JCG Elevates Kristen Szymborski to CFOO Ahead of Retirement

Johnson Consulting Group announced the next phase of a leadership succession plan four years in the making. Jeff Casey, who has served the deathcare profession for nearly 50 years and has been with JCG for nearly 12 of them, will retire from full-time work at the end of 2026.

As part of that transition, Jeff will step away from his role as Chief Operations Officer effective October 1, 2026. Oversight of JCG’s day-to-day operations will shift to Kristen Szymborski, CPA, who will assume the newly created role of Chief Financial & Operations Officer.

Casey will remain a full-time consulting resource to Jake Johnson, Kristen, and JCG through December 31, 2026, supporting the transition through year-end. Beyond 2026, he will continue working with the firm in a consulting capacity, including supporting Menke Funeral & Cremation Center, the Sun City firm he led before joining JCG.

The move caps a succession plan Jeff and JCG President & CEO Jake Johnson have been building toward for four years. Kristen joined the firm in April 2023 as JCG’s first full-time Chief Financial Officer, a hire made specifically to prepare for this transition, and over the past year JCG’s Executive Leadership Team has focused its planning on the handoff.

“Succession planning is what we do for our clients every day, and this is us practicing what we preach,” said Jake Johnson, President & CEO of Johnson Consulting Group. “Four years of deliberate work went into this. We hired Kristen with this day in mind, we gave her the runway to learn our business from the inside out, and we gave Jeff the time to hand off what he knows the right way. Kristen has earned this role, and she is the right leader to carry our operations forward.”

A Career That Began at Sixteen

Casey’s career began in 1978 in Lima, Ohio, where he was hired at sixteen as a part-time utility person at Siferd Funeral Homes. He put himself through Cypress College of Mortuary Science while driving full time for Pierce Brothers Mortuaries and Cemeteries in Los Angeles, graduating in 1982 as a funeral director and embalmer.

Over the next three decades he advanced from managing funeral director to general manager and then regional vice president at SCI, with responsibility for as many as 28 funeral homes and 10 cemeteries across greater Los Angeles and Ventura County, and later led Fred Hunter Memorial Services in South Florida (six funeral homes, two cemeteries, and a crematory) and a team of more than 100.

Casey relocated to Arizona in 2011 as Managing Director of Menke Funeral & Cremation Center in Sun City. He joined Johnson Consulting Group in January 2015 as a Management Services Consultant and advanced through Director of Operations and Senior Vice President of Operations to Chief Operations Officer. A licensed funeral director and embalmer in California and Arizona and National Board Certified, he was named SCI Area Manager of the Year three consecutive years and recognized by the California Funeral Directors Association as Outstanding Young Funeral Director of the Year.

Among his earliest honors is one that connects his career to JCG long before he joined it. In 1989, Jeff received the Ralph H. Head Manager of the Year award at Pierce Brothers, an award created by Tom Johnson, who presented it personally each year and who would go on to found Johnson Consulting Group in 2000.

“I started at sixteen sweeping floors and washing cars at a funeral home in Lima, Ohio,” said Jeff. “Nearly fifty years later, what I’ve valued most is the same thing I noticed then: the people in this profession show up for families on the worst day of their lives, and they do it well. I have always believed you should leave anything you are part of in a better spot than you found it. Handing this role to Kristen, with the time and the planning we’ve put into it, is the best evidence I can offer that the work we ask our clients to do actually works.”

Szymborski’s Expanded Role

Szymborski is an experienced financial executive with more than 18 years of expertise driving financial optimization and business transformation through data insights and automated reporting. Before joining JCG she served in senior finance leadership roles across manufacturing, wholesale distribution, and franchising, and spent five years at CliftonLarsonAllen, a Top 8 accounting firm. She is a licensed CPA in Arizona and holds a master’s degree in accountancy from the University of Phoenix. In her expanded role she will oversee JCG’s day-to-day operations in addition to the firm’s financial management.

“I have had the benefit of learning this business from Jeff and from Jake, and of learning this profession from the families and firms our clients serve,” said Kristen. “JCG’s clients care for families on the hardest days of their lives. My job is to make sure the operations behind our work are strong enough that our team can stay focused on exactly that. I’m honored to step into this role.”

About Johnson Consulting Group

Johnson Consulting Group is the leading consultancy for the funeral home and cemetery profession, representing more than 145,000 annual cases and $600 million in annual client revenues, with more than $3 billion in transactions guided over 20 years. JCG’s services span business consulting, mergers and acquisitions, leadership and management development, performance analytics through its Performance Tracker X platform, and accounting and cash flow services. Making Life Easier With Personalized Solutions.