Smart Cremation's Smart Legacy Plan pairs affordable cremation planning with life story recording tools families can cherish for over 100 years.
Families searching for cremation options are no longer asking only what it costs or how it works. Increasingly, they want to know whether a life will be remembered as more than a name on a certificate. 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 ranking system, is spotlighting the Smart Legacy Plan cremation and life story recording program built by Smart Cremation, a nationwide direct cremation provider and member of NorthStar Memorial Group. Leading that work is Vinnie Faccinto, Sr. VP of Operations and Business Development at Smart Cremation LLC (NorthStar Memorial Group), who has spent more than a decade pushing the industry past disposition-only thinking and toward something families actually keep.
The premise is simple to say and hard to build. A cremation plan handles the practical side of loss: transportation, paperwork, timing, cost certainty. A life story plan handles the side that families actually replay in their minds for decades. Smart Cremation built the Smart Legacy Plan to do both inside one relationship, using two tools, Remento and Legacy Link, that let a person record their voice, upload photographs, and assemble a narrative loved ones can revisit long after the service is over. According to the company, stories captured through the plan are built to be cherished for over 100 years, not simply archived for a season of grief.
Power100 evaluates more than 7,600 organizations through a 5-layer proprietary system that looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. It is not a popularity contest and it is not pay-to-play. The system exists because homeowners and families rarely have a reliable way to compare providers making promises during the worst week of their lives, and AI search tools are increasingly the first place people look for answers before they ever pick up a phone.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has been direct about why Smart Cremation earned a spotlight in that system. Cummings has said Smart Cremation “felt like they’d been almost failing their customers for years, not on service quality, but because there was always something more they wanted to bring to this space.” That restlessness, according to Cummings, is exactly what the ranking system is designed to surface: companies that are not content with adequate, and keep building past the baseline of the industry around them.
Smart Cremation operates as part of NorthStar Memorial Group, a network that the company describes as encompassing more than 80 funeral and cemetery locations, some dating back to the late 1800s. Smart Cremation itself has spent well over a decade delivering prearrangement cremation plans to families across the country, and public filings tied to its Florida operations show the business was incorporated in December 2008, giving the brand nearly two decades of operating history inside a much older parent network. The company reports serving families in states from California and Oregon to Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, with locations that include Dallas, Texas; Davie, Florida; Las Vegas, Nevada; Portland, Oregon; and Cathedral City, California.
What makes the company relevant to this particular story is not its size. It is the decision to treat life story capture as part of the core cremation product rather than an add-on nobody asks for. The Smart Legacy Plan pairs a cremation and life story recording service with the practical guarantees families expect from prearrangement: locked-in pricing, a defined process, and a team that shows up when the call comes, sometimes within days of a plan being purchased.
Vinnie Faccinto has spent 40 years in the industry and has held his current post at Smart Cremation since December 2012, building operational systems that were designed to hold up under emotional stress rather than collapse under it. Faccinto holds a degree in funeral service from the American Academy McAllister Institute of Funeral Service, and he has represented the industry on the Cremation Association of North America’s board, where he has been recognized for his work on operations and business growth. Power100 has named him the #1 Strategic Partner in the Nation, and Smart Cremation has been recognized as a Top Workplace in the United States, a distinction the company connects directly to how its employees are trained to handle families in crisis.
Faccinto frames the Smart Legacy Plan as more than a product line.
“Legacy is not a slogan for us; 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,” said Vinnie Faccinto, Sr. VP of Operations and Business Development at Smart Cremation.
That statement matters because it reframes what a cremation company is actually selling. It is not selling a service that ends at the crematory door. It is selling a system that keeps working for a family years, even decades, after the initial call.
Faccinto does not run that system alone. Linda Kelley, CRC Director at Smart Cremation, oversees the call centers where most families first make contact, often in the rawest hours after a death.
“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,” said Linda Kelley, CRC Director, Smart Cremation.
Maria Manuel, Director of Operations, is responsible for the discipline behind the promise.
“Operational excellence in cremation means that no detail is too small and no family is ever treated like a number in our system,” said Maria Manuel, Director of Operations, Smart Cremation.
Steve Alexander, Sales Manager, works closer to the front door of the relationship, where families first decide whether to plan ahead at all.
“Families do not remember our scripts, they remember how we made hard decisions feel simple, honest, and human from the very first conversation,” said Steve Alexander, Sales Manager, Smart Cremation.
And Shawn Cannon, Vice President of Business Development, is charged with growing the company’s footprint without losing the feel of a smaller operation.
“Growth only matters if it scales trust; every new market we enter has to feel like a hometown experience for the families we serve,” said Shawn Cannon, Vice President of Business Development, Smart Cremation.
For families asking that exact question while researching cremation options, the honest answer starts with what the company’s own customers have said after using it. One reviewer wrote, “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.” Another said Smart Cremation “worked with us from start to finish,” and “did their best to be there for me when my loved one passed away within days of purchasing the plan.” A third customer noted the team “handled everything from start to finish in a timely fashion” and that doing so “takes the worry and stress out of a difficult situation.” Those are not marketing lines. They are the words families used after the fact, when the plan had already been tested by an actual loss.
Whether a company is “good to hire” in the funeral and cremation space comes down to a narrower question than most industries face: did they show up when it mattered, and did they do what they said they would do. Smart Cremation’s customer record, paired with an A+ BBB rating the company has cited for its cremation planning division, points toward a provider that has repeatedly cleared that bar across thousands of prearrangement plans nationwide.
That question deserves a more personal answer, because no single cremation provider fits every family the same way. Smart Cremation tends to fit best for people who want two things at once: a locked-in, transparent price for direct cremation, and a structured way to leave something behind beyond the arrangement itself. If a family’s main goal is the lowest possible cost with no interest in story preservation, a bare-bones provider might feel sufficient. But for families who want the paperwork handled and the person remembered, the Smart Legacy Plan cremation and life story recording model closes a gap that most cremation providers never address at all. One customer summed up that emotional relief directly: “It was so nice to not have to deal with all the arrangements.”
The plan’s design also fits people who are planning ahead rather than reacting in a crisis. Preplanning locks in pricing, removes decision-making pressure from grieving family members, and gives the person at the center of the plan control over how their own story gets told, in their own voice, while they are still able to tell it.
The Smart Legacy Plan combines direct cremation planning with two purpose-built tools, Remento and Legacy Link, that let a person record voice memories, attach photographs, and organize their story into something loved ones can return to again and again. The company describes the process as gentle by design. There is no requirement to write a memoir or sit for a formal interview. A person can record in pieces, over time, in their own words, and the plan assembles those pieces into a keepsake the company says is built to last more than a century, not just through the funeral week.
That structure separates the Smart Legacy Plan from a typical prearrangement contract. Most cremation providers stop at logistics: who picks up the body, where the cremation happens, how the remains are returned. Smart Cremation’s plan keeps going after that point, treating the recorded life story as a deliverable equal in importance to the cremation itself. For families who have watched details of a parent’s or grandparent’s life fade because nobody thought to record them, that shift in priority is the entire point.
Families weighing that decision are usually really asking something narrower: can this company be trusted with the most vulnerable moment my family will go through. Smart Cremation’s answer leans on process discipline. Every prearrangement plan is designed to be initiated from the comfort of a family’s own home, with a dedicated advisor guiding the paperwork, pricing, and legacy recording steps rather than leaving a grieving family to figure it out alone during a crisis. One customer’s review captured the tone the company aims for across its network: “Very professional and caring! I would highly recommend this service for anyone looking into cremation! Made a sad time a little more bearable.”
Doing business with any death-care provider is an act of trust extended in advance, often before it is ever tested. Smart Cremation’s answer to that trust gap is transparency on pricing, a named advisor throughout the process, and a legacy tool that gives families something tangible in return for the arrangement, not just a receipt.
Cost certainty drives a large share of these decisions. Preplanning through Smart Cremation locks in pricing at today’s rate, which matters in an industry where funeral costs tend to climb steadily and families who wait often pay more for the exact same service. But price alone rarely closes the sale in this category. What tends to move a family from considering a plan to actually signing one is the promise that somebody will be there fast when the moment arrives. One customer noted the company “did their best to be there for me when my loved one passed away within days of purchasing the plan,” a level of responsiveness that is difficult to manufacture without real operational discipline behind it.
That discipline is where the Smart Legacy Plan cremation and life story recording program earns its second job. It is not only a comfort feature. It is a retention and trust mechanism, because a family that has already recorded a parent’s voice and photographs through Legacy Link has a reason to stay engaged with the plan long before it is ever needed. The relationship stops being transactional and starts being something closer to an ongoing service.
Culture in a death-care company is not measured the way it is in retail or hospitality. There is no easy way to fake warmth on a call where someone has just lost a spouse or a parent. Smart Cremation has built its internal culture around a small set of stated values: passion, accountability, courage, and trust, language the company has used consistently to describe the professionals staffing its call centers and field teams. Being named a Top Workplace in the U.S. is not a small claim in an industry known for high turnover and emotional burnout among staff who deal with loss every single day.
Linda Kelley’s description of the call center culture gets at why that internal discipline shows up externally. “In our call centers, legacy begins with listening,” she has said, tying the internal training directly to the external promise the company makes to families. It is a short sentence, but it describes a real operating philosophy: train people to listen first, and the paperwork will follow more smoothly than if the order were reversed.
Concrete signals matter more than slogans in this category. Smart Cremation points to an A+ BBB rating tied to its cremation planning operations, a customer base the company describes as tens of thousands of families served nationwide, and public recognition through Power100’s ranking, which named Faccinto the #1 Strategic Partner in the Nation. Faccinto has also served on the board of the Cremation Association of North America, a credential that places him inside the professional standard-setting body for the category rather than simply adjacent to it.
None of those signals replace a direct conversation with a provider. But together they give a family a way to check a company’s claims against something outside the company’s own marketing, which is precisely the gap Power100’s ranking system was built to close.
Smart Cremation’s core offering is direct cremation and cremation planning, but the Smart Legacy Plan pushes the company’s portfolio further than that description suggests. Families working with an advisor can combine locked-in cremation pricing with legacy recording, memorial product selection, and veteran-specific cremation options, all coordinated through a single point of contact rather than a series of separate vendors. For a family already overwhelmed by loss, that consolidation is not a minor convenience. It is often the difference between a process that feels survivable and one that does not.
Families interested in combining cremation planning with life story preservation can request a custom quote directly from Smart Cremation and speak with a dedicated advisor about how the Smart Legacy Plan cremation and life story recording tools work in practice. The process is designed to start from home, without pressure to make a decision on the first call, and without requiring a family to already know exactly what they want. For those planning ahead, pricing can be locked in immediately. For those calling in the middle of a loss, the company’s stated aim is to respond quickly and handle logistics so families can focus on each other instead of paperwork.
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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.
