Funeral Words

In the Will or out of the Will?

I had a man visit the funeral home recently asking for a copy of the records for his mother's funeral, including the statement of goods and services along with insurance policy information. I did not give him the information and it took most of an hour to explain in several different ways why he did not have immediate rights to that information (supposedly he had come on the advice of an attorney).

In short, he had a hard time understanding why his "mother's policy" didn't count towards his mother's estate. He kept thinking that anything left over from that life insurance policy should become included in the final accounting.

I had to explain that since the insurance policy had a single beneficiary (one of his sisters), that money belonged completely to his sister and that she had the right to do whatever she wanted with those funds.

I don't see this level of family conflict often (once ever few years) but it does serve as a good reminder for all of us to review with staff some of the differences between estate assets and non-estate assets at the time of death. In this case, the daughter used the procedes of a policy to pay for the entire funeral. She was the sole beneficiary and had complete rights to those funds.

However, make sure your staff understands the difference when multiple beneficiaries get listed or some other entity (like a trust fund) gets listed as a beneficiary. In those cases, others may have rights along with the person making the funeral arrangements.

Talk these things through. It becomes vitally important once someone raises a question, to use clear language and to communicate without defensiveness the differences. Most of the time they have no quarrel with the funeral home if you take the time to talk things through with the disgruntled party. If you've done your job well, and treat people fairly and openly and clearly, the conflict will head in a different direction. 

Back at it!

Thank you all for the kind words I have received the last couple of months I've taken away from blogging. I know you've missed the material, at the same time, I've needed to focus on business and family for a little while. It's been good for me and well worth the shift in effort.

Still, I think I have a few insights and ideas (and the occassional contrarian point of view) which don't get talked about in any of the other funeral service media. I think I should keep at this, and I will.

A quick note for now that Stephen Lee, editor of the Funeral Service Insider has taken my "What would Wal-Mart do?" posting and reworked it for his newsletter. Expect to see that either this week or next, AND expect that you will start to see some thoughts and ideas pop up here on a more regular basis.

Thanks for checking in and have a fabulous week.

BT

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Back in the Saddle

Well folks, sorry to have taken such a long and unannounced break from posting, but yes, I actually have a funeral business to run (and kids to raise and a few other things) and for the last several weeks I have stayed focused on those other more pressing needs.

This has given me a chance to regroup my thinking about funeral service, so expect some new material from me shortly.

For now, let me pass along a somewhat silly link for a company that makes couches out of recycled 18 gauge caskets. Any takers?

http://coffincouches.com/

Below a sample in "Dodger" (as in the baseball team) blue.

A Million More...

...deaths per year that is, over the next 15 to 20 years. Let me say that again 1 million more deaths per year in this country than we deal with right now and that's assuming for calculation purposes that the population remains about the same size over that time. The population is expected to grow (at least moderately) as well.

Going into the holiday weekend, I don't have time to start a major posting but I now have a PDF version of the American Funeral Director article I wrote for the January 2008 issue. This begins to spell out some of the issues.

Give it a read and get me some feedback. I need to write a follow-up piece which looks at the mortality changes on a more regional basis (some areas will see moderate growth, others--explosive) and I would want to address anything about this article which is unclear or incomplete.

Thanks.

Download where_are_the_boomers.pdf

Contradictions in Grieving

I made note of the new book An Uncertain Inheritance in a previous posting where an editor named Nell Casey has collected a variety of stories penned by professional writers about their individual experiences of caregiving. Not all of these stories involve end of life situations, in fact one of the best comes from the point of view of the challenge of someone receiving care from loved ones during a bout of deep clinical depression.

I have not finished yet, but I would like to pass along a short quote from one of the essays. This captures some of complexity involved with grieving. We must always keep this in mind when working with families. Death means lots of different things to people and sometimes grief brings not just sadness but guilt and frustration to the surface. You never know what you will find.

From the essay entitled, "The Baby" by Anne Landsman:

"I was stunned at how bereft I felt, even though there were so many miles separating my father and myself [she in New York, he having died in South Africa], so many years of distance, so much childhood hurt. I felt cold all the time, as if I was about to get sick. I began to understand the animal nature of grief, the mourning of dogs, apes, elephants. The loss of my father was huge, as if someone had taken off a limb. Not only had I lost him, the idosyncratic, lovable rascal that he was, I had also lost a fantasy. When he was alive, there was always the hope that he would turn one day into a real father, the benign, openhearted father I dreamed of having. Now that dream was gone too."

An amazing insight, take it and use it in your own practice of funeral service.

Peace,

BT

Watch those cash-advance rules of thumb

I spent some time reviewing my company's financials this afternoon and it surprised me to see how much our newspaper cash advance line has jumped in the last year--almost 29% (or $43,000 for a company our size)!

We have seen several of our local papers switch over to paid obituaries in the last year or so and as a result families must pay substantially more to post funeral information.

Anyway, this got me thinking I should write a simple reminder to all of you to double check those cash advance rules of thumb. We all have them, quick mental guides on how much an obituary will cost based upon the amount of family information in the record. This allows us to provide a reasonable estimate on the "Statement of Goods and Services". Still those rules of thumb get out of date from time to time and all the more so these days with the cost of many goods and services on the rise.

So check those bills more closely and make sure your arranging directors have current costs in mind when they sit with their families. An unnoticed newspaper short-fall of $20 or $30 dollars can add up quickly if it happens too often and at least in states like Massachusetts, cash-advance items have literally no margin for error.

In a time of slimming margins, every dollar counts. Don't just write off those mistakes. Fix them! That will make funerals just a tiny bit less expensive for everyone else.

Have a fabulous day!

It's not about the "BIG" idea...

The concept of the "Blue Ocean Strategy" has surfaced on the cover of NFDA's Director magazine. The process involves a complex and probably error prone (unless you are a strategic planning specialist of some kind) approach to measuring your business' place in your market place and possibly finding a new business offering.

Underlying this approach rests the assumption that one big idea will make your business successful, as the article points to Starbucks Coffee and Southwest Airlines as examples of companies which found "blue oceans" within which to operate. Of course, at the time of the founding of these companies, the people involved had no idea that their WAG (wild-assed guesses) would turn into national phenomena. Just passionate people with an idea that happened to work out, but not one reached through some sort of fancy chart and graph planning process.

For instance, if I remember correctly, Southwest started as a triangle drawn on a cocktail napkin with the corners representing three cities in Texas. After they got going, Southwest realized they had a concept with "legs" and the capacity to move beyond the boundaries of one state. Lots of trial and error and willingness turned Southwest into the powerhouse we see today.

So it takes passion, hard work, luck (lots of passionate people have started airlines and failed)  and constant learning and trying new things. In the end, the trying and the learning at the grass roots of an organizaton will get you to bigger business opportunities much faster than a formal strategic planning process which drops in from out of the blue.

Try, listen, learn, do some more. That's the essence of building any business  or project.

BT

P.S. Here's a commentary which ran in the New York Times a week ago. A reminder that innovation rarely comes from the "Eureka!" moment, most often from persistent grind-it-out hard work and learning. Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work

For the Parents and Grandparents in All of Us

I will call this posting a "Friday Extra," as it has little direct impact on funeral service but for all of you with young ones of some sort or other (children, grandchildren, nieces, newphews, etc.) who you worry about becoming the prey of online preditors, give the following New York Times editorial a look. It points out how many kids (probably most) develop a certain street-smarts about their online contacts which does help keep trouble at bay.

Of course parents and guardians need to remain supportive, vigilant and aware of the lives kids lead on line, but perhaps this article will help ease the paranoia just a bit.

Have a great weekend, BT

NYTimes.com: My Wired Youth

The Happiness Industry--How Has It Changed Funerals?

A couple of days ago, I read an article from Newsweek entitled, Happiness: Enough Already. A provocative headline to say the least, since we live in an era where extreme happiness has become a goal and for some a true obsession, to the point where many (psychologists included) seek to medicate away almost any form of sadness.

The article goes on to point out that though a small percentage of the population does fall into the category of the long-term clinically depressed (people who truly need medicative support in order to function above a subsistence level), many will experience bouts of depressive symptoms which do not require agressive treatment. In fact, the obsessively, extremely "happy" person has a tendency to become a less productive individual than those experiencing a more moderate level of happiness. A little bit of difficulty can provide the incentive needed to stive towards improvement and betterment.

All of this leads me to ask an open ended question to all of us in the funeral service world. We have found ourselves working more and more with the idea of "celebrations" instead of funerals. I wonder how much of this has come from the underlying expectations of the "happiness industry" and whether as the pendulum of cultural opinion swings more towards allowing for the balance of sadness in life, that the character of funeral services will begin to shift as well.

Such a shift will play out very gradually of course, but something to keep in mind as you may find families making more room for grief and solemnity once more. Comments?

Here's a link to one of the books mentioned in the article. Sounds a little technical but might help put a few things into perspective.

Hershey's Raised Prices Today--How about you?

I saw a news item on the Business Week website. "Hershey Boosts Prices In Domestic Confectionery Line" citing increased costs of doing business, Hershey's has instituted a weighted average price increase of 13% effective immediately on its standard bar, king-size bar, 6-pack and vending lines.

Checked your prices lately? If not, I'm here to remind you that the time has come. I started unpacking the numbers today and will have changes implemented shortly.

Hershey's went for 13% in one of their core product lines. How much have your costs increased? Figure it out and make a change. Today's the day.