By Thomas A. Parmalee
Most cemeteries understand the critical importance of encouraging families to buy cemetery property before they die.
But that doesn’t mean all of them are good at it.
That realization was what led William R. Toson to start The Tribute Companies in 1973, according to his daughter, Christie Toson, who has been the company’s president and CEO since 2016.
“He started The Tribute Companies in 1973 as a sales and consulting business because he saw the need for there to be a lot more help on the preneed side of the cemetery world,” she said.
At first, the company was named “W.R. Toson and Associates before changing its name to Tribute Cemetery Systems and later The Tribute Companies. It began when Toson’s father resigned from his product development position with the Quaker Oats Co. and launched the company with his wife, Barb Toson, as a founding officer.
Starting “one small cemetery at a time,” The Tribute Companies developed sales programs to help teams develop their preneed capabilities, Toson said.
“We helped cemeteries gain momentum, so they could build mausoleums and generate revenue to develop different options for families where they didn’t previously have the cash flow to do that,” Toson said. “You can’t do much if you’re sitting back waiting for burials to happen,” she said.
That perspective, which was directly responsible for the company starting in the first place, still applies today, Toson said.
“Our perspective as a company is that preneed is everything,” she said. “Without that preneed business, we have nothing.”
Cemeteries enjoy the most success when they approach preneed from an educational angle, she said.
“We are educating people and helping them understand why they need to do it ahead of time,” she said, noting that benefits include locking in current rates and deciding what you want — not leaving those decisions to others.
“We’ve got to get past the stigma and the uncomfortable factor,” she said. “This is part of life — and we have to start the conversation someplace.”
The Right Man for the Job
Toson’s father, who remains on the company’s board, grew up in the cemetery business: his father (Robert W. Toson), grandfather (Harold E. Toson) and uncle (Harold N. Toson) were all cemeterians.
According to the company’s About Us page, “When clients demanded control of the products they sold, Tribute purchased a precast concrete company to sell a complete line of cemetery-related products wholesale to cemetery owners, so that they could help grow their revenue by offering products directly to their end user for a reduced price and superior quality.”
That company was Freeport Vault Company, and it was a gamechanger for the company’s trajectory, Toson said.
“This allowed cemeteries to sell vaults to consumers as another revenue generator, which was different at that time,” Toson said.
Not every cemetery has been open to the idea of changing the way they’ve always done things, Toson said.
“It is really hard to get people to look at a different way to offer vaults to consumers,” she said. “So many times, they are sold through funeral homes, and they are delivered one vault at a time to the cemetery.”
The Tribute Companies sells vaults by the truckload – 20 to 22 vaults, delivered directly to a cemetery.
“The cemetery then services those vaults for services happening in a cemetery itself,” she said. “It is very interesting to see how many cemeteries are NOT willing to learn a different approach because they don’t want to take the time to service those vaults.”
But Toson thinks a different approach makes all the sense in the world.
“Otherwise, they are just letting the funeral director earn the revenue,” she said. Our perspective is that a vault is cemetery hardware and should be sold through the cemetery, not the funeral home, who has no benefit from it.”
With ground burials not as common anymore, she believes it is more important than ever for cemeteries to look beyond selling grave spaces to turn a profit. “They will be in a lot of trouble if they don’t rock the boat,” she said. “They must sell other products and services.”
After getting into the precast concrete business, The Tribute Companies continued to innovate, founding a full-servie architectural firm to focus on designing facilities that are “economically sustainable” for today and in the future, its About Us page says.
Owning Cemeteries of Their Own
The Tribute Companies fundamentally changed – and grew more profitable in 1988 – when William R. Toson acquired Pinelawn Memorial Park in Milwaukee, which was owned by his father, who was ready to retire.
The company would go on to acquire three additional cemeteries, all in Wisconsin, with each opportunity coming about because of The Tribute Companies’ special role as a sales consultant.
“Through the conversations and success of the sales management, we discovered — and I was not involved at that time — that there was an opportunity to buy the cemeteries,” Toson said.
Some of the acquisitions were more typical than others.
For instance, while the owner of Restlawn Memorial Park in Wausau was ready to retire in 1998, another opportunity presented itself a year later in an entirely different manner.
The Tribute Companies began working for Fort Howard Memorial Park in Green Bay as a sales consultant, but it discovered a variety of mismanagement issues. Eventually, the state intervened and supported a transition of ownership to The Tribute Companies in 1999.
The last cemetery to be added to Tribute’s portfolio — Gardens of Stonebank in Hartland — which Toson calls “a little country cemetery surrounded by lakes,” also came under Tribute’s umbrella almost by happenstance in 2007.
“It was managed by a church (Kettle Moraine United Presbyterian Church), but it was always a nondenominational cemetery,” Toson said. “The church was struggling. Volunteers were no longer interested in taking care of it.”
The church knew it needed help, and while The Tribute Companies donated its services to the church for some time, it was still struggling to maintain the cemetery.
“Finally, they said, ‘If you could take it off our hands … They didn’t even want us to buy it. They simply could not manage it anymore,” Toson said.
Despite the church’s stance, The Tribute Companies worked out a payment plan to buy the cemetery in 2007, paying in installments. “We have a great partnership with them,” Toson said. “It’s because they respect us, and we earned that trust from the way we managed the cemetery in the past. We are proud of that.”
In 2005, The Tribute Companies moved its home office to Hartland where Gardens of Stonebank is located, according to a company timeline.
Interestingly, while The Tribute Companies began by focusing on preneed, that part of that business is relatively minor today.
“We have found our strength is in other components,” Toson said. “When we divide our revenue between architecture, construction and design, and the precast concrete side of our business versus our cemeteries, it is about a 50/50 split.”
In previous years, the revenue between the divisions would “seesaw” back and forth. “One year, the cemeteries would be fantastic and the other two would be terrible,” she said.
But as president and CEO, Toson has worked hard to stabilize performance across its divisions.
Rather than causing the company to lose its focus, owning and operating cemeteries of its own has driven revenue at other business units, Toson said.
“It makes us very unique, and we struggle with branding that,” she said. “We struggle to be able to show very quickly who we are and what that looks like.”
But when employees speak directly with cemeterians, the company’s expertise in the space pays dividends.
“We bring real-life experience to what works in cemeteries and what does not work in cemeteries, rather than saying, ‘We are guessing’ or ‘This is what we are hearing,’” she said.
On the design and development front, the company has tested various concepts at its own cemeteries, giving it a chance to see firsthand what has resonated with consumers and what has fallen short of expectations.
“Sometimes, we’ve had clients on the design and development side tell us they have thought of doing this, and we can say, ‘We tried that, and it does not work,’” she said. “And with our successes, we can very much show our return on investment in our own cemeteries – and we can help with pricing and provide real-world examples.”
Serving families that prefer cremation has, of course, been an essential part of The Tribute Companies’ success.
“We have always had some really unique and beautiful cremation options in our cemeteries,” Toson said, noting that her staff focuses on offering various memorialization and personalization options to families.
Joining the Family Business
At the dinner table growing up, Toson rarely talked about getting involved in the family business.
“I didn’t quite understand the business,” she admitted. “I grew up saying, ‘My dad buys and sells mausoleums.’”
When Toson graduated from Marquette University with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology in 1994, she began working in the field — only to discover at age 25 that she did not like it.
“I needed to take a break and figure out my course in life,” she said.
With that thought in mind, she had a frank conversation with her dad and asked him if she could work in the family business for a year or so — only until she figured out what to do with her degree.
Her father told her a sales position was always available. “Everyone needs to understand how to sell,” was his message to her.
“He wasn’t going to train me or give me any special privileges,” Toson said.
While Toson was trying to figure out her next step, she realized something: She liked working in sales.
“I focused on selling mausoleum crypts and preneed, and it was door to door and cold calling,” she said. “It was tough, but it was a wonderful way to learn in the school of hard knocks, get some thick skin, and learn how to sell in really tough situations.”
As time went on, she also discovered working in sales gave her the flexibility to be a mom and take care of her kids.
“I ended up doing well, and I learned that if I gave effort, I could really earn some nice money,” she said.
She liked all that … and she never got out of the business.
“I learned how to sell, then I learned the administrative side of the business – and then I became the manager of the office, and then general manager of the Milwaukee location,” she said.
Leaving Pinelawn Memorial Park in Milwaukee, where she spent much of her time working, and joining the company’s home office in Hartland around 2004 was a big change for Toson. In fact, she was dragged by her father “kicking and screaming,” she joked.
“But he said he needed me to come to the home office to learn other facets of the business” – like its precast concrete work and design and development functions,” she said.
Loving the cemetery side of the business so much, she pushed back hard.
“But finally, when I moved over, I learned about the other parts of the company and what we did,” she said. “I was hyper focused on the cemeteries, but learning about the other divisions helped me grow into the president role” — a title she assumed in 2012.
“My parents were starting to slow down, not health wise, but they wanted to go back and forth from Florida to Wisconsin and enjoy their lives a little more,” she said. “They had earned it, and that is when we really started to work on a succession plan,” she said.
Now, as president and CEO of Tribute, she’s no longer as focused on sales, although she does get involved from time to time and still feels great joy in closing a deal, she said.
“There is a thrill of the sale like no other … I still very much love that,” she said. “However, I am ridiculously driven, so climbing up the ladder was just within me. “
Every time she assumed a different role, she realized how much she did not know, she said.
“To this day I wake up and will encounter something and think, ‘I cannot believe there is one more situation I really don’t have the answer to,’ and then I have to figure it out,” she said.
Those types of challenges have kept her engaged and invested in her job over the years, she said.
But becoming CEO was never preordained, even as she marched up the ranks.
“My father and I absolutely trust each other, but we are both really firm in our beliefs and opinions, and when we get into a disagreement, we both firmly believe we are right,” Toson said. “That is an area where we had some tough times in terms of what do we do next and where are we going with all this,” she said.
Their relationship has always been defined by raw honesty.
“There were times when I had conversations with him where I said, ‘I don’t know if this is the right move for us or if I am the right person,’” she said. “We had some tough conversations.”
Earlier in her career, conglomerates were also buying up cemeteries for ample premiums, she noted, which forced the two of them to have some candid conversations about the future and her commitment to the business, she said.
In 2016, Toson bought The Tribute Companies from her parents, assuming the additional title of CEO — and she’s been leading and growing the company ever since.
Making Waves
While at the helm of Tribute, Toson has challenged traditional boundaries in deathcare, which has made her some enemies — particularly in Wisconsin, an anti-combination state that forbids the joint ownership of funeral homes and cemeteries.
Toson has been a vocal supporter of changing the law and is one of the few cemetery operators with the land and the resources to erect a funeral home on her grounds if she’s ever given the opportunity to do so.
“We are one of the few people that have the interest,” she said. “There are probably very few cemeteries that have the interest or the capital to build a funeral home on a cemetery.”
Rather than backing away from initiatives that challenge conventional thinking, the company has chosen to continue pushing forward, even though its stance has upset some funeral homes in Wisconsin as well as some competing cemeteries, she said.
“We are either going to be friends or push the boundaries,” she said.
There continue to be discussions about changing Wisconsin’s combination laws, Toson said, but no one appears willing or able to take the lead on the issue. She does not have the time or capacity to spearhead another effort herself, she said.
Tribute is nevertheless watching anti-combination developments in other states, particularly Michigan, where Toson believes there are signs of progress.
“If they can get it changed over there, we know we could make some changes quickly,” she said.
Interestingly, The Tribute Companies could own and operate a crematory under Wisconsin law, which Toson thinks would be a great way to serve consumers.
But communities have pushed back on the idea, and there are some surprisingly challenging problems from a practical perspective as well.
“We cannot get the body from where the person passes away from to the crematory in Wisconsin,” she explained, noting that state regulations mandate that only licensed funeral directors can transport deceased human bodies.
Ultimately, Toson believes the debate should be less about protecting existing business models and more about responding to what consumers are demanding.
“I think it is just an area where we have to listen to the consumer,” she said. “And they are driving this to happen … our philosophy is that there is plenty of business for all of us.”
Planning for What Comes Next
For Toson, succession planning is becoming one of the most pressing challenges facing The Tribute Companies. As the company’s 100% owner, she recognizes both the privilege and the vulnerability of having so much of the business depend on one person.
“I am a realist, and all of us know something could happen to us instantly,” Toson said. “So, when I say being a 100% owner is wonderful and I am super proud, it is also terrifying in a sense.”
She and her leadership team have been working through that issue by implementing the Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS, a framework focused on accountability, direction and organizational discipline. The Tribute Companies began using EOS about two years ago, and Toson said it has helped bring greater transparency to the organization — even when that transparency requires difficult conversations.
“It is not easy,” she said. “There are some hard conversations we need to have.”
The need for a succession plan is complicated by the fact that neither of Toson’s two adult children is currently positioned to step directly into the business. Her son, Jacob, lives in California and works in finance and has no interest in joining the family company. Her daughter, Maia, is an attorney in Milwaukee who has some interest in the business but is focused on establishing her legal career.
“I’m struggling with what happens next,” Toson said. “The team is working. We are in the deathcare space, and none of us knows what is happening tomorrow. We want a plan.”
That plan, she suggested, may ultimately involve more than simply identifying a single successor. Given the unusual combination of businesses within The Tribute Companies, Toson does not envision an obvious buyer for the entire organization. Different divisions could potentially find different homes, she said, depending on the strategic fit.
Whatever happens, Toson wants the company’s family legacy and reputation to remain at the center of the decision.
“So often, you hear of the next generation of the family that feels they are entitled,” she said. “Entitled to the business. Entitled to a lifestyle. Entitled to things.”
That mindset is not one she wants to endorse.
“I know I have had some great things in my life, but I also work really hard for everything I have,” she said.
Preserving that work ethic — along with the family’s reputation and values — is a nonnegotiable part of the company’s future, she said. Being true to her family’s reputation is one of The Tribute Companies’ core values.
“If any employee walks outside and damages the family reputation or behaves in a way that embarrasses me or destroys our reputation, my fuse is short — and they do not belong on the team,” she said.
For now, Toson’s objective extends beyond preparing The Tribute Companies to survive her departure. She’s laser-focused on building an organization capable of reaching another level before that day arrives.
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