Established Funeral Business Looking for Equity Partner to Expand

Partner is sought to invest capital, time and expertise to help the business conquer the lucrative Harare market. They are offered to share equity and profits.

We are an established funeral parlour in Kadoma in need of a Partner able to invest both time and expertise to conquer with us the lucrative Harare market. We have done a study of costs of funerals in Harare and found that we are way behind like businesses in that part of the country (our charges are 1/4 of Harare minimum charges) thus our need to expand to there.

We need to take our business to Harare in order to compete effectively. At present, we charge $250 for a cheap funeral and sometimes have to go down to $150 to secure customers whilst in Harare similar businesses charge a minimum $650 going all the way to $5000 for the expensive ones. Big parlours are doing a minimum 15 funerals a day at such charges. Take a typical day where they do 10 low-cost funerals, 2 funerals by $1200, 2 funerals by $2000 and 1 funeral by $3000 and you can see what we are talking about. Do your maths per week and then per month. We only need to get a 1/4 of these funeral totals to be sitting pretty. With our 2 hearses and an ambulance and the knowledge gained so far, we can make it. We need a partner to financially help to establish the business in a short space of time 2 week tops in Harare and we will move all the cars and other stuff we have (office equipment and tools).

We are willing to discuss with the partner the way forward (some matters are too sensitive to publish online).

We aim to conduct funerals at lower cost and charge less to attract the lower end as well as those people with more money sense who want a good service at a lower cost. We know the big guns are out there but we have the tools and the knowledge to compete at their level and higher and aim to one day be the big gun ourselves. We will bring a whole new price level low enough to be afforded by all and yet keep standards very high. We don’t have many overheads and we keep cost as low as possible to still make a profit.

We see our young business offering a good alternative to the people of Harare to choose if their difficult times. We have had some much needed experience in running this business in a small town and are ready for the big time challenges with a partner willing to go in with us and share this bigger cake. We would have liked to have an experienced partner who is hands on but that is not a prerequisite. The partner just needs to be willing to invest both money and from time to time, some of their time to map out strategies and discuss expansion programmes.

Our idea is to rent a bigger space with large rooms, parking space for cars, put up a mortuary rent in all major suburbs like Machipisa, Glen View, Budiriro and Kuwadzana etc., offices to get closer to the people. We intend to centralise our mortuary and main offices somewhere in Willowvale and service all requests from there. We further need to equip our collection ambulance to better service the bigger venture we are under taking .We also need to license these operations with the city council. We think the money we are looking for will be enough for these and will be left with some to run the day to day affairs. The partner has a say in how the money will be used.

The partner will buy half the business and will share everything we make. Their capital will entitle them to ownership of the hearses and the ambulance and anything else owned by the parlour. As a 50% partner we and the investor will need to make all decisions collectively including staff appointments and use of funds. If the partner chooses to be a silent partner, its up to them to elect a rep or let us run the business as we have done so far.