BROOKSVILLE - A hearse zipping down the Suncoast Parkway may seem an unusual sight, but get used it, says the head of a longtime Brooksville funeral home company.
Southbound hearses signify major changes for the Brewer's funeral business, which now-retired Pat Brewer first opened in Brooksville in 1965.
The business had been family owned until the Brewers sold to then publicly traded Equity Corp. International in 1995. Equity was later bought by publicly traded Service Corporation International.
Now, not two years after winning a fight to buy back the family business from one of the world's largest funeral home companies, chief executive officer Barry Brewer has recently taken some aggressive and corporate-like steps to expand his own business - and more are on the way.
In July, Brewer & Sons' parent company, Family Owned Service Company, bought out Mark III funeral homes in Tampa from Diane Curry, who had decided to retire. Barry Brewer declined to reveal the purchase price.
Brewer & Sons now boasts six funeral home locations spread over Hillsborough, Hernando and Orange counties, including two in Tampa, two in Spring Hill, one in Brooksville and one in downtown Orlando.
The company, which already claims about 42 percent of the Hernando County burial market, has recently grown to fielding about 12,000 calls a year, Brewer said. By comparison, the average funeral home that belongs to the National Funeral Directors Association handles 182 calls per year.
And the Brewers hinted at more acquisitions later this month.
Although Barry Brewer admits to having learned a thing or two while under corporate ownership, he eschews any comparisons of Brewer & Sons to a corporate business.
With 35 employees, his company is still a small business, he says, especially since all the locations are within an hour drive of Brooksville. He and the elder, retired Brewer, who still helps with the business, personally meet 90 percent of the families served, Barry Brewer said.
"We have a limit to where we're going," said Barry Brewer, 41. "If I can't be there within an hour, I don't want anything to do with it."
The cash flow from the new funeral homes has funded major remodeling efforts at both Tampa locations as well as at the Brooksville and Seven Hills locations.
Brewer & Sons is also in the process of changing to a paperless operation. Customers will be able to create their own virtual funeral on the computer, browsing caskets, vaults, urns and flower arrangements on a screen.
The mountain of paperwork ranging from the death certificate to the obituary will also all be completed on a computer screen, which the Brewers expect to help eliminate occasional clerical errors.
"It cuts down on mistakes, so that we don't have anything like misspelled names, because customers can check the screen before they leave," said Pat Brewer, 65. "And it's got to be simple, or we won't use it."
The company is one of only a few hundred in the nation using specialized funeral home software , said Todd Burgess of Aurora Caskets Co., who on Wednesday was tweaking Brewer & Sons' new software program.
Brewer & Sons made another high-tech move by equipping all three hearses and 22 cars with Sun Pass prepaid toll transponders, for quick access to the new Tampa locations, Barry Brewer said.
"Everything is time conscious in this business," he said. "There's 158 things we have to organize, and it all has to go down without a flaw."
All the new changes are a far cry from three decades ago, when locals expressed concern when Pat Brewer decided to open a second funeral home in sparsely populated Spring Hill.
"It was the talk of the town," said Barry Brewer, who remembers people wondering: "Who you going to bury out there? All you've got is mermaids, dinosaurs and black bears?"
- Staff writer Jennifer Liberto can be reached at 848-1434 or liberto@sptimes.com
