Funeral Home / Death-Care Acquisition & SBA Underwriting Financial Model

Most funeral-home templates are startup or operating forecasts, and most brokers headline a call count. But a funeral home's earnings hinge on its revenue *per call* — and the service mix is shifting. The US cremation rate is ~63% and rising toward ~82% by the mid-2040s (NFDA); direct cremation is ~25% of the calls but only ~10% of the revenue. A firm can look busy while its revenue per call quietly erodes. This model reads the firm the way a disciplined buyer and an SBA lender do — on the blended revenue per call, the normalized SDE, and the trend.

What it does - Call-Volume + Service-Mix engine — at-need calls × a blended revenue per call from three service types (a traditional burial, a cremation with a service, a low-cost direct cremation), each at its own price. The blended revenue per call (~$6,082 on this firm) and the cremation rate (~63%), not the raw call count, are the numbers that decide the deal. Direct cremation is ~25% of the calls but only ~10% of the revenue — the value dilution the seller's count hides. - The honesty a broker's sheet skips. It recognizes bad debt / uncollectibles (families don't always pay; insurance assignments get written down) as an explicit line; it hires a licensed funeral director to replace the owner who works the calls, meets the families and sells the pre-need; and it prices on the SDE *after* those, not the seller's owner-free, no-bad-debt number. The result is the true DSCR (1.36x) shown next to the naive broker DSCR (1.89x) — the gap is the director and the bad debt. - Pre-need as future pipeline, not cash. The pre-need backlog is real, but it's funded into a trust or insurance and recognized at-need, over years — a lender won't treat it as today's cash flow, and you shouldn't pay a current-earnings multiple on it. The model prices the at-need business and shows the backlog separately as future coverage. - Real estate own vs lease. A toggle for a leasehold base case (rent in overhead, 10-year SBA term) vs a fee-simple purchase of the building and any crematory (added to the uses, 25-year term). - The down-case that matters. The sector's #1 structural risk is the accelerating cremation shift. An 8-point mix move toward direct cremation + a 4% call slip drops DSCR to 0.88x — below the 1.25x floor, because overhead (staff, facility, fleet) is fixed. Profitable today; under pressure as cremation rises. That is the honest headline. - SBA 7(a) capital stack — buyer equity, seller note (full-standby vs amortizing toggle as the DSCR lever), and the SBA loan that fills the rest, with the lender's DSCR gate and a 5-year cash-on-cash and equity-multiple exit. No IRR is printed (deliberately — on one small deal it is hostage to the exit multiple).

Inside: a 10-sheet Excel model (every calc a formula, Google-Sheets-safe, no macros), a 20+ page PDF guide, and a benchmarks sheet with sourced ranges. Three firm profiles (Burial-Traditional / Balanced Community / Cremation-Forward) reload the multiple, working-capital peg, capex and bad-debt rate.

Educational planning tool, not financial, legal, tax or investment advice.