Dennis Yu flew out to Austin and we sat down for a few hours of recording. Some of that became a Coach Yu Show episode, and the rest is going to feed everything we’re building here at Funeral Home Exit.
A funny thing happens when you talk about selling a funeral home for a few hours straight. You start to notice which parts you’ve said a hundred times, and which parts you’ve never actually said out loud. I want to share the moments from this interview that hit me hardest, because they were the ones I wasn’t expecting.
The question I wish people would ask me
Dennis asked me what question I wish people would ask, because they don’t.
I get asked all the time, “What did you sell for? What was the multiple? What do you do all day now? Must be nice.” Those questions are fine, but they’re not the real one.
The real question is: are you happy?
Nobody asks that. And it’s the only one that matters. Because the whole point of preparing your business for an exit, the whole point of putting in the years of work, the SOPs, the documented processes, the clean financials, the management team that can run without you, is so that on the other side, you actually get to live the life you wanted to live. If you sell for a great number and you’re miserable, you got the math right and the goal wrong.
For the record, I am happy. I’m spending Christmas mornings with my four-year-old without a phone vibrating in my pocket. I sleep through the night. I haven’t had a 2 a.m. funeral call in over a year. That was the goal the whole time.
What “puts food on the table” actually means
When I was 24, I came back to College Station from Los Angeles because my dad had just died from cancer. My granddad came out of retirement to help. He told me, “We don’t have much. We have a name. But you can have it, and it will put food on the table and feed your family.”
That phrase has stuck with me for 20 years.
Talking it through with Dennis, I realized something. My granddad was a caregiver. A truly excellent funeral director. And “puts food on the table” was enough for him, because his identity was wrapped around serving families, not building a business.
That’s the line most independent funeral home owners I know live on. They serve families brilliantly. They put food on the table. And then they age out, or they get tired, or a health event happens, and the business has no value beyond the real estate because nobody ever turned it into a business that could run without them.
I wanted both. I wanted to serve families AND build something that could be sold, on my terms, when I was ready. Those two things aren’t in conflict, but a lot of owners think they are.
The two-week test
Dennis asked me how owners actually move out of being a day-to-day operator. I told him the truth: I did it incrementally, and the test is brutal.
Can you leave for a week and not check your phone? Good start.
Can you leave for two weeks? Now you’re getting somewhere.
Can you leave for a month and your team doesn’t call, doesn’t text, and the business runs the same as if you were there? Now you actually have a business. Before that, you have a job.
Most owners I talk to fail the two-week test, and they’re shocked when I tell them that. They genuinely thought they had built something transferable. They hadn’t. They had built a job they happened to own.
This is the single biggest thing I want every funeral home owner to test for themselves before they ever take a call from a broker or a buyer. If you can’t pass the two-week test today, that’s your project. Not pricing, not the broker hunt, not the LOI. Build the systems that let you disappear for a month.
Why I stopped working funerals before I sold
The last couple of years before the sale, I stopped working funerals.
That was hard. Funeral directing is a calling for most of us. Friends would lose a parent and call me at 2 a.m., and the assumption was that I’d meet with them, handle the arrangement, be there at the service. That’s what 20 years of “I’m always there for you” looks like.
What I learned is that families don’t choose a different funeral home if you greet them at the door, hug them, introduce them to one of your directors, and stay reachable. They still pick you. They still trust you. The handoff has to be earned with a real team that can actually carry the weight, but if you’ve done that work, the families come anyway.
Stopping the funerals was the part of the preparation that hurt the most personally. It was also the part that signaled to buyers that the business could survive me leaving. You can’t fake that. Either the owner is gone for a month and the place keeps running, or they aren’t.
The irony of pre-need
Funeral home owners spend our entire careers telling families to plan ahead. Pre-need, not at-need. Take the burden off your kids. Make the decisions while you have time and a clear head, instead of making them in a fog of grief.
And then most of us never apply that to our own businesses.
Dennis pointed this out and I laughed because it’s so obvious in hindsight. We are professionally trained planners who don’t plan. We coach families through the most important financial conversation of their lives, and then we treat our own succession like it’ll figure itself out.
Selling a funeral home in the middle of a health crisis is the at-need version of selling. Selling a funeral home that you’ve prepared for years is the pre-need version. The difference between the two is two to three times the sale price, and a completely different post-sale life.
If you’re reading this and you’ve been putting off this conversation: you don’t have to be ready to sell tomorrow. You just have to start preparing today, so that whenever the day comes, you exit on your terms.
What’s next for Funeral Home Exit
This interview, and the rest of the footage Dennis and I recorded that day, is the source material for almost everything we’re building here. A calculator, a book, articles like this one, and eventually conversations with other owners who have walked this path.
I’m building Funeral Home Exit because after my sale closed, friends and acquaintances kept calling me with questions. They didn’t want a broker. They didn’t want a consultant who’d never run a funeral home. They wanted to talk to someone who’d done it. So that’s what this is.
Dennis is going to publish his own version of our conversation over on the Coach Yu Show side of things, and the BlitzMetrics team is breaking down the valuation and exit-planning playbook that we walked through together. There’s also a piece on Local Service Spotlight pulling out the lessons that apply to any local service business owner thinking about a future exit, because honestly, most of what we covered isn’t unique to funeral homes.
If you’re a funeral home owner and any of this resonated, the best next step is the calculator on this site. Answer a few questions, get a range, and if you want to keep the conversation going, schedule a call. No pressure, no broker on the other side. Just two operators talking.