked up what your competitor charges. That combination is doing real work on margins across the board.

I talked recently with an independent operator running about 110 calls a year. Volume is holding. He is having a decent year. But dollars per call are going down, and he is clear-eyed about what that means over time. His first line of defense is knowing his overhead and the math inside his business cold.

Direct cremation is probably half the business at most homes right now, and owners who never built their pricing against actual overhead are absorbing the squeeze without fully realizing it. They picked a number. That number is probably wrong.

He had a sharp line about capital spending too. Buying a new hearse while burial demand keeps falling is, in his words, "the dumbest thing you could possibly do." Spend where it earns.

And on his eventual exit, he is not banking on a top-dollar sale. His words: he is "kind of planning on it being worth nothing." That is honest planning, and more owners should be doing that kind of math now.

Here is what concerns me most about all of this...

When consolidators acquire local homes, experienced preneed agents get an offer: stay on, hit new quotas, take a commission cut to a flat 4 percent. A veteran agent, well into her 70s, with decades in this profession, got exactly that offer. The buyer kept her because no one else could do what she does.

Good preneed agents are rare. You do not build them from a training manual. When you underpay them and overload their quota, you find out what they were worth after they're gone.

One in five Americans fell behind on a loan or mortgage payment in 2025, up from one in eight in 2022. Families are under financial pressure, doing their research online, and still waiting for a person they trust. Preneed is the response to all of this, and it needs to be run by people. Sixty-nine percent of buyers still want a salesperson to validate what they found on their own. Protect that conversation before a buyer offers your best agent 4 percent and she walks.

The full brief and impromptu podcast is up on theashflash.com. Pricing, capital strategy, the preneed urgency case, and the one structural move most owners overlook that could shift the entire weight of your preneed momentum.

Subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/ge6pWPXB