I flew down to Austin to spend the day with Cody Jones. We recorded a Coach Yu Show episode, shot a stack of supporting content for his new site at Funeral Home Exit, and ate at Salt Lick BBQ. The episode is now live, and I want to write up what I actually took away from the conversation, because Cody is the kind of operator I learn from every time we talk.
Cody is a fifth-generation funeral director who took over Callaway-Jones at 24 when his father died of cancer. He grew the business over 20 years and sold it for an eight-figure exit, at a multiple well above the top of the industry range. The funeral profession typically operates on a 4 to 6 percent margin. Most owners age out, get tired, or wait too long, and their business closes for the real estate value. Cody did something different, and the difference is worth studying.
Why I wanted Cody on the show
I meet a lot of business owners who have sold their company. Most of them have one of two patterns: they got lucky on timing, or they ran an aggressive growth play that PE found attractive. Cody is in a third bucket, which is rare. He intentionally engineered a business to be acquisition-ready, in a slow-moving traditional industry, over the course of a decade plus. Then he executed the sale on his own terms, walked away healthy, and is now spending time with his four-year-old son.
That third bucket is the one most local business owners actually need to learn from. You’re not going to triple revenue in 18 months because some PE firm fell in love with your industry. You’re going to grind for 10 to 20 years and then someone is going to look at your books, your team, your processes, and your reputation, and either offer you a number that lets you retire well or a number that doesn’t.
Cody got the former. Most owners get the latter. The interview is about why.
The question Cody wishes people would ask
On camera, I asked Cody what question he wishes people would ask but never do.
He said, “Are you happy?”
The questions he gets, over and over, are about the multiple, the number, the daily life of someone who doesn’t have to work. Those are the easy questions. The hard one is whether the whole thing was worth it. Whether the goal was the right goal. Whether the post-exit life is the life he wanted.
I think about this constantly when I’m advising founders. Exit math is downstream of life design. If you sell for the maximum number but the deal terms keep you trapped in the business for three more years, the math was right and the goal was wrong. If you sell for less, but you walk free on day one and get to spend Christmas mornings with your kid without your phone ringing, the math was lower and the goal was right. Cody chose for the goal, and got the math anyway, because he was the kind of operator who could.
“I get more questions like ‘how much did you sell it for’ and ‘what was the multiple.’ Like, are you happy? That’s what I wish people would ask. Did you make the right choice? No one asks that.”
The two-week test, and why most owners fail it
When I asked Cody how owners actually move from being a day-to-day operator to being a real owner, he gave me a test I’m going to start using with every founder I advise:
Can you leave for two weeks without checking your phone? If yes, try a month. If your business survives a month without you texting your team, without putting out fires, without your phone ringing in the night, then you actually have a business. Before that, you have a job you happen to own.
Most independent operators fail this test and don’t realize they fail it. They’ve conflated “indispensable” with “irreplaceable.” The first one means the team leans on you out of habit. The second one means the team would actually collapse without you. Buyers can tell the difference inside an hour of due diligence.
The fix isn’t a tech stack or a course. The fix is documented SOPs, a real management layer, and the discipline to let your team make decisions you’d make differently, so they build the muscle to make decisions at all.
The pre-need irony
Funeral home owners spend their entire careers coaching families to plan ahead. Pre-need vs at-need. Take care of it before the crisis, not during.
And almost none of them apply that to their own business.
Cody pointed this out and I laughed, because it generalizes immediately. Financial advisors don’t plan their own retirements. Personal trainers stop working out. Therapists are notoriously bad at therapy. Whatever it is you coach others to do, you tend to neglect for yourself. The pattern is so reliable that you can build a coaching business around just noticing it in your own life.
In Cody’s industry, the cost of skipping the pre-need version of your own exit is two to three times the sale price, plus a different post-sale life. That’s not a rounding error. That’s the difference between retiring on your terms and selling the building for whatever the real estate is worth.
What I’m taking forward
Three things I’m leaving Austin with:
The first is the two-week test. I’m going to use it on every operator I advise who tells me they’re “thinking about selling someday.”
The second is the question. I’m going to ask the founders I’m closest to whether they’re happy, and I’m going to ask it before I ask anything else.
The third is the framework for Funeral Home Exit itself, which is what Cody is now building. He took every call he got from funeral home owners after his sale and realized there’s no good resource that comes from a real operator who actually exited. So he’s building one. The first version is a valuation calculator on his site, and the deeper material is the book and the podcast he’s starting. If you’re a funeral home owner, you should be talking to Cody directly. If you’re not in funeral services, the patterns still apply, and Cody’s own takeaways from the day we recorded are worth your time.
My team at BlitzMetrics is going to break down the valuation and exit-readiness playbook in more detail, and we’ve got a companion piece on what local service business owners specifically should take from this. One source, four angles, because the moment was that rich.
If you got value from this, share the episode and tag Cody on LinkedIn. He’s still finding his footing as a public-facing operator after 20 years in the trenches, and the encouragement matters.