Dr Nomfundo Mcoyi-Zondo spent 13 years teaching at Inanda Zwakele Primary School in KwaZulu-Natal before she left the classroom in 2009 to start a funeral services business from nothing. Icebolethu Group now has more than 200 branches across South Africa and one in London, making the 51-year-old one of the more unusual growth stories in an industry most people only think about when they need it.
Building a business the industry usually inherits
What sets Mcoyi-Zondo apart in South Africa’s funeral sector is not just the scale she reached, but how she got there. Much of the established funeral industry in South Africa is built on businesses passed down within families, often running for decades before a second or third generation takes over. Icebolethu Group was started from scratch by someone with no prior funeral industry background at all, just a decision to leave a stable teaching job and build something new. That distinction is part of why Mcoyi-Zondo became the first woman elected president of the South African Funeral Practitioners Association (Safpa), and industry recognition that sits alongside what is reportedly the first time a woman has built a funeral company of this scale from a standing start rather than inheriting one.
Growing from a single branch in 2009 to more than 200 today, spanning KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and a branch in London serving the South African diaspora, required solving the same operational problems that scale any service business: building management structures that work without the founder physically present, training staff to a consistent standard across locations, and in Icebolethu’s case, repatriation logistics complex enough to bring bodies home from abroad. The group handled the repatriation of former police minister Nathi Mthethwa’s remains from France, the kind of case that requires coordinating across international mortuary regulations, documentation and transport in ways a single-branch local funeral parlour never has to manage.
Running a people-heavy business through a cost-of-living squeeze
A funeral business is unusually exposed to the two pressures squeezing most South African service businesses at once: a workforce that needs to be paid and retained, and fuel and transport costs that sit at the core of every delivery, in this case moving vehicles, staff and sometimes water tankers between venues. “Everything is going up: diesel, petrol, everything. We need to reach out for our staff,” Mcoyi-Zondo said, describing the reasoning behind benefits that go beyond what many businesses of a similar size offer: a pension fund extended to all staff levels, not reserved for management, and a free daily lunch provided to employees.
Those benefits matter for a specific reason beyond staff goodwill. A funeral business depends entirely on front-line staff behaving with consistent care and professionalism at the most sensitive moment in a client’s life, work that is physically and emotionally demanding and historically underpaid across the industry. Retaining experienced staff at that front line, rather than cycling through new hires who have not yet absorbed the standard the group wants to project, is arguably as important to Icebolethu’s reputation as its branch count.
An operational detail that says something about where the business actually operates
One detail stands out for what it reveals about the conditions Icebolethu actually serves rather than markets to: the group provides water tanks at funerals to deal with water scarcity, a practical response to the reality that many of the communities it operates in, across KwaZulu-Natal in particular, still face unreliable municipal water supply. A funeral can draw dozens or hundreds of mourners to a single home or venue over several days, and a business built to serve that market has had to solve for infrastructure failures most urban service businesses never have to think about.
What the growth path signals for other founder-led service businesses
Icebolethu’s trajectory offers a concrete data point for any South African entrepreneur weighing whether a traditionally inherited, family-run industry can be entered and scaled from zero. The answer, on this evidence, is yes, but the route runs through unglamorous operational investment: staff retention economics that go beyond a basic wage, systems robust enough to maintain service quality across 200 branches rather than one, and a willingness to solve logistics problems, from international repatriation to water tankers at a rural homestead, that a smaller operator could simply avoid by staying local. Mcoyi-Zondo’s path from a primary school classroom to that scale, inside 16 years, is less a story about funerals specifically than about what it actually takes to build a service franchise network in South Africa from a single founder with no capital advantage beyond the decision to start.
