Business
Over my years in funeral service I operated from two different funeral home buildings. The first building that I operated in was a former residence remodeled over a few times since about 1933 to offer a funeral home operation. In 2006 we moved into a brand new building built exclusively for the funeral and cremation…
Last week I was sent an offering to download the Passare short 26-page ebook entitled “The New Funeral Consumer”. In general, the ebook is based on observations and answers from what Passare says “is (probably) the largest independent funeral study that has ever been conducted. Interviews were conducted with over 3,000 individuals and each were…
Steve Wright, 4th generation funeral director, recently announced that the Wright Funeral Home in Moorhead, Minnesota, had been sold to longtime employee funeral directors and brothers Adam and Bailey Nordin. The Wright Funeral Home dates back to 1881 and has grown and served the greater Moorhead-Fargo community for 141 years. Steve Wright assumed full control…
I love business and the challenge of building a business. To me it is very much like a jig-saw puzzle. . . . you have to work with the pieces you have and continue to move them around until they, like a jig-saw puzzle, fit together and make everything work. I served on the Board…
Worcester, Massachusetts, funeral director Peter Stefan, age 85 died this week. Stefan made a name for himself, not as a businessman, but as a man and funeral director, of compassion. Even in a profession which exudes compassion among its workers, Stefan stood out to his peers. Stephen Teasdale, the Executive Director of Worcester’s Main South…
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…
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…
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…
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…
