New Life for Funeral Homes
MaineBiz.com - Milestone & Mainely Urns
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Photo / Tim Greenway
Ownership by acquisition
Not all funeral home owners come into the business through family succession. Take Michael Martel and Timothy “TJ” Smart, two longtime funeral directors who founded Milestone Funeral Partners in 2021.
The Auburn-based business owns 78 funeral homes across New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont. It’s also about to expand in its own backyard with the acquisition of five locations in Maine due to be finalized later this month.
Through a separate business called Milestone Cemetery and Crematory LLC, they own Brooklawn Memorial Park & Crematory near the Portland International Jetport and Auburn’s Gracelawn Memorial Park — which established Maine’s first crematory in 1950 and its first mausoleum a decade later.
Martel, who grew up in Lewiston, started in the profession doing part-time janitorial work as a teenager at a local church helping clean up after funerals before taking a job at a local French Catholic funeral home.
“They bought me my first suit and taught me the ways of working with people,” Martel recalls. “By the time I graduated from high school, that’s what I wanted to do.”
Michael Martel is CEO of Milestone Funeral Partners LLC, an Auburn-based owner of 78 funeral homes in six states. It aims to finalize the acquisition of five in Maine this month.
He and his business partner, who grew up in Old Town, both worked for Service Corporation International, a large national strategic acquirer based in Houston, before starting on their own. Today, Milestone Funeral Partners has 39 equity owners, including more than 30 licensed funeral directors across seven states and two private equity backers – Bender Equity of Ridgewood, N.J., and Dallas-based Rosewood Private Investors.
When Milestone makes an acquisition, it leaves the running of the business to the sellers.
“We always have majority ownership, but the sellers have the opportunity to roll some of their equity into the Milestone organization, so they can in fact be partners,” Martel explains. “We never want our professionals to look back and say, ‘I hate the fact that I’m only a manager.’”
Touting its decentralized, low-overhead approach, Milestone underscores that hometown relationships are the real “brand” that matters. In most cases, those in the market to sell find Milestone rather than the other way around, according to Martel.
“We’re not for everyone,” he says, “but the owners who choose to partner with us have a pa ositive experience and usually refer their colleagues to call on us as well.”
Local alliance and regional growth
Seeking to expand its range of services, Milestone recently joined forces with Mainely Urns, a New Gloucester-based manufacture of cremation urns and memorial products.
Mainely Urns in New Gloucester manufactures urns and memorial products sold under the “Urnspiration” brand.
The partnership cements a longstanding relationship between the two companies, by shifting the focus from selling merchandise to helping bereaved families create tributes via Mainely Urns’ “Urnspiration” brand of personalized urns, printed Lookbooks and QR code-linked galleries.
“It’s an alliance of like-minded Maine death-care business operators, focused on unique personalization opportunities for bereaved families,” Martel says.
As for Milestone’s long-term plans, Martel says that the goal is to keep growing in this part of the country and build on existing clusters.
“That probably means acquiring 10 to 15 firms a year,” he says. “We could comfortably do that for a really long time and build a nice strong business here in the Northeast.”
