Business
American Enterprise Group (AEG), parent company of preneed insurer Great Western Insurance Company (GWIC) and innovative financial lender Live Oak Bank have announced a partnership that will make it possible for funeral home and cemetery business owners to access up to $20 million in capital. A recent press release on the strategic partnership announced that…
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Ohio Senate Bill 224 will make over a dozen changes to the state’s funeral and burial laws according to this article from Cleveland.com. The bill will do such mundane things as increasing the price to reactivate a funeral director’s license and it will also establish a more formal process for families to collect money from…
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I recently read an article from Yahoo Finance written by Andy Serwer that asks the interesting question, “(Is) inflation the business opportunity of a lifetime?” You can read that article here. Serwer explains that after almost fifty years of very low static inflation that we may be in for a much higher rate for the…
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I’ve written before about Peter Lynch’s 1989 best-seller “One up on Wall Street”. It was a learning book for me and one where I had a coming of age introduction to different types of investing. One of Lynch’s topics in the book was the death care company Service Corporation International (SCI). He likened the company…
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Over the weekend I conflated two situations and tried to make the argument that one situation could actually help the other. What happened is that I have noticed that almost all funeral homes of a larger case volume seem to be short professional staff. And, it’s not just in the United States — InvoCare in…
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We are in the final week of the award winning musical “Fun Home” playing at the Melbourne Theatre Company in Australia. The play, which you can see a 30-second trailer of here, collected five Tony awards seven years ago when is played on Broadway. This article in Australia’s Pursuit magazine is entitled “How popular culture…
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I’ve been an entrepreneur and started new companies so I know the drive and dedication behind one who does so. And, to invent a new industry, which in some cases may include legislative law changes, to start the company in that environment is an even tougher hill to climb. That’s why I’m such a fan…
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If you have been on the front lines of funeral service for any time period you probably have some of the same thoughts that I do. When I would serve a family there was period of about 7 days from my first connection to the family after the death through a few days after the…
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We are now two years into this pandemic. I remember late February and March of 2020 very well. In February of that year Angie and I flew home from a couple of weeks in the Hawaiian Islands, and while there were no masks present on our trans-pacific flight, we did take the precaution to “wipe”…
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Writing this blog I hear from all kinds of people. Lately I’ve heard from funeral home owners/employers who tell me it is difficult to find qualified funeral directors to work for them in this day and age. I also hear from employed funeral directors who are down on the profession, or simply their current owner,…
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