Foundation Partners Group (Winter Park) recently announced that the Florida Cemetery, Cremation & Funeral Association (FCCFA) awarded funeral director and partnership consultant Rick Tuss with its 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award. Presented at the FCCFA annual convention in July, the award recognizes Tuss for more than 40 years of dedicated service to the funeral profession and the families of Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Tuss began his career in 1979 as a preneed consultant. Since then, he has served as a cemetery sales director, general manager and regional funeral home manager. In 2012, Tuss and a partner purchased what is now known as Charlotte Memorial Funeral Home, Cemetery and Crematory in Punta Gorda, which was ravaged by Hurricane Charley in 2004. Tuss and his partner not only completed needed repairs but also remodeled and modernized the facility and added a crematory, making it the only combination funeral home in Charlotte County. In 2019, they sold the firm to Foundation Partners Group and, after two years of retirement, Tuss reentered deathcare as a partnership consultant for the company.
A member of FCCFA since the early 1990s, Tuss has served on the board of directors for most of that time. He was president from 1999-2000 and has served as secretary of the board since 2023.
In other news, Foundation Partners Group has acquired Cake, an online provider of end-of-life planning tools and resources. Since its launch, more than 100 million people have used Cake’s extensive digital catalog of more than 5,000 articles and easy-to-use tools to navigate the intricacies of end-of-life planning and bereavement support, including wills, funeral arrangements, advance care directives, estate settlement and grief.
Suelin Chen, Ph.D., created Cake in 2015 to help address people’s anxiety about end-of-life planning and empower them to make the best decisions for themselves and their families. “Cake was founded with the vision that other life milestones – like having babies or getting married – had online tools to make the process easier,” said Chen. “This just wasn’t true for the end-of-life category. The good news is that families are increasingly more comfortable talking about death and dying, and we think Cake has contributed to that trend.”
Finally, shortly before this issue of The Director went to press, Foundation Partners Group announced the appointment of David Waltzer as its CFO. In this role, he will oversee financial strategies and operations supporting the company’s long-term growth and expansion into a broader range of end-of-life planning services.
With 36 years of experience, Waltzer has held leadership positions in multi-unit healthcare services, manufacturing, distribution and consumer products and services. He most recently served as CFO at Wellpath, where he managed care for more than 260,000 patients daily across the United States and Australia. He began his career as a senior auditor at Arthur Andersen, followed by roles at Lockheed Martin and National Dentex LLC.
Waltzer holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and accounting from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a master’s in business from the University of Baltimore. foundationpartners.com; thefccfa.com