Precoa and the business of getting around to it

John Sytsema had a perfectly reasonable way of helping people plan their funerals. Someone walked in. Someone referred a friend. The staff answered the telephone. In western Michigan, where his family runs Sytsema Funeral & Cremation Services, that arrangement worked. It also had a ceiling: the same people looking after families who had just suffered a death were trying to persuade other families to prepare for one.

“We were relying mainly on walk-ins and referrals,” Sytsema recalled in Precoa’s account of the partnership. Newspaper and radio advertising brought awareness, but appointments were harder to secure. Responsibilities rotated. Nobody had enough uninterrupted attention. The first thing to run short was focus.

That is the small, consequential problem behind Precoa, the Portland company whose name compresses the Preneed Company of America. Preneed means arranging a funeral before someone dies. Precoa helps funeral homes find interested families, keep in touch, and bring them into a planning conversation. Its proposition is practical: someone should own the next step.

A good intention needs an appointment

In 2004, Mark Hornibrook and Bret Davis finalized their founding agreement at Davis’s kitchen table, joined by their wives, Ane and Jenny. Hornibrook brought funeral-insurance experience; Davis brought preneed marketing and sales experience. Their plan joined marketing, appointment setting, and sales in one operation. Davis became the Funeral Planning Center’s first manager.

The underlying observation was almost annoyingly familiar. A person can approve of planning ahead and still postpone it. A funeral home can have a respected name and still lack the staff to pursue every inquiry. Between those two reasonable positions sits a calendar with nothing on it.

Precoa’s answer became ProActive Preneed. Marketing generates interest through channels including direct mail, digital campaigns, and community education. Scheduling specialists contact interested families. A local advance funeral planner meets them. Recruiting, training, reporting, and relationship-management software support the work around that meeting.

The unglamorous middle does the work

A CRM records the conversations, appointments, and follow-ups. The web portal gives planners calendars and performance information. Regional sales staff coach them. The distinction from buying a campaign or a software subscription is the surrounding labor: Precoa supplies people and management as well as tools.

At Sytsema, the attraction was that surrounding capacity. The family saw organized community education, marketing research, training, and sales management they could use without building each function themselves. Precoa’s published case study reports doubled preneed business over a partnership lasting more than a decade. That is a customer account selected by the seller; it gives a useful example, rather than a forecast for every funeral home.

“It is so far beyond what we could have done ourselves.”John Sytsema · funeral-home co-owner

The distinction also appears at Charles F. Snyder Funeral Homes & Crematory in Pennsylvania. Its existing outreach and educational events were combined with more systematic tracking, appointment setting, recruiting, and reporting. Precoa’s case study describes an already active program that doubled its preneed volume. The customer was buying additional capacity to execute its ambitions.

Five million reasons to pick up the phone

In July 2026, Precoa announced that it and its partners had prearranged one million families. Its reported 2025 activity included more than 243,000 appointments, more than 100,000 individuals preplanned, over 7,100 community education programs, and 5.2 million follow-ups. The last number is the revealing one. Behind a planning decision sits an enormous amount of repeated, organized contact.

Those figures should remain separate. A follow-up is not a family; an appointment is not necessarily a completed plan. Nor are insurance sales the same thing as Precoa’s revenue. The business makes more sense when the activities are distinguished than when they are piled into one impressive-looking total.

The plan no longer ends in a drawer

Precoa bought Everplans from National Guardian Life Insurance Company in 2024, adding a platform for organizing and sharing important information. The purchase extended its reach beyond the original appointment. Families could keep wishes accessible and update details as their lives changed.

In October 2025, Precoa introduced Sales Studio, with guided presentations, funeral-home pricing, shopping carts, digital signatures, and submissions. Expanded Everplans integration brought digital policy delivery and continuing access to planning preferences. In August 2026, CloudSync added continuity across visits and devices, including offline work. A conversation could resume without asking a family to reconstruct everything it had already said.

Buy the capacity. Copy the discipline.

For a funeral-home owner, the entry point is a free market-share analysis. Precoa says it invests in partner marketing and requires no long-term contracts. Insurance carriers listed as partners include National Guardian Life, Physicians Mutual, and Funeral Directors Life. Its commercial role combines funeral-home growth support with a route to insurance-funded planning.

The operating culture supports that relationship-heavy work. Precoa names kindness, progression, and craftsmanship as its values; its careers materials describe coaching, a hybrid corporate workplace, and incentive travel. In June 2026, Michael Hornibrook remained CEO while Tyler Hornibrook became president, separating long-term direction from daily execution.

Other businesses can copy the discipline: give follow-up an owner, preserve the conversation history, and measure what happens after interest appears. The logic depends on capable people handling the eventual appointment and a service the customer wants. More reminders cannot repair a poor meeting. Precoa’s useful insight is that a good meeting also needs someone to make it happen.