Good Place

The conviction and the company

I believe AI creates an opportunity to redesign how real-world services are delivered and build companies that take responsibility for the result. I'm most interested in using agents to deliver more personal services with less effort.

Personal requests often create extra work: finding someone who can fulfill them, checking the terms and fitting them into the rest of the service. If agents make that coordination less costly, a company can offer choices that were previously too expensive to arrange.

My experience in death care is why I want to build this company in funeral service. The person helping a family must also organize physical care, coordinate suppliers and guide unfamiliar decisions under time pressure.

The company is called Good Place. We intend to acquire and operate local funeral homes, build the infrastructure for agents to perform the work, and use it to offer a simpler, more personal service. To explain how this could grow into a much larger company, I want to start with what one funeral actually involves.

What stands behind one funeral

“I attended a funeral.” The sentence describes a gathering. It says little about the work that brought everyone there: decisions, documents, bookings and physical care spread across several organizations.

A funeral home may need to arrange transport, prepare documents, coordinate care, secure a cemetery or crematory, and organize a ceremony. Medical professionals, public authorities, suppliers and other local providers hold different parts of the process. Payment and advance planning introduce further relationships. The map below shows the broader ecosystem in which a home operates.

Separate pieces of the plan

Consider a burial with a ceremony. The cemetery knows which times it can offer. A supplier knows whether an item is available and when it can arrive. The home knows the family's preferences, budget and decisions. Confirming the service requires bringing those pieces together.

Where records and conversations are disconnected, staff do that work themselves. They enter details again, check whether documents are ready, chase replies and reconcile conflicting information.

The same problem limits what a family can get for its budget. The service it wants may not fit the home's catalogue at that price. A different florist or monument carver would bring it within budget without changing what the family asked for. If the home does not know those providers, the family takes the cheapest option instead.

This is how an operating constraint becomes a limit on the service. The choices a home can offer depend partly on how much work its team can carry and on which providers it knows. To change that at scale, we need to look at why so much of the operation is built separately in each local business.

The opportunity

The funeral home at the center of the map may be a small business carrying all of these responsibilities itself. Its owner may handle arrangements, manage staff and resolve the problems nobody else knows how to solve. Local knowledge makes the service work, but the business has limited resources to invest in changing it.

This is a substantial part of the industry. NFDA's September 2025 figures put approximately 75% of US funeral homes in family or private ownership. That includes businesses with several locations, but leaves a large market in which the resources available to each operator shape how it can improve. NFDA industry statistics.

Introducing a better intake process or a new supplier connection is only the beginning. Someone has to maintain it, update prices and handle the cases that do not fit. For a single home, that ongoing work competes with serving today's families. A company operating several homes can support an investment that each location would struggle to make alone.

Ownership transitions create an opening to make that investment. In NFDA's 2023 member survey, 45.9% of respondents planned to retire within five years. In an earlier member survey, 73% had no succession plan. Over the next few years a large part of this market will change hands. For an owner preparing to leave, a buyer can provide both a succession path and resources for the business's next stage. Good Place would look for homes where those needs meet an operation we can improve. NFDA succession survey, NFDA retirement planning survey.

A service arranged in advance and online

Alongside that ownership transition, the way people expect to buy the service is changing. A generation that arranges everything else in its life ahead of time and from a phone expects the same here. The industry has started to respond: nearly 36% of NFDA member firms offered online cremation arrangements in its 2025 report. NFDA 2025 report.

But what can be arranged online today is usually one part of the service. Cremation can be followed by a gathering elsewhere, a religious service or a meal with friends. The family still has to find the people and places that will deliver those parts.

I see an opportunity in that separation. The ease of buying one part of the service could extend to the whole arrangement. The challenge is to make the underlying work affordable enough that a more individual choice does not become a separate organizing project for either the family or the director.

That is where agents change the kind of company we can build. They can take on sequences of work across records and tools, continuing after the first request instead of leaving a person to advance every step. We want to connect that capability to the actual businesses, facilities and providers that deliver the service. Anthropic on agent workflows.

This capability matters in an industry already concerned about staffing. NFDA's 2025 report identifies finding qualified personnel as members' leading expected business challenge over the following four years. Reducing the coordination required for each case could let a limited team deliver more service. NFDA 2025 report.

The resulting opportunity is larger than improving a booking page. NFDA puts US funeral-home revenue at $16.3 billion. Good Place would participate in that service revenue through the homes it operates, earn more from better delivery, and use a shared operating capability to expand. The ambition is to make a more capable local service repeatable across the country. NFDA industry statistics.

Why we want to own the operation

To offer the whole arrangement online, we need control over how it is delivered. The service has to be available at the quoted price, with the people and resources needed to deliver it. That promise becomes unreliable when prices, capacity and provider commitments remain disconnected behind the booking page.

Adding a service might require qualifying a vendor, agreeing terms, setting a price and changing a shift. Making it affordable might require removing administrative work or buying differently. Good Place wants to make those decisions together, so that the offer and the operation develop around the same economics.

Why a subscription is not enough for this plan

A vendor can provide capable agents, integrations and tools. It can even sell completed work. The operator still decides how the business changes: which responsibilities disappear, how staffing adjusts and what to do with released capacity. Those choices determine how much of the technical improvement reaches the service and the earnings.

For example, removing administration could let a home handle more cases with its current team, or operate with a smaller staffing requirement. Choosing between those paths involves demand, shifts and the rest of the workload. We want the authority to make that choice and carry it through inside the business.

Acquisition also gives us a place to begin: an operating home with inquiries, relationships, staff and facilities. We pay for those assets and take responsibility for their continuity. Our return would come from the acquired business and the improvement we create, after the cost of implementing and running the new operation.

A managed-service agreement could delegate some of this authority without a purchase. We are choosing ownership because we want to rebuild the home as a whole and retain the resulting earnings. That choice has to justify its additional capital, but it lets us develop the service and the company together.

The work agents would perform

We would begin inside the home, following the director and team through actual cases. First calls, documents, shifts, purchases and arrangements compete for their attention. The aim is to identify work that can disappear or be executed by agents, then organize the human roles around what remains.

The operating environment would connect case information to the home's resources, supplier terms and financial records. A new booking, a missing document or a supplier delay could then trigger the work it requires elsewhere. These are proposed workflows we would build and test in that setting.

From paperwork to physical capacity

The first call comes at two in the morning, and the director picks up. What the family says on that call, or enters online later, could populate the case and the documents that need it: the death certificate, the permits, the authorizations. An agent would request missing details, prepare documents for authorized review or signature, file them and follow their status. The director would no longer need to reconstruct the same information or chase every routine step personally.

That record would also inform the physical operation. Agents could match authorized transfers to available teams and vehicles, send assignments and track completion. Across cases, a common view of people, rooms and equipment would support shift planning and reveal where the home can handle more work without adding resources.

Physical care would still be performed by the people responsible for it, and decisions reserved to particular professionals would stay with them. The surrounding coordination would be assigned according to what agents can reliably complete. Existing roles would no longer determine in advance how much human labor the service requires.

Connect purchasing to what the home sells

Scheduled services could trigger stock checks and authorized replenishment orders. Agents could follow delivery, match invoices to orders and surface discrepancies. A delayed item would be connected to the cases that need it, so the operation could find a substitute before the missing delivery becomes a service failure.

Supplier terms would also inform the catalogue. When a cost or availability changes, an agent could identify affected offers and recalculate what the home earns from each one. The company could then revise a price, change a supplier or remove an uneconomic option with a clearer view of the consequences.

Make local services part of the operation

A family might want a gathering at a familiar restaurant or a particular musician outside the home's usual offer. Agents could find providers and assemble their services, prices, terms and availability. Local assessment would establish suitability, after which quoting, booking and payment could follow a repeatable process.

This would give a personal request a lasting operational benefit. Once a provider is qualified, its offer becomes usable for later cases as well. A new family would still need its date and requirements confirmed, but the home would no longer have to rebuild the relationship from the beginning.

The same view of staffing and bookings could also help the home use its own space differently. Community gatherings or support events might fit between services where local demand supports them. We would account for setup, cleaning and staffing before treating spare space as another source of activity or revenue.

An interface that fits the work

The staff should not have to manage another complicated system to keep this running. We need to develop the interface alongside them: a person completing a transfer needs a quick way to record completion, while a director resolving an exception may need the whole case. Voice, a wearable or a simple device could be useful; the format remains to be discovered.

Underneath it, agents would use a common record of what has been requested, authorized and completed. Routine work would proceed within agreed authority, while unresolved decisions would go to the appropriate person. That is what would connect the back office to the service the family sees.

The family could then choose from an offer the home can actually fulfill. Consider a family that wants cremation followed by a gathering at a restaurant, favorite music, champagne and a collection of photos or videos. The difficulty is translating that wish into a venue, suppliers, equipment, timing and a price. A connected local offer could do that work without handing the family a list of people to call. The purpose is to make room for a gathering that feels connected to the person being remembered.

Clear prices and online access would be supported by the operation behind them, with human participation where the service requires it or the family wants it.

The economics

NFDA puts the 2023 median cost of a funeral with viewing and burial at $8,300, and $6,280 with viewing and cremation. At those prices a home with $1 million of annual revenue serves roughly 120 to 160 families a year. NFDA statistics.

The economic thesis is 10% → 40%. On an illustrative $1 million of annual revenue, that means moving from $100,000 to $400,000 of home EBITDA: four times the operating earnings on the same revenue base. We built that thesis on the hardest cases: small homes in rural markets, where volume is thin and staff are hard to find. An economically sound home in that environment reaches close to 40% in our model. We do not model larger markets yet.

In the model for one candidate, a home earning $158,000 on $696,000 of revenue reaches $377,000 on $975,000 after the levers, before marketing, catalogue and central costs are settled. That is a model, not a result. The first home is where we prove it.

The levers work together. Time released by agents can support additional cases or a lower staffing requirement. A broader catalogue can increase revenue, while better purchasing improves what the home retains. We would choose one operating plan so that the same capacity is not counted twice.

At company level, the homes' earnings must cover the shared agent infrastructure and central team. Purchase price, integration and working capital determine how much we invest to obtain those earnings. The financial appendix keeps the detailed equations and worked scenario separate from the main argument.

Existing players

Existing players approach the industry through management tools, ownership of locations and service networks.

Passare

Passare sells case management, financial tools, family collaboration and integrations, including AI-assisted intake. Passare.

Service Corporation International

SCI is North America's largest deathcare provider, with 1,485 funeral service locations and 500 cemeteries at the end of 2025. It was built through acquisitions, sharing preparation, administration, transport and personnel among locations in a cluster. SCI 2025 annual report.

Meadow

Meadow offers funeral arrangements through partner venues, with published package prices and an online portal for following the process. It shows that a service brand can organize delivery around an external provider network. Meadow funeral services.

From the first home to a national company

I want Good Place to become a national death-care company whose capacity can grow faster than the human work needed to run it. The first home gives us a place to develop that operation. Each subsequent location should benefit from capabilities the company has already built, while contributing new experience and local supply to the network.

Build an operation we can repeat

We have prepared analytical scenarios for seven acquisition candidates. The first purchase should bring established demand, access to operating records and sound earnings after replacing the owner's work. We would enter with a viable business, then learn where agent execution changes its costs, capacity and service.

The first implementation begins with a bounded workflow. Its purpose is to establish how the rest of the operation can change. If document preparation improves, we can connect it to readiness for physical work. If dispatch becomes dependable, staffing can reflect the new workload. Each improvement should make the next part easier to build.

At the next home, we bring those workflows and a method for introducing them. Its staff, providers and local requirements would need to be connected, but the company should already know what information to collect, what to test and how to handle common failures. That is where the first investment starts to support a repeatable business.

Distribution begins with the local business

Acquiring homes and reaching families are separate parts of expansion. We seek acquisitions through owner relationships, industry introductions and brokers. The relevant opportunity is a viable business whose owner wants a transition and whose operation we can improve, with the local knowledge needed to keep serving its community.

The home brings an initial flow of inquiries. We will use those to understand where families leave the arrangement process, what they ask for and which services the operation can fulfill. Local search, the home's website and community referrals then lead to a bookable offer. Additional promotion follows the ability to deliver those cases at a useful contribution.

As the network grows, shared work supports each home's listings, follow-up and campaign management. Local demand still has to be earned. But a new location begins with a working way to reach and serve families, instead of having to invent its own acquisition and arrangement process.

What scale changes

The opportunity for reuse extends beyond administration. A purchasing connection can serve several homes. A tested document workflow can be adapted to the next jurisdiction. A provider serving multiple locations works through one set of booking and payment routines instead of maintaining a separate process with each home.

Where locations are close enough, their physical operations can also work together. Available vehicles, preparation capacity or specialist staff can support demand across a local group of homes. We design that sharing around travel time and service commitments. A national network contains local operating groups with different resources, connected by common capabilities.

This is how scale improves capital efficiency. The company spreads development and central operating costs across more activity, while reducing the work required to integrate another location. A home still needs acquisition capital and local resources. The advantage comes from making those resources more productive and avoiding work the company has already solved.

An operation that keeps improving

Running homes would expose the failures that matter in practice: missing information, a purchasing discrepancy, a dispatch decision that sends work back to staff. We use those cases to improve the workflow and test whether the correction holds across similar situations. A reliable correction then reaches every location using that process.

Our bet is that competitors would need to match the whole operation, including its provider connections and implementation knowledge, to deliver the same service at the same cost.

Risks

The ambition depends on three things going right: agents must remove enough work to change the economics, acquisitions must leave room for that improvement to create a return, and the service must earn demand against credible alternatives.

Reliability and adoption

An agent that requires constant checking may move work around without reducing it. Poor integration can also create a second job for staff. We would measure the complete workflow, including corrections and human intervention, and expand execution where it improves delivery. Required authorizations and physical care constrain what can be delegated.

Acquisition and integration

A home's reported earnings may depend on unpaid owner labor, and local trust can be damaged during a transition. Purchase price, replacement staffing and the cost of changing the operation can absorb the expected gain. National expansion would need to follow our ability to fund and integrate homes while maintaining their service.

Competition and customer choice

Existing operators can adopt agents, and vendors may make comparable capabilities available without an acquisition. Families may prefer a simpler or more familiar service than the one we propose. Good Place would have to earn its position through delivered service and economics, while adapting the offer to what people actually choose.

The larger vision

Solving the operation of a funeral home would change one important part of the ecosystem. It also puts Good Place in daily contact with the work that remains outside it. Transport providers, crematories, cemeteries, venues and suppliers all have their own capacity, costs and ways of organizing a service. The boundaries of our first acquisition are not the boundaries of the opportunity.

Some of that work can be improved through better connections or an operating partnership. Some of it requires changing the provider's own business. Where that creates enough value, Good Place will operate or acquire the adjacent service and build its agent workflows around the work found there.

We are in diligence on the first homes now. We have everything to make Good Place a market leader within the next five years.

Funeral homes are where we intend to begin. The larger project is to rebuild a whole service ecosystem around that kind of company, so that personal service can become widely available without requiring the same amount of organizing work every time it is delivered.