How We Stay Vital and Profitable

In the 1970s, my childhood was spent in an apartment above my parents’ funeral home. Because my parents drove the ambulance and operated the funeral home, we were the go-to in any emergency. This was a pretty typical experience for many funeral directors during this time. I fell in love with being needed and being the source of comfort for our small town. The ability to be there for those in need is what attracted me and countless others to the funeral profession.

Another staple of my childhood was the ability of our small, locally owned funeral home to have the financial working capital we needed to successfully operate our business. I believe that these two situations go hand in hand: being relevant in our communities and being financially stable. I grew up, became a CPA and a licensed funeral director and embalmer. I was our CFO, an active funeral director, and owner of our funeral home.

Since 1991, I have also been providing accounting services to funeral homes and cemeteries across the United States. In the last 10 years, I have witnessed several clients who are beginning to have serious financial struggles. Why would a profession that is vital to their communities be struggling? The answer is very complex, and I look forward to digging into each of our points of service as well as our pricing for those services at CANA’s 2026 Symposium this February. Here’s a preview of what we’ll discuss.

The First Call

Many times, having the appropriate information when attending the first call is invaluable in establishing a connection with the survivors. This is the time when the family will be most uncertain and in shock. You want to establish your role and your relevance to them. Do you have your best people on the first call in which they encounter family members? I believe adequate training and availability of vital information at the time of the first call are two items that are essential to serving the family in the best way possible.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. What procedures and phrases do our staff or removal service use with a family?
   
2. Do we have a checklist of vital steps for every first call?
   
3. Do we have information available on prearrangements on file or recent interactions with a family to use during the first call?
   
4. Do we provide adequate information on the next steps? Do we adequately fill the gap between the first call and the first meeting with our funeral home?
   

The Arrangement Conference

The arrangement conference is your opportunity to be of most help to the family. Training your staff is the best way to make successful arrangements. Employing checklists and communicating different ways you can provide lasting healing over the coming days, weeks, or months is essential. This critical time can make or break the relevance of your services.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do we adequately train and periodically review arrangement staff for the best ways to conduct an arrangement conference?
2. Do we focus on personalized services and non-traditional gatherings if these would be most helpful to the family in beginning their healing process?
3. Are we flexible to the varied needs of families, and are we proficient in having fresh ideas regarding different ways survivors can express their grief?

Aftercare

I believe that providing guidance once the service is over and the family has returned to their lives is the most important chance we as a profession have to generate goodwill, significance, and relevance. I also believe that in our own funeral home and in many funeral homes across this nation, we fail to provide much in the way of services for “aftercare.”

The lack of working capital and adequate staffing is directly related to the reasons we don’t do a better job of providing care for the family after the service is completed. I believe we are missing a big opportunity to help the family. I also believe that we are the best source for providing aftercare services. Our staff has a relationship with the survivors and is in a wonderful position to continue our care after the funeral or memorial. We need to design and implement aftercare services just like we do cemetery, crematory, transportation, or other services we coordinate. We need to find a way to create training and grief services and find a way to fund these extra services.

Pricing of our Services

We need to get creative. Every day, I see funeral home financials from across the country, and I am reminded of two critical challenges:

1. Funeral home pricing has not kept up with inflation. Because we don’t adequately raise revenues, our costs are pushing our net income into the negative.
   
2. Once the Federal Trade Commission funeral rule came into effect in 1983, we decided as an industry that the cost of providing funerals was much higher than the cost of providing cremation.
   

Let’s examine each of these in detail:

Inflation. Funeral home pricing has not kept up with inflation. My paternal grandfather died in 1966. Reviewing our funeral home Red Book for 1966, I noticed the median funeral revenue per case was $1,250. When I apply that average to the average inflation rate according to the U.S. historical Inflation rates for each year since, we are losing against inflation by more than 10%. We should price our services in a way that allows us to serve our communities.

Pricing cremation services. According to the NFDA, the median price for cremation services is less than the median for traditional burial revenue in the United States. From the funeral home revenues I see, many funeral homes are experiencing a much larger gap between the average revenue from burial and cremation.

Most funeral homes have very large, fixed costs. Therefore, every case you handle should be assigned a portion of that fixed cost. You should do the same with all expenses: electricity, advertising, insurance, employees, employee benefits, property taxes, building maintenance, and auto expenses. These expenses are the same whether you have a burial or cremation.

We have some work to do on our pricing, for sure. As a profession, we need to be sure that we understand the costs of each type of service we provide. Appropriate pricing is the key to having the financial working capital to meet the needs of our communities.

What to Do Next?

The funeral profession needs a reset. How do we reset in a way that is most beneficial for our employees, investors, and customers?

I will offer a practical roadmap to restore profitability and sustainability through strategies to improve cash flow, build wealth, and adapt to future demographic and economic shifts this February at CANA’s 2026 Cremation Symposium. I hope you join me to learn actionable methods to manage inflation, leverage financing options, strengthen preneed programs, and move beyond burnout toward long-term financial health and business resilience.

There are few professions that have as long a history of providing vital services to people in need.

We need to take stock of our vast resources and employ our talents to continue providing these vital services long into the future.

We would do anything for the families and the communities we serve. So, what do we do to make sure we’ll be there for them in the future? Drawing on decades of personal and professional expertise, Kara Ludlum heads to CANA’s 2026 Cremation Symposium to explore how many funeral homes and cemeteries— once financially strong—are now struggling amid changing industry dynamics and persistent self-sacrificing culture. Get your action plan in Las Vegas this February 25-27, 2026: register now!

This article excerpted with permission from Kara Ludlum and Osiris Software.

She is also the co-founder of Osiris Software, a leading management software solution serving funeral homes and cemeteries in both the United States and Canada. In 2023, Osiris Software expanded its family of companies to include Insight Books and Certified Celebrants, where Kara continues to play a key role in supporting professionals who serve grieving families.

Kara Ludlum has dedicated her career to the funeral profession. A second-generation funeral director and former funeral home owner, she brings both personal experience and professional expertise to the industry. Kara is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and senior partner at Ludlum & Mannen CPAs, a firm that works exclusively with funeral homes and cemeteries across the United States.

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With her unique combination of hands-on funeral service experience, financial expertise, and software innovation, Kara is recognized as a trusted leader and advocate for funeral professionals across North America.