Business

Church membership. . . and funeral ceremony

By Funeral Director Daily / April 23, 2019 /

The Gallup Poll recently released its findings on church membership last week and I found an article on it written by the Associated Press that you can read here.  One of the interesting items was that, contrary to anecdotal thought, Hispanic Americans church membership has dropped, since 2000, from 68% to 45%.  That is a…

What is your company’s culture

By Funeral Director Daily / April 19, 2019 /

Each individual has their own personality that is known to those that know them.  Some people are gruff, some people are social, some people are always happy, some people are tight fisted with money, some people are gracious, and on and on, but all of us have traits that we are known for.  Acquaintances know…

Independents strategize niche on three continents

By Funeral Director Daily / April 5, 2019 /

Without even recognizing it funeral service has always had niche businesses inside of it.  Even full service funeral homes could fit in the niche category if they exclusively catered to protestant or catholic clientele. . . or if they were a cremation society type discounter.  We’ve always had some niche operations in the industry even…

America’s next migration movement and its effect on funeral service

By Funeral Director Daily / March 29, 2019 /

I’m a history buff and I love to look back and learn what has happened in our country.  I’ve found that many times a “precipitator” happens and that event or group of events causes history to happen.  I was running on my treadmill the other morning watching CNBC for business news and Fox News for…

A niche market. . . .to pursue or avoid?

By Funeral Director Daily / March 27, 2019 /

I read an interesting article the other day from the Washington Post that you can read here about the death of a 77-year old man in Washington state.  It is an interesting article about a family’s decision to skip the funeral home and bring the man back to his home for three days of visitation…

From pizza dough to the embalming room

By Funeral Director Daily / March 26, 2019 /

Today we bring you this great human interest story of 21 year old New Zealand funeral director and embalmer Ethyn Milliken.  In today’s world where it is sometimes hard to find employees in the funeral profession you will see from this story that great future funeral directors may be just around the corner or that…

Fu Shou Yuan looking to “Memory Factory” ideas

By Funeral Director Daily / March 21, 2019 /

Some of the best ideas for the business end of the funeral profession that I received came from other industries.  I also think that you can learn from other countries and cultures. In this article from the South China Morning Post Chinese funeral home company Fu Shou Yuan looks towards the future and says that…

Keeping the pump primed for acquisitions

By Funeral Director Daily / March 19, 2019 /

For the last half century the funeral industry has seen tremendous growth of multiple firm businesses getting that growth not necessarily thru growing sales, but by acquisition of other firms.  Firms that wanted to grow by acquisition  had to be ready when a firm from down the road came up for sale, which in many…

Thursday morning news items

By Funeral Director Daily / March 14, 2019 /

We saw a couple news items that were fairly unique as to their content and thought that we would bring our readers both of them today with very little commentary on our part. The first item that we found concerned a funeral home in Nova Scotia, Canada, where the public service is warning against crematoriums…

How long until virtual funeral homes/crematories?

By Funeral Director Daily / March 8, 2019 /

I saw an article earlier this week from Seeking Alpha that you can read here that retailer Nordstrom’s sales increased year over year for the year 2018 by 2.3%.  What really hit me about the number though was as I read farther into the article I found out that Nordstrom’s brick and mortar stores suffered…