FTD........going after funeral business

[BOSS]

Has anyone cancelled FTD and still been able to keep some funeral home business. I am having trouble making it with FTD.

Yes... actually YES ... FTD or any wire service is not my source for sympathy biz... the local funeral directors and customer service are... I spend some time and money keeping them happy... sending them cases of beer, food trays and such when they are slammed like they are today with 11 bodies at 1 funeral home...

I make sure my sympathy work is unbeatable in my market, and customers and funeral homes beat a path to our door... there are 8 florists in my city of 45,000, last week I did about $4K in sympathy work, and another $2.5K this week... no it's not always like that, but often enough to make me think on doing only sympathy work...

Any wire service takes upwards of 38% off the top on every order... seems to me, that's where the lions share of the profit is....scratch that... THAT IS WHERE THE PROFIT IS~!

 

[Johan]

I make sure my sympathy work is unbeatable in my market, and customers and funeral homes beat a path to our door... there are 8 florists in my city of 45,000, last week I did about $4K in sympathy work, and another $2.5K this week... no it's not always like that, but often enough to make me think on doing only sympathy work...

I don't think that is such a bad idea. I florist in a city near me does ONLY funeral work from a little shop pure dedicated to this. He works part time and apparently does really well from it. He doesn't buy top grade and can buy open product and still make plenty on it because as long as it looks great for just a few days it's fine. He advertise in the funeral section of yellow pages etc and probably has a few funeral directors on board. I would love to do this. I know another shop owned by a funeral director and they just do funerals and functions only but still have a high street presence in a florist studio next to the directors. The do the flowers for about 5 funeral directors in the local area. So this part of my business is quite sown up with them but I still have one director and lots from our customers in general.

 

[anytimeflowers]

I think much has to do with whether or not your local funeral homes are independent. Almost all of the funeral homes in my surrounding cities are independent so it is completely a matter of my relationship with each of the directors. I have never been FTD.

You should have a frank conversation with each of the funeral homes about this to find out where your standing would be with them if you were to drop FTD.