Coming Up With Business Ideas

Business of Death Part 1

Written by Jay Shapiro for Gaebler Ventures

Death, as they say is one the few certainties in life, alongside taxes. So if we are to associate money matters with demise, are there business opportunities to be had in connection with human demise?

As sure as taxes, death is something that eventually comes to us all. And with something so certain there are always business opportunities.

There are the obvious lines of business associated with death, like undertaker services, coffin makers, florists who specialize in memorial wreaths etc. All of these are acknowledged to be an acceptable part of the funereal industry.

In business they say there are no new ideas, despite this, some pretty novel ones are cropping up in the deaths business these days:

• It is possible to have a gem made from the carbon in the human body. Some people feel this is a fitting tribute do a deceased loved one and have jewelry made from the resulting stone.
• Be made into pencils! It's just an idea and not one which, as yet, has been made into an official business. However, carbons in the body can be incorporated into pencils. Emboss the deceased's name onto the pencils and an usual way of remembering them has been created.
• Go to the moon. The last time man went to the moon was in the 1960s. But you can go there now, or some of your ashes can. Ashes can be fired into space for those who want to be remembered with a bang.
• Fireworks. Speaking of a bang, ashes of the dead can be mixed with the gunpowder used to make fireworks. A pyrotechnic display might not be everyone's idea of a suitable send off but there will be those who think it entirely appropriate.

There are other ways of commemorating the dead that don't quite fit with the traditions of our western culture, which some think rather stuffy and inhibited anyway. So whether you think that death related businesses are obscure or simply macabre, there's a market for them, albeit one that is likely limited.

Having said that, if you think there are lucrative possibilities here you're probably right. Although making money from the more unusual concepts might prove a long and hard road.

What might be a better approach, in a commercial sense, would be to set up a website that is entirely, but tastefully, death related. People die every day, it's a fact of life, and people are dealing with death every day too. That market is vast. The webmaster that can provide valuable information about all the option, even the obscure ones stands a better chance of turning a profit perhaps than the company which turns the dead into egg timers or something equally as bizarre.

By aiming to be the premier source of the info about the death industry you get the chance to reach out to a wide audience. One so wide in fact that it almost has no specific demographic to pinpoint - fair to say the demographic is made up of every one and any one world wide who faces the task of dealing with the death of someone close at some point in their lives. In that sense, it's a box that we can all put a tick in.

So, if you're setting up a site that is solely there to provide information, how do you make money? You have no product to sell and the site's free for visitors to use? Your income would come from revenue. This represents huge potential, seeing as the funeral business and those associated with it is big business. It's not a hard line selling your site's ad space to providers of funeral services provided the site is notching up good traffic.

Jay Shapiro is a freelance writer based in the UK. Jay has a particular interest in the emotive aspects of the entrepreneur's character. "Alongside the nuts and bolts of business, the character of the person is often the ingredient responsible for success."

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