Funeral business: how do funeral homes make money?

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The funeral business is a very unusual one, and not every entrepreneur will take it on. But if you approach this issue philosophically and set yourself the goal of making money, there is every chance of starting a ritual business from scratch.

Many people try not to discuss the topic of death until a special occasion. When relatives, friends or acquaintances suffer such grief, they immediately contact the right agency. For funeral business owners, this procedure provides an opportunity to earn money.

Before you open your agency, you need to create a complete funeral home business plan. It will give you the opportunity to quickly navigate the competitive world and take your place in the funeral services market.

• Funeral business in Russia: market analysis, competition
• Goals and objectives
• Making coffins
• Ritual textiles
• Clothes for the deceased
• Ribbons
• Wholesale sale of ritual textiles
• Where to start a funeral business? Legal aspects
• Organizational aspects
• Where to open a funeral home?
• Furniture and equipment
• Recruitment
• Funeral home services
• Attracting clients
• Costs and profitability of the funeral services business

Features of the funeral business

The most important thing to remember when opening a business providing funeral services: you will have to deal with living people. Moreover, having lost a loved one, they are sometimes in a stressful state and do not behave quite adequately. Therefore, funeral home workers will require maximum delicacy and tact.

When opening such a specific business, you need to take into account the great competition in this niche. To succeed, you need to have a wide range of services and organize a competent advertising campaign. You can use all the tools available to a businessman: off-line products (leaflets, flyers, signs, banners) and online resources (website, social networks, presence on specialized forums and local public pages).

It is better to provide funeral services in a comprehensive manner, since the amount of income will depend on their list. The range of services may include:

• assistance in choosing a burial place and preparing the necessary documents;
• work in the cemetery (digging and arranging a grave, preparing a place for installing a monument and fence, caring for the grave);
• production of monuments;
• organizing transportation of the body to the burial site, providing transport for accompanying persons;
• preparing the deceased for the funeral (body storage services, make-up, putting on funeral clothes, sanitary treatment, etc.);
• musical accompaniment of the ceremony;
• sale of ritual products - coffins, wreaths, crosses, clothing and other goods necessary for burial;
• organization of rituals for various religious denominations.

To accommodate employees and product samples, you will need an office designed in accordance with the specifics of the business.

Recruitment

Be very responsible when choosing employees for your agency. Funeral home employees must be able to communicate well with people. One of the main criteria for choosing staff is psychological stability, since visitors are usually very irritable and sometimes react inappropriately to completely harmless little things. One of the most important employees of a funeral home is the person answering the telephone. Considering the peculiarity of this situation, it is better to hire a girl with a quiet, pleasant and calm voice to handle phone calls, who can understand the needs of the customer and accept his grief.

The second most important employee will be the funeral agent, whose job is to visit clients to determine the list of services. An experienced lawyer should handle the preparation of death certificates. If the body of the deceased needs to be brought into appropriate shape, you will need a makeup artist and an embalmer. Also worry about finding orchestra workers, drivers and general workers in advance.

How to open a funeral service bureau: detailed instructions

So, you have decided to open a funeral service bureau. First of all, you will need a business plan in which you describe the steps for organization, financial costs, and marketing to enter the market. Find out what documents are needed to open a business, what are the requirements for the location of the office, how many employees will be needed, etc.

If you plan to provide many services, there will be significant costs involved. Experts believe that at the initial stage you will need to invest 2-3 million rubles.

You can limit yourself to organizing a funeral and selling ready-made ritual supplies. This will not require significant costs, but in this case one should not expect large profits.

Documents and licenses

As mentioned above, this activity is currently not licensed. However, you need to register your activities by opening a limited liability company. In this type of activity, legal custom is the legal basis for regulating the list of services provided by a funeral agency.

According to the law, in order to ensure that the state covers part of the burial costs, the funeral organization must enter into an appropriate written agreement with the customer. For this purpose, only standard forms are used, on all sides of which the funeral agency’s seal is affixed. It is necessary to distinguish between an invoice order for a funeral and an agreement for the provision of funeral services.

Premises requirements

Regardless of the services provided, it must be spacious so that all ritual goods can be freely placed. It is also necessary to equip a reception area for clients and a showroom. The design is in restrained, calm tones.

You need to remember: if you open a ritual hall for farewell ceremonies or a morgue, these premises can only be located in a non-residential building. Children's, cultural and educational institutions should not be located within a radius of 50 meters from it.

You can open an office in a public place, in a residential area of ​​the city, and a mortuary with a farewell hall in a separate building. This makes it easier to find premises that will suit state regulatory authorities (SES, fire inspection).

What equipment is needed

The list and quantity of equipment depends on what services you are going to provide. If you decide to engage in the production of ritual products, you will need to organize workshops or even workshops for this. So, for example, for the production of monuments, depending on the material, you will need machines and devices for processing it.

The office part of the room includes a standard set of furniture - at least one table and chair, a closet, a computer and the necessary stationery, as well as sofas and chairs for visitors.

How do funeral agencies work?

A funeral home will only generate income if you know how to interact with clients. The target audience is quite wide, you just need to find it and have time to offer services before others, to convince them to contact you. This requires an impeccable reputation and the ability to build relationships with people.

Today, information about potential clients is often obtained using not entirely legal methods. For example, representatives of government agencies can sell proprietary information to interested parties. Representatives of the funeral agency also establish connections with morgue and hospital workers and local police officers.

According to funeral home workers, they have to spend a lot of money just to obtain information, because it is almost impossible to know in advance who will need funeral services. If you go the legal route, then it would be preferable to advertise in the media and through your website, which you promote in all available ways.

Attracting clients

Today, attracting clients in the funeral business mainly comes down to illegally searching for information about the deceased. This is due to corruption and data leakage. Businessmen who agree to this try to establish contacts with the police and hospital morgues.

State authorities are already concerned about the situation and are planning to begin universal certification of everyone involved in the funeral business in the near future.

Today, the Institute of Service and the Academy of Entrepreneurship in Moscow have already begun to train funeral business agents. The course is designed for 160 hours, and students here learn all the intricacies of funeral legislation, basic psychology, and the difference in religious rites in different religions. Interestingly, final exams are taken at the capital's mayor's office. It is easy to predict that when the authorities tighten the requirements for the funeral business, the demand for corresponding educational services will increase.

If we talk about legal methods of promotion, then a bright and memorable advertisement for a funeral home is clearly not suitable. It would be better to publish notes in the most widely read city newspapers, magazines or on relevant Internet resources.

How to register a funeral home

Registering a funeral home will take several months. You can do the paperwork yourself, or you can hire a lawyer who will open it for you.

Previously, in order to provide funeral services, a license was required. They have been canceled, and now you only need to notify the tax authority about opening a business - for example, an LLC. Immediately choose a simplified taxation system or UTII.

Since this business involves hiring employees, you will need to make regular contributions to pension and insurance funds.

Funeral costs

Often, grief-stricken relatives of the deceased are unable to even calculate how much money is needed to pay for funeral services. In this case, a funeral director comes to the rescue. He will help you cope with the piled-up affairs, explain the burial procedure, tell you where and what plots you can buy, what you will need for burial, etc.

Depending on the wishes of the client, the funeral can be of different price categories - from modest to the most luxurious. It depends on the services chosen, the materials from which the ritual accessories are made, etc.

Nothing sacred

But even such amounts, which for most families turn out to be unaffordable for most families, do not satisfy the “businessmen of death.” The extra income they make for themselves is simply amazing in its inhumanity and impudence!

If we are talking about a crematorium, the body is cremated without a coffin and without appropriate accessories. Where does the coffin go next? - Right! For re-sale! They manage to sell one coffin 5-7 times! The purchase price of the coffin is about 5 thousand rubles. It sells for at least 12. The arithmetic is obvious!

Even funeral items are reused!

Wreaths from graves are also collected and re-sold!

Another simply blasphemous method of making money for such organizations is the burial of unidentified bodies. The burial of such bodies is paid for by the state at the rate of 1,500-2,000 rubles for each burial. What's wrong with that? And the fact is that companies are creating new places for these burials, expanding cemeteries, but in reality the bodies are simply buried somewhere on the outskirts. Often, such a “mass grave” can contain 5 or 10 bodies. And the places “vacated” as a result of such a “maneuver”... that’s right, are being sold!

Earning money at a funeral service salon

Earnings at a funeral service salon depend on the size of the average bill.

Let's do the calculations:

• organizing a funeral in an average town costs approximately 45,000 rubles;
• if you serve 10 clients monthly, you will earn 450,000 rubles;
• approximately 70% will be spent on current expenses: salaries to employees, purchase of goods, maintenance of the funeral business;
• profit 135,000 rubles.

If you are not going to produce ritual goods yourself, you will not need expensive equipment. You can open a small salon by spending about 300,000 rubles and purchasing:

• tables and chairs;
• computer;
• multifunction device;
• cabinets for storing papers and for clothing and personal belongings of staff;
• telephone set;
• store equipment (racks, display cases, shelves).

The average payback period for such a business is about a year. Compared to other types, the ritual business is a promising area, you can make good money on it. But if you take a lot of small orders at low prices, and even dump, then your business investment will not pay off soon. Such income does not allow the business to grow and develop.

You can go the other way: come up with services that few others provide. For example, if there is only one company in the city that deals with pet burials, you can offer customers a more competitive product or service.

Read what kind of business you can open with minimal investment.