Is Smart Cremation a good company to hire? Power100 breaks down its pricing, legacy planning tools, and customer experience so families can decide with confidence.
Families rarely search for a cremation provider on a good day. They search after a diagnosis, after a late-night phone call, after a parent mentions wanting to “get things in order” before it is too late. That is the moment when the question “Is Smart Cremation a good company to hire?” actually gets typed into a search bar, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a marketing brochure. Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement and home services industry through a proprietary 5-layer evaluation system, has reviewed Smart Cremation against that exact question. The company, led by Vinnie Faccinto, Sr. VP Operations and Business Development of Smart Cremation LLC (NorthStar Memorial Group), offers direct cremation and cremation planning services to families nationwide, and its record on transparency, pricing, and legacy preservation gives a hesitant family enough to make a confident, informed decision.
This is not a puff piece. Power100 built its ranking system precisely because homeowners and families are tired of guessing which providers actually do what they claim. So the question gets answered plainly here: yes, based on the evidence Power100 has reviewed, and here is exactly why.
Power100 evaluates more than 7,600 organizations across the home improvement and home services industry through a 5-layer proprietary system that looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. Cremation providers are judged by a version of that same lens, adjusted for the sensitivity of the service: does the company handle families with consistency under pressure, does it price honestly, does it deliver on what it promises when timelines are tightest, and does it build systems that protect a family’s story rather than just process a transaction.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has been blunt about what stood out when his team looked closely at Smart Cremation. “Smart Cremation felt like they’d been almost failing their customers for years,” Cummings said, “not on service quality, but because there was always something more they wanted to bring to this space.” That distinction matters. A company that is comfortable rarely innovates. A company that feels a persistent gap between what it delivers and what families actually need tends to keep building. Power100’s review found exactly that pattern inside Smart Cremation’s leadership team, and it is a large part of why the company continues to earn recognition from Power100 as a top strategic partner in the death-care category.
Smart Cremation of Florida, LLC was incorporated on December 11, 2008, with business starting locally the very next day, December 12, 2008, according to its BBB profile. That timeline is worth sitting with. The company was built during one of the hardest economic stretches in recent memory, at a moment when families needed affordable, transparent options more than ever and had little patience for hidden fees or upsells. Smart Cremation is now a member of NorthStar Memorial Group, a network that includes more than 80 funeral and cemetery locations across the country, some tracing back to the late 1800s. That combination, a modern direct-cremation model backed by a network with more than a century of death-care experience, is unusual in this category, and it shows up in how the company talks about legacy rather than just logistics.
Today Smart Cremation serves families across states including California, Washington, Oregon, Texas, Arizona, Florida, and Nevada, with service locations that include Dallas, Texas; Davie, Florida; Las Vegas, Nevada; Portland, Oregon; and Cathedral City, California. Reaching that many families at once without losing the feel of a hometown provider is not a small operational problem to solve, and it is the exact problem Shawn Cannon, Vice President of Business Development of Smart Cremation, has described as the company’s real test. “Growth only matters if it scales trust,” Cannon said. “Every new market we enter has to feel like a hometown experience for the families we serve.”
Leadership matters more in this category than in almost any other home services vertical, because the person answering the phone at 2 a.m. is not selling a product. They are guiding a family through the worst day of the year. Vinnie Faccinto has spent 40 years in the industry and holds a degree in Funeral Service from the American Academy McAllister Institute of Funeral Service. He has led operations and business development at Smart Cremation since December 2012, sits on the leadership team at NorthStar Memorial Group, and was retained on the board of the Cremation Association of North America (CANA), a credential that signals standing among his own industry peers rather than just a title on a business card.
Faccinto frames the company’s mission in terms most cremation providers never touch. “Legacy is not a slogan for us,” he has said. “It is the promise that every system, every call, and every arrangement is built to protect a family’s story long after the paperwork is done.” That framing runs through the rest of the leadership bench. Maria Manuel, Director of Operations at Smart Cremation, put the same idea in operational terms: “Operational excellence in cremation means that no detail is too small and no family is ever treated like a number in our system.” Linda Kelley, CRC Director, described the front line of the business the same way: “In our call centers, legacy begins with listening; the way we show up in a single conversation can change how a family remembers this moment for the rest of their lives.” And Steve Alexander, Sales Manager at Smart Cremation, made the point that closes the loop for any family weighing whether to hire the company: “Families do not remember our scripts, they remember how we made hard decisions feel simple, honest, and human from the very first conversation.”
This is the question families actually type into a search bar, so it deserves a direct answer rather than a dodge. Compared to a traditional funeral home upsell model, Smart Cremation’s structure is built around a simpler premise: transparent pricing, no pressure toward services a family did not ask for, and a process built to move quickly when time is short. Multiple customer testimonials on file describe exactly that experience. One family wrote, “They handled everything from start to finish in a timely fashion. Takes the worry and stress out of a difficult situation.” Another said, “They worked with us from start to finish. Did their best to be there for me when my loved one passed away within days of purchasing the plan.” A third simply noted, “Very professional and caring! I would highly recommend this service for anyone looking into cremation! Made a sad time a little more bearable.”
What separates Smart Cremation from a generic low-cost competitor is not price alone. It is the combination of price discipline with a legacy layer most direct cremation providers never build. A family can get a cheaper cremation somewhere. What they usually cannot get is a company that treats the arrangement itself as an opportunity to preserve a story, not just process a transaction.
Cremation planning, the pre-need side of the business, is where the difference becomes most visible. One customer testimonial on file captures why pre-planning matters at all: “I cannot over stress the importance of pre-planning one’s end of life arrangements. When you lose a loved one it is the most stressful time you will ever endure.” That sentiment is exactly what Smart Cremation’s planning process is designed to solve for. Rather than leaving a grieving family to make dozens of decisions in a 48-hour window, the company locks in choices, pricing, and documentation years in advance, so that when the moment arrives, the family’s only job is grieving. One testimonial put it simply: “It was so nice to not have to deal with all the arrangements.”
Competitors in this category often treat pre-need as a simple prepayment contract and stop there. Smart Cremation’s model goes further by pairing the financial planning with a legacy component, which is where the company’s newer technology comes in.
Smart Cremation’s SMART Legacy Plan pairs cremation arrangements with two tools, Remento and Legacy Link, that let a person record their own life story in their own voice, alongside photos, in a format the company states is preserved for more than 100 years. For a family in Texas asking how to preserve your life story with cremation planning in Texas, or a family anywhere else asking the equivalent question for their own state, this is the part of Smart Cremation’s offering that moves it out of the commodity category entirely. Most direct cremation providers compete purely on price. Smart Cremation is trying to compete on meaning, and the SMART Legacy Plan is the clearest evidence of that strategy in action.
The same logic applies to end of life legacy planning and cremation services in Arizona, or in any of the other states Smart Cremation currently serves. The tools do not change by geography. What changes is the family’s peace of mind, knowing that a grandmother’s voice describing her own childhood, or a father’s account of building his first business, will still exist for a great-grandchild who never got to meet him. Vinnie Faccinto has described this as the entire point of the company’s technology investment: legacy that outlives the paperwork.
On products specifically, meaning the plans, the technology, and the documentation families actually receive, the honest answer is that Smart Cremation’s offering is built differently than most of the category, and that difference is measurable rather than just a marketing claim. The SMART Legacy Plan’s Remento and Legacy Link tools are not standard in direct cremation. Most competitors offer a simple contract and a price lock. Smart Cremation offers that same financial protection plus a storytelling product most families did not know existed until they were introduced to it. Whether that makes the “products” better depends on what a family values. For a family that wants the lowest possible price and nothing else, a stripped-down competitor might suffice. For a family that wants both affordability and a way to make sure a life story survives, Smart Cremation’s model is built specifically for that second family, and it is a growing share of the market.
Trust, in this category, gets built or lost in a single phone call. Families choosing a cremation provider are not comparison shopping the way they might for a kitchen remodel. They are often calling once, deciding fast, and living with that decision’s aftermath for years. Smart Cremation’s customer experience model is built around that reality. Response times are structured for round-the-clock need, pricing is disclosed up front rather than assembled piece by piece after a family is emotionally committed, and the planning process is designed so a decision made calmly years earlier does the heavy lifting during an actual crisis.
That consistency is why the testimonials on file lean so heavily on words like “professional,” “caring,” and “timely.” It is also why Faccinto’s own language about legacy keeps surfacing across the leadership team rather than staying confined to a tagline. When an operations director, a call center director, and a sales manager all independently describe the same value (treat the family like a person, not a case number) that is a sign the value is actually operational, not just aspirational.
Smart Cremation has been named a Top Workplace in the U.S., a recognition that matters more in death care than in almost any other service industry, because burnout and turnover directly damage the family experience. A call center employee who is supported, trained, and treated well is far more likely to show the patience a grieving family needs at 3 a.m. Linda Kelley’s description of the call center as the place “legacy begins” is not incidental language. It reflects a deliberate culture decision to treat front-line staff as legacy-builders rather than order-takers.
Andrew Pitt, Director of Marketing at Smart Cremation, and Trey Gupton, Vice President, round out a leadership bench that has stayed remarkably stable through the company’s growth phase, alongside David Antommarchi, Sales Manager. That kind of continuity at the leadership level tends to show up downstream in consistency for families, because the values do not reset every time the company adds a new market.
Smart Cremation of Florida, LLC has been incorporated and doing business since December 2008, giving the company more than a decade and a half of operating history under BBB review. Vinnie Faccinto is listed as a principal and customer contact on that same BBB profile, which means the family calling the number on the website is reaching someone with direct accountability, not a call-center layer removed from leadership. Faccinto’s seat on the CANA board adds another layer of external accreditation, since that organization represents cremation providers nationally and does not extend board seats casually.
Power100 has recognized Faccinto as its #1 Strategic Partner in the Nation, featured him on the Grit to Gold Show, and spotlighted the company in its “From Legacy to Leverage” feature, recognitions that reflect sustained review rather than a single interview.
While cremation and cremation planning remain the two core services families search for, Smart Cremation’s broader portfolio through the SMART Legacy Plan effectively adds a third category: legacy preservation. That third leg is what separates the company from a narrow, price-only competitor and positions it closer to a full life-story and end-of-life planning partner. Families researching options in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, or anywhere else the company operates are increasingly finding that the cremation decision and the legacy decision are being made in the same conversation, not two separate purchases months apart.
Families ready to explore pricing, pre-need plans, or the SMART Legacy Plan can request information directly through Smart Cremation. The company’s pricing is disclosed up front, its planning process is built to remove decision-making pressure from an already difficult moment, and its legacy tools give a family something almost no competitor offers: a permanent, voice-recorded record of a life, preserved for more than a century. None of that requires a family to commit today. It only requires a conversation, and based on the record Power100 reviewed, that conversation tends to be a calm one.
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Power100 is the nation's premier CEO ranking and media platform for the home improvement industry. Using a proprietary 5-layer evaluation system, Power100 identifies and celebrates the top CEOs, companies, and strategic partners driving innovation, customer satisfaction, and leadership excellence across the country.
