Hi all - this week, we’re diving into…funeral home roll ups. We’ve dived into the funeral home software buy & build story and curiosity finally got the best of me.
Before diving in, we’re 10 days from closing the application for the June cohort of the Road To Cary Accelerator.
Road To Carry Accelerator
This is for mid-career PE, corp dev, IB, and operating professionals who are ready to build their own acquisitoin platforms.
What you get from the Accelerator: developing an active acquisition thesis, building a live deal pipeline, and starting warm relationships with capital allocators actively deploying equity, including:
The bottom line: what takes most people 12 months of research, coffee chats, and false starts, we compress into 8 weeks of accountability, learning, and execution.
We are reviewing applications and holding informational chats on a rolling basis. The application takes 10 minutes. If you've been wondering whether this is your path, that's reason enough to apply so we can talk.
The Accelerator is delivered 100% online, plus in-person networking events. Part-time / async-compatible and confidentiality strictly enforced.
PE Playbook: Funeral Homes
This article was supported by RTC’s past Research Analyst Joseph Chiang.
State of Play
For generations, the local funeral home operated as a geographic monopoly of trust. Families returned to the same home their parents used, their grandparents used. The operator barely had to market and the pricing was set by convention.
That structural comfort is now meeting three simultaneous forces:
Private equity with dry powder and a fragmented acquisition target list,
A demographic wave that will push U.S. annual deaths from 3.1 million today to nearly 4 million by 2050, and
A shift to cremation that is compressing per-case revenue while simultaneously opening a digital-native, direct-to-consumer channel that traditional operators have no idea how to compete with.
Foundation Partners Group (FPG) is the most aggressive attempt to build a modern platform in the middle of all three. They grew from 22 locations in 2010 to 270+ by 2023, acquired a digital cremation brand, bought the leading online end-of-life planning platform at 100 million users, and then in 2026 launched a B2B division to sell services to the independent competitors they have not yet acquired.
The industry is quietly going through an upheaval. Let's dive in.