Beyond Counting Obits: a Deeper Funeral Convergence Tracks Market Share

Gerard Reinert came to my attention during the recent unpleasantness at Foundation Partners Group. He had gotten out while the gettin’ was good and it took very little LinkedIn stalking to see that he had a whole separate business that he’s been running for more than a decade. That’s what caught my eye.

Funeral Convergence is a data company, and, according to Reinert, the only one that does what it does, which is provide up-to-date funeral home marketshare reports.

Reinert’s venture began out of a specific regional void before expanding into a broader operation. By the time he started the business in 2014, he already had made a career and a name for himself in operations and had built and sold a wildly successful cremation company.

Funeral Convergence was born from the purchase of a highly specialized company operating out of California providing a niche service. It collected all the data from all the death certificates in the state and compiled it into reports it sold to independent funeral homes as well as groups and consolidators..

“There was a previous person doing it for decades. She was actually going into health departments and counting death certificates by hand,” Reinert said. “It was used primarily by the company I was with, Pierce Brothers with Tom Johnson, and that’s how he was able to do his acquisitions and everything else.”

When electronic death registration systems took hold, gathering this information shifted from manual counts to digital retrieval and the new company, Funeral Convergence, was able to expand as digital access to electronic death records did.

“EDRs were taking hold across the country, so the data was being inputted. It was just a matter of figuring out what each state’s restrictions were on what information they would release,” Reinert said. “That’s why we’re only in 30 states, because there are many states where a death certificate or the information on it is all personal information, even though the person is deceased, they won’t release it to us.”

Moving Past Obituaries

Historically, operators relied on manual, informal tracking methods to evaluate local competition.

“In the past and still presently, funeral homes are counting obituaries in their newspaper to see what their competition is doing,” Reinert said. “But with the information we’re providing, they can figure out staffing, their marketing, everything else involved that they have never even thought about.”

As obituaries become less exclusive it’s getting a lot harder to use them as a barometer. Many funeral directors still make that effort because they’re ambivalent about the data collection that underpins the information.

“We do get a lot of pushback from funeral directors across the country of, ‘We shouldn’t have this data’ and ‘It’s wrong for us to know what their individual firm is doing,’” Reinert said.

Practically speaking, it’s barely more invasive but substantially more informative than just checking the obits.

Real-World Applications

The data gathered from official filings serves different purposes depending on the structure and goals of the business.

“We have individual firms who just use it locally to figure out how they stand and what they’re doing compared to everyone else,” Reinert said. “We have regional consolidators who have several funeral homes, and it just creates a standard for them to maintain so they can see what’s happening at all of their locations. And then we have corporate clients who use it nationwide … from the perspective of, ‘This firm is doing very well, they’re independent, maybe they are an acquisition client.’”

He pointed out how raw disposition numbers inform decisions around marketing and operational shifts:

“If your cremation rate is 90% and your competitor down the street is only at 40%, you’re doing something wrong and losing the burial business,” he said. “Even in California, we can break it down into ethnicity. So if you’re doing a huge Hispanic business and they’re not burying, which is traditionally Hispanic, then maybe your marketing is wrong to that ethnic group.”

And all this is pre-AI practices and tech. It’s easy (and sane) to be suspicious of a lot of the information and interpretation AI provides, but nothing crunches numbers better.

Integrating AI and Looking Ahead

Over the last year, Funeral Convergence has begun using AI to take data from around the area of a specific funeral home for clients and doing a market analysis over years of data,” Reinert said. “Basically saying, ‘This is what’s going on’ and ‘Do you realize this?’ [For instance], You’re decreasing in business even though your sales might be up. You don’t understand that your competitors around you are increasing tenfold, which you’re not realizing.”

Of particular interest to many companies looking to expand, whether they’re small groups ore large consolidators is the cremation mix. If, for instance, a place has a really low cremation rate, it could be an indicator of an opportunity if cremaion in the area is still relatively low. Alternatively, if the business is an outlier, it could indicate that a funeral home is lagging in its sales.

For Reinert, the primary goal remains educating the trade on how to utilize available metrics effectively.

“It’s not about us trying to sell more reports; it’s trying to educate people on what is out there,” Reinert said. “If we pick up business along the way in doing this in educating, that’s great… [But, especially for independants], as regional people get involved or corporations get involved, and you start losing your own market share, you kind of really need to know what everyone else is doing.”