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"You know how kids say they want to be a policeman or a fireman? I always wanted to be a funeral director," says Robert Waltrip. He was following family tradition, but the chairman and CEO of Service Corp, International has more than fulfilled his childhood ambition. He's built his family's single-home funeral business in Houston. TX, into a $643 million company comprising 661 funeral homes and 166 cemeteries nationwide.
In the mid-1960s, Waltrip saw growing numbers of old-time, family-run funeral homes up for sale as the new generation went off to college and other careers. With an insider's knowledge of a little-understood industry, he's been picking off the best of the lot ever since, but the biggest leap forward came when SCI doubled...