Dale-Time

This is a photo of one our flower carts. We use them to transport the flowers from the area in the building where the flowers are delivered to the visitation rooms and then on to the chapel for funerals. Then we use them again to transport the flowers back to the garage where the delivery van is so we can take the flowers where ever the family wants them delivered. Handling flowers is still something we do all the time at the funeral home and I suspect most funeral homes have a cart like this in some shape or form. I have no idea where our carts came from but they look they were some type of standard cart and then customized to meet our specific needs. They are made out of steel, chrome and sheet metal. Very sturdy and have lasted over 60 years and I’m sure they have several decades of use left in them.

I don’t ever remember the flower carts not being at the funeral home. I’m 55 years old and the house I grew up in was attached to the funeral home. I used to go through the flower room on my way to my elementary school every day. I never really thought about them much. They were just part of the scenery here at the funeral home.

So why am I writing about them today. Well…Today I spent several hours cleaning them up.

We have been doing some well needed painting around the funeral home. I hired my 20-something nephew who is in between jobs as a summer white water rafting guide and wintertime ski lift operator and another gal with some painting experience to get the jobs done in a timely manner. My wife picked out the colors and basically supervised the job. I have been busy still working on the house trying to get ready to move in (I’m way behind schedule and my wife is about ready to string me up the flagpole). I decided it was time for me to delegate everything and I let them handle the job and over all they have done a great job.

Unfortunately they used the flower carts to move paint and equipment around the building and they spilled paint in the carts. Not a lot, but enough to make them look like crap and then the paint dried and it was crusty and nasty. They also didn’t clean the paint brushes very well and left the rollers wet with paint and wrapped in plastic bags so they could use them later when they got back to finishing the job. I know this is some trick that they saw in some remodeling magazine and years ago I might have done the same thing.

But with age (and lots of mistakes) comes some wisdom. I learned some time ago, thanks to my former father-in-law, that if you treat your tools well they will last a long time and you will do a better job. It takes patience, time to set up and then time to clean up when you’re done. I do my best to follow his teachings. Sometimes I fail. I don’t put all the tools away if I’m in a hurry or I know I’ll be back at the job soon. But I have found that when I don’t clean up and put things away I always have a hard time finding my tools later when I really need them.

OK …. you’ve all heard this before. So back to the flower carts.

The flower carts symbolize my business and how I should take care of people. I could just look at them as something that’s only there for a short time. Use it and then throw it away because it’s easier to get a new one than to clean it and take care of it. But I realized that these carts have been around for over 60 years, doing a great job, in the public eye and very functional. If I had to replace them I would get a new and improved model. But they don’t need to be replaced yet. They just need to be taken care of.

Maybe the folks that spilled the paint in them didn’t realize their history. They didn’t know how many jobs they had done so well over the years. Maybe the carts just looked old and utilitarian. I didn’t see them like that. I saw some old faithful tools (friends) that had been so helpful for a long time. So I spent a couple hours getting them back in shape. I’m glad I did. I’m sure they will return the favor and give me many more years of faithful service.

Now if I could just find that pair of vice grips I used last week.

I’m Dale Clock. Thanks for listening.

Visitations are for visiting. It makes sense, doesn’t it? That’s why we call it a visitation. Someone dies and and the family schedules a visitation and their friends and other family members gather at the funeral home or at the church so they can talk to each other. They gather so they can show their respect. They gather so they can tell each other stories and help each other work through the loss of a loved one. That’s what’s supposed to happen.

So why do so many funeral homes insist on putting every one in a long receiving line? You know the routine. You are greeted at the door by the LOL (little old lady) working the lobby. (Every funeral home has  LOL’s working for them and they are usually wonderful people). The LOL then escorts you to the end of the line and you’re stuck. The family is somewhere down the line and even if you happen to see someone else you know, you don’t dare get out of line. Do funeral homes and families really think that this is the most effective way for everyone to visit. Or are they doing it because “That’s the way we’ve always done it”.

I don’t know about you but I can’t stand receiving lines. They are long and boring. Receiving lines force me to talk to people I don’t know.  They limit the number of people I do get to talk to, to just the people in front of me or the people in back of me in line and the family members at the head of the line. Very often when I go to a visitation I only know one or two members of the family. I may not have ever really known the deceased. But the receiving line forces me to wait for long periods of time to say a few comforting platitudes to people I will probably never see again. Yes, it serves a certain purpose. But wouldn’t that same purpose be met by stationing family members around the room so their friends can walk up to them directly. So they can spend a few meaningful minutes sharing the stories that show how much we care for each other.

I also want the chance to talk to people other than the family. There are many times when I may have known a person that died but I didn’t know the family well. But I was a good friend of the deceased and we were part of a group together. I want the chance to share stories with other friends and members of that group. Because I too have lost someone that played a part of my life and I need to share stories to help me through my own personal loss.

At Clock Funeral Home we hardly ever have receiving lines. Sometimes they do happen to form, but we purposely tell families to spread themselves around the visitation room. We also have multiple displays of the family’s personal memorabilia and photos at various location around the room. It’s all well lighted and easy to get to, just like at a museum or art gallery. This makes the visitors work the room. It makes them wander around and look at all the stuff. It makes them stop and view the video for awhile. The stuff reminds them of the things they remember about the deceased or their friends. And when the visitors get their chance to really talk to the family and friends the stuff they have seen is food for the conversations and stories that are so important at times like that.

The true value of a funeral is the gathering together of people and the sharing of stories. Because it’s through those stories that we show our respect, honor, love and support for each other. It’s what we, as humans beings need.

So if the funeral home you usually use keeps putting you in receiving lines that defeat the purpose of what visitations are meant for, next time let me help you gather together and share the stories. I promise you won’t get stuck in line.

I’m Dale Clock. Thanks for listening.

For some time now I have been disappointed in the comparative reports that the funeral trade publications and other funeral organizations have been producing for us funeral homes. The ones I’m talking about are the annual Federated Reports, The Funeral Insider survey results, NFDA surveys, SIFH Comparative reports, just to name a few. While all of the reports and the data they show can be helpful, they fail to show how the change in the mix of business (i.e. percentage of cremation and the percentage of what types of services provided) is really affecting the bottom line and the funeral industry as a whole. I think one of the main problems is that these reports average too many different types of services and geographical areas into one number. Let me try to explain.

For years the “number” we all wanted to compare was average funeral sale based on casket and services. Sometimes the reports also threw in the vault sale too. This number was OK when we were all at 10%-20% cremation. But as my business has shifted to over 50% cremation that number is not as relevant as it used to be. For the last 15 years I have broken down my data by disposition (burial or cremation) and service type within each disposition. I break things down into multiple areas in those categories that are specific to the types of service we provide in our area. But I think on a national basis we can break things down into 5 different service types.

Burial

1. Full Service – with or without visitation – Includes – casket, vault, printed material, services, facilities, and autos
2. Direct Burial/Graveside Service

Cremation

1. Full Service – with or without visitation but always with the body present. Includes casket or rental casket, urn, printed materials, services, facilities and autos.
2. Memorial Service – no body present (may include private family viewing) includes urn, printed material, services, facilities and autos
3. Direct Cremation – No services and No visitation with the funeral home involved.

I would throw out any trade calls, public assistance and children calls. We could nit-pick about regional variations but I think nearly every call can be put into one of these five categories.

Now if a whole bunch of funeral homes were willing to submit sales data on each of their calls (not just yearly totals and averages) to a national database, then those numbers could be broken down and compared with other folks who have similar cremation percentages, different regions of the country or volume breakdowns.  I know that’s asking a lot and there would need to be guaranteed confidentiality. But frankly, comparing my average sale to someone doing 20% cremation is of no value to me. We are not in the same business. I need to know how other folks around the country are doing in similar situations to me.

It seems to me that a perfect place for this to happen would be through the major funeral home website providers. They are already hosting databases of obituaries for all of their clients. It would be easy to add another data entry screen for the sales figures for each of those calls. The data provided to their clients could be invaluable. That could also be a selling point for the website providers who claim that their web sites can increase market share and profits.

Are you listening out there Funeralnet, FuneralOne, Tributes.com or even NFDA???

I’m Dale Clock. Thanks for listening

Last month my wife’s book was published. It is titled “Navigating the Eldercare Journey…Without Going Broke” and her name Is Jodi Clock. The book is a practical guide to help folks plan for and manage the challenges many people face as they reach the last years of their lives. It’s geared towards people going through this themselves and also for adult children who are helping their parents go through this. And there are a lot of baby boomers going through this stuff.

What I like best about the book is that it follows the story of an aging couple, Russ & Yvonne, as they deal with end of life issues like Alzheimer’s, second marriages, blended families, inheritance, Medicaid, nursing homes and failing health. Each chapter tells a part of their story and then goes on to give specific advice for handling the situations they are going through. It makes for and easy read and you can easily see people that you know in the characters. It’s also organized so each chapter can stand on its own. So if a certain chapter doesn’t really apply to your situation you can find chapter that does. At the end of each chapter is a Family Care Plan that gives you a list of things to do to accomplish the goals described in the chapter.

So who the heck is Jodi Clock and why should you listen to her? As a dutiful husband I have to listen to her. But I also want to listen to her because she has 25 years of working in the funeral pre-arrangement business, the last 10 of which has been with me here at Clock Life Story Funeral Home. She has talked with thousands of people and helped countless others preserve some of their assets while still qualifying for Medicaid and accomplishing the things they want to do. Jodi is one the most knowledgeable person in this field in the country.

Jodi came to write this book through the encouragement of her publisher. The publisher and her friends had recently experienced many the same challenges and were frustrated that there was no place to go for solid advice. And luckily through some mutual friends Jodi came in contact with them and they told her she needed to write this book. So after many months, a couple name changes and lots a rewrites the book was published.

You can get the book on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Navigating-Eldercare-Journey-Without-Volume/dp/1935766279/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339599419&sr=8-1 or at Barnes and Noble at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/jodi-clock?keyword=jodi+clock&store=allproducts

You can also learn more about the book and read a few excerpts at www.jodiclock.com

I encourage you to give it a read.

It’s also interesting that the last entry in Alan Creedy’s blog discusses the Time article on How To Die. http://funeralhomeconsulting.org/best-practices/customer-engagement/marketing/death-goes-mainstream/

In his blog he encourages all of us in funeral service to focus on educating the public in all the practical aspects of Dying and to become the “go to” expert on all these matters. I’m sure that Jodi’s book is doing exactly that. Without a doubt we will be using it as a gift to give to many of the folks that call on us for advice. I’m guessing it could help alot of other folks in the funeral  business.

I’m Dale Clock. Thanks for Listening.

In honor of Mother’s Day I’d like to share a poem with you. It’s by Billy Collins, an American poet. I’m not sure where I first heard this poem but it somehow stuck in my mind. I looked it up a couple weeks ago to use at funeral that I was the Celebrant for and used it again yesterday for another funeral. I hope you like it as much as I do. It’s even better when you listen to the author read it himself. Here is a link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khQ9e0QpEM8

Thanks Mom for all that you did for me.

The Lanyard – Billy Collins