Funeral Service Network Aims to Keep Costs Low

Bob Gregorchuk and his wife are often teased about their occupations.

Gregorchuk and Karen Stone-Gregorchuk own the Passport Travel agency in Ventura, with Karen handling the day-to-day operations. And separately, Gregorchuk is founder and president of the Sunset Plan, a Westlake Village-based cremation and burial service linked to an international network of mortuaries.

“People say my wife does round trips and I do one-way trips,” said Gregorchuk. “In a sense they are both travel businesses, aren’t they?”

Though Gregorchuk will occasionally book a vacation for a client at Passport Travel, his true vocation is burial and cremation, a business he’s been involved in for more than 25 years.

Between 1970 and 1990, Gregorchuk owned the Ted Mayr Funeral Home in Ventura. When he sold the business to Pierce Brothers-Griffin Mortuary, he spent some time traveling. But his leave of absence didn’t last long.

“I missed funeral directing,” Gregorchuk said. “But the costs to operate a crematory, licenses for working with hazardous chemicals, permit fees, insurance costs and labor costs were all going up. I felt sooner or later people wouldn’t be able to pay the high costs of funerals.”

Which is why he started the Sunset Plan, a network of 130 affiliates in the United States and another 30 in Canada, Australia and Great Britain that provides low-cost interment services.

“The Sunset Plan is a cooperative effort to bring the overhead costs down,” Gregorchuk said. “In the Midwest, you see mortuaries and funeral homes in small towns working with larger funeral directors in big cities. We’re taking that practice a step further.”

Sunset Plan contacts affiliated mortuaries when a client’s burial or cremation is needed in an affiliate’s service area. Sunset Plan arranges to pick up the body and provide burial services, and the mortuary provides the hearse and other funeral equipment. In the case of cremations, the Sunset Plan handles the arrangements and an affiliated crematory handles the cremation itself.

“Participating mortuaries are getting clients they wouldn’t ordinarily get and we are spending the money on the advertising. So it’s easy for them to discount their services,” he said. “As for us, we don’t have overhead at our facility. It’s just business offices and licensed holding facilities.”

Through Sunset Plan, a simple burial, with no funeral service, costs $976 and a simple cremation is $857.

A 1995 survey of 17 Ventura County mortuaries, conducted by the Channel Islands Memorial Society, showed simple burials ranged in price from $897 to $1,540, with an average price of $1,292. Simple cremations ranged from $600 to $1,390, with an average of $959.

The nonprofit Channel Islands Memorial Society, which has a network of five area mortuaries, offers basic cremations and burials for $633.