Funeral Home Owners - The Assumption of Adequacy Is the Problem
Tom Anderson wrote something in Funeral Director Daily this last week worth highlighting. He used Wendy’s as the entry point. Roughly 5 percent of Wendy’s franchise locations closed in the first half of 2026. Anderson’s point was simple and a little uncomfortable: those weren’t failing restaurants. A lot of them were doing fine, right up until they weren’t. The owners had looked around, decided things were good enough, and stopped asking whether good enough was still actually good. McDonalds has committed a different sin. I believe in an effort to streamline their business with technology, they forgot about the customer at the counter. Attention: funeral directors and agents…the secret sauce in your business is YOU! :)
In fact, there was a similar story reported in another one of my market brief publications for sales talent, which is that AI is not taking your sales job, but those who know how to work with AI are what we need. You are working on it, right?
That’s the trap he’s describing for funeral home owners.
WHAT THE DATA SHOWS
Samuel Arnold, incoming president of the NJSFDA and fifty years in the profession, said recently that families who once expected two days of viewing and a two to three hour service now often request cremation, no viewing, and services as short as 45 minutes.
The Parting Stone research from July puts the U.S. cremation rate near 63 percent in 2025, with projections reaching as high as 82 percent by 2045. NFDA data reported earlier this month shows direct cremation alone accounting for roughly 41 percent of U.S. cremations. Connecting Directors published a piece in early September noting that fewer families are using dedicated funeral home chapels at all, choosing personal venues instead, which shifts more decision-making weight onto the family and away from the professional. Keep in mind, hard data that is reflective of a meaningful cross section of funeral homes across the country would tell us a lot more. In the meantime, anecdotal reporting of this nature can at the very least give us an insight to follow for more detail. Something I’m working hard to do for you all here through this brief.
I still do believe myself that this isn’t a fringe shift. It’s the center of the market moving.
WHY IT’S HARD TO SEE FROM THE INSIDE
“Good enough” used to be good enough, and often still can be, until a competitor arrives who won’t accept good enough. Not too long ago, if you were established in your community, if families knew your name, if you handled calls with care and returned them promptly, you were doing what the market asked. The proof was in the call volume. The proof was in the relationships.
Then, somewhere along the way, the market started asking different questions. And no bell rang. No alarm sounded. Instead, the quiet drip of your leaking faucet turned into a running stream of neglect and quietly, the market has shifted and you must now adapt in specific ways to survive. Stay tuned here for support in this effort.
The families in the 25 to 50 age group, the ones making decisions right now for parents or arranging for spouses, have spent years researching purchases online, comparing options, expecting transparency, and forming opinions before anyone from your staff ever hears from them. They have different instincts about what a meaningful service looks like. They’re using venues their families loved. They’re designing shorter, more personal gatherings. Some of them genuinely want direct cremation and that’s the right answer for them. But a lot of them are landing on that choice not because they thought it through but because nobody showed them anything else.
That’s the missed conversation. That’s where “good enough” costs you, in a slow erosion you don’t fully register until it’s already substantial.
THE GUT CHECK
Anderson’s gut check is the most useful thing in his piece. Pull your last ten arrangements. Look at each one. Ask yourself honestly: how many of those families were shown anything beyond what you’d have offered their parents?
In a serious, business-owner way. Because if the answer is “most of them got roughly the same presentation we’ve been giving for fifteen or more years,” then you’re serving a memory of the market.
Wendy’s didn’t close 5 percent of its locations because of a single bad decision. Those closures were the accumulated result of locations that stopped evolving while consumer habits kept moving. The gap between what the location offered and what the market wanted widened gradually, and then it became apparent and permanent and seemingly all at once.
Pull those ten arrangements. Sit with them. Ask whether the families you served were genuinely met where they are right now, or whether they were met where families used to be.
That answer tells you more about the state of your business than any benchmark report.
Pre-need Agents - The Ceiling is NOT the Families
Survey Findings Point to Emotional Barrier, Not Lack of Information, as Primary Obstacle for Cremation Families
A survey released July 30th by Parting Stone found that 34.5% of families who receive cremated remains have made no decision about final placement. More than one in three families are living with unresolved remains, sometimes for years.
Of those families, only 7percent cited lack of information as the reason they had not moved forward. They know about scattering, interment, columbarium niches, and keepsakes. The barrier, according to the research, is emotional: nearly four in ten said deciding on permanent placement feels like letting go.
Among families in that limbo, 70 percent said they would welcome a new way to honor their loved one if it felt right. Thirty-eight percent reported they were not at peace, and that group was twice as likely to feel guilty. More than half wished they had more people to talk to.
Tom Anderson at Funeral Director Daily has outlined the revenue implications. Funeral homes that follow up with cremation families at six, twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four months can build genuine relationships and recover real revenue across urn vaults, interment lots, columbarium niches, and preneed arrangements. The cadence works because it aligns with the emotional timeline the data describes rather than a sales calendar.
A separate concern comes from the preneed side of operations. KB Jay Jacobson, writing in the September issue of American Funeral Director, noted that preneed agents are frequently dismissed by funeral home leadership as vendors rather than consulted as field sources. Those agents are in communities, in kitchens and living rooms, gathering early signal about what families worry about and when they are starting to move. Jacobson cited Academy of Management Journal research from Ethan Burris finding that managers often rate employees who raise challenging suggestions as poorer performers, and are less likely to act on those suggestions.
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