Archive: Business & Technology

They say that getting a new job, making a major business readjustment with new responsibilities, moving, buying a home, and getting married are among the top major life changes that cause stress.  According to the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory, those four alone add up to a score of 194, which indicates a '50% chance of a major health breakdown in the next 2 years'.  But Kyle Sharp seems anything but stressed.  In fact he seems calmly delighted that he and his wife Jennifer, whom he married only a few weeks ago, moved to Lansing so he could become the new funeral director and owner of Lansing Funeral Home.  They closed on the sale May 31.

"We moved in that day," he says. "We're living at the funeral home so we're close to everything.  As soon as we closed we came right here and went to work."

They both hit the ground running.  Jennifer is working at the Montessori School in the Village of Lansing.  Kyle officiated at over a half dozen funerals in the first month or so.  Former owner Lisa Auble stayed on to some extent to help with funerals and especially to help Sharp learn about Lansing and the surrounding community.

"Lisa was a huge asset to the community, very well respected," Sharp says. "She cared a lot about the families she served and the funeral home itself.  She wanted a warm and welcoming place for people to come at one of the most difficult times of their lives.  My main goal is to continue that.  One of the benefits that I have is I still have Lisa here.  When she took over (because previous owner Kirk Shreve had passed away) she had to find her own way.  I'm lucky to have her."

Neither Sharp nor Auble were expecting to make a change at this point.  Auble happened to be at an event talking to Sharp's father one day and he casually mentioned his son was interested in owning his own funeral home.  She casually joked that he should call her.  The next day her phone rang, and before either of them knew it, the sale was made.  Auble had been planning to retire, but not for a few years.  Sharp was also looking three or four years into the future.  But opportunities don't arise all the time, so they both decided to do it, and they closed May 31st.

"It really worked out perfectly," he says.  "The timing was not what I expected.  I got married on June 23rd, so we were in the middle of our wedding planning when I started talking to Lisa.  We closed on May 31st and we got married in June.  I had always wanted to own my own funeral home in a small community where I could truly make a difference.  I wanted somewhere where I could be for long time, where I could establish myself and become part of the community.  My wife and I want to start a family and no place seemed quite as good as Lansing."

Like Auble, Sharp works at other funeral homes when they need help.  He says it is a way for funeral homes in small communities to insure that all the work can be done during busy times.  He has approached area funeral directors to offer his services and obtain theirs when he needs them.

"It's important.  You have to do things fairly quickly in a business like this.  Things can't wait," he says. "There's a good support network throughout the entire area, the county and surrounding counties.  I'm lucky because my father's a funeral director in Cincinnatus.  So if I really need help urgently he's always there as well."


Sharp was born in Ithaca and raised in nearby Speedsville.  He began helping at his father Kevin's funeral home when he was about 12, greeting people at the door and mowing the lawn... loving the work and he was especially inspired by his father's positive impact on grieving families.

After graduating Newark Valley High School he majored in biology at Wilkes University.  He always wanted to go to mortuary school, but wanted to make sure that was his calling, and he had to save money.  He worked as an aquatic biologist in south Florida. 

Three years later, missing his family and home, he moved back to the area and decided to pursue his dream.  He enrolled in American Academy McAllister Institute's online mortuary school, based in Manhattan.  With a strong history of working with his father, the online program made sense, allowing him to work as a financial analyst for UPS while he was in school.  Part of the program is lab work at the Manhattan campus, which he completed, after which he began a year-long residency at Ballweg & Lunsford Funeral Home in Syracuse in 2015.  He continued working there until this May when he bought the funeral home here.

"When I got my residency in Syracuse it was a family-owned private funeral home," he says. "Right about the time I was done with my residency they sold to a corporation based in Florida.  The way a funeral home is operated is different when it's run by a corporation."

Sharp says he wants to continue the Lansing Funeral Home tradition of paying close attention to families' needs but with a fresh perspective that allows him to offer new technology and honors the wider variety of choices families prefer in modern times.  He notes that last year cremations accounted for more than 50% deceased people in the US for the first time, and other alternatives such as green burials are becoming more popular.

"Funerals are no longer a time when everybody dresses in black and there is deep, low music playing in the background," he says. "It's really about celebrating somebody's life.  Some funerals are sad.  Some funerals are very upbeat -- everybody's laughing and enjoying themselves.  And both are OK."

As for stress, if he's feeling it he's not letting it show.  And reducing it as much as he can for clients -- at a very stressful time in their lives -- is what he does.

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