What We believe
Selling your funeral home or cemetery is a difficult decision. In many cases, your business has been built over generations by your family. And we place high value in that, and approach every acquisition with that at the forefront of our mind: your business is a cornerstone of the community, and your passion for serving families at their time of need was what has made it successful over the years.
Our focus is on helping to alleviate the burdens of ownership, while maintaining a strong commitment on serving families first. Profitability is a byproduct of doing the right thing for your client families - focusing on helping everyone that has been touched by loss heal and begin to move forward.
This is why we always start out with asking "What do you want or need in a sale", we don't mean a dollar amount, but rather what do you want to do in the next phase of your life? Do you want to stay on and work fulltime or part-time at your firm, be part of something bigger like a regional partner, or maybe you want to just move on completely. We are willing to look at all options with you.
We also believe that the employees are the backbone and heart of the business. We prefer acquisitions where all the employees stay on as a team with us going forward and the only changes that we must make are upgrades to technology, facilities, or vehicles. As well as alleviate some of the back-office responsibilities like dealing with vendors, accounting, and HR. In other words, keep everything that made the business successful in the first place, and only change things that would allow the staff to spend more time focused on serving families.
We are not a large corporation. We are a well funded, small group of funeral professionals looking to grow nationwide through partnering with funeral homes and cemeteries that share our vision.
-
David Deighton Partner
[email protected]David has over 29 years’ experience as a licensed funeral director and embalmer with a B.S. Degree in Mortuary Science from Wayne State University, along with a degree from Central Michigan University in Communication and Business Administration. He is a first-generation funeral director, starting at the bottom and working his way up. In addition to his initial fulltime staff position, he did trade embalming at night to save extra money and was able to buy his first funeral home in 1994 while still in this 20’s. He successfully turned around this closed location, and after 9 years sold this firm to spend time with his young family. Over the past 30 years he has also helped several others buy, sell or finance funeral homes and worked with other owners and industry lenders to help turn around under-performing locations, even stepping in as the onsite manager when required. In 2009, along with a business partner, he helped create a company that acquired several funeral homes, a crematory, a cremation society, and a cemetery in multiple states on the east coast. He exited this company by selling his shares to his business partner. He is now 100% focused in making Clearstone a leader in the industry.
-
Bill Jaehnig Partner
[email protected]Bill has over 25 years’ experience as a licensed funeral director and embalmer. During this time, he has worked in businesses that ranged from a small privately owned funeral home, to working as a Regional Manager overseeing multiple locations in multiple states for one of the public companies. He is living in Oregon and will provide day to day on-site support.
-
Zach Edwards Partner
[email protected]Zach has a background in finance and technology. Before co-founding Clearstone Memorial Partners Zach spent all day reaching out to and learning about software and technology business around the world and is excited to bring his findings to the industry. Zach is also supporting the teams efforts in sourcing and performing due diligence for future acquisitions.
-
JC Aubry Regional Vice President
[email protected]JC has nearly 20 years’ experience in the funeral industry and a background in Operations Management. JC has managed over 50 funeral home and cemetery sites in his career including the largest funeral home and cemetery combination in Oregon. He is a licensed funeral director and previously taught funeral service education at Mt Hood Community College. JC is excited to be part of Clearstone and lead the Oregon team to success.
