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Larry Stuart: Funerals 101 - Parts 2
21 Plays4 years ago
Welcome to Part 2 of Funerals 101 with Larry Stuart! In the previous part of this three-part episode, Larry talked about the role of a funeral director and some of the common challenges when it comes to handling cremations.
In this second part, host Jennifer continues their conversation about how bringing value to the services they offer starts within themselves. That it is only by thinking that they’re qualified to provide services could they consider themselves worthy to assist those who need what they can offer. After all, funerals ARE an industry; it IS a business. There is profit and loss, and demand and supply. We need to recognize funerals as a business and stop annihilating them for making a profit from their services.
Added to this conversation is how people should look at the funeral industry, especially during this COVID19 pandemic - they were the last responders and worked 24/7 and saw dead bodies pile up but they got no praise or reward but further annihilation in the press/media.
Join Larry and Jennifer as they deep dive into these topics, and make sure to watch the sequel in our next episode. Stay tuned!
LITTLE NUGGETS OF GOLD:
- The importance of giving value to ourselves and to the services that we give to our clients
- A deeper understanding about the services given in the funeral industry
- The funeral industry during the COVID-19 pandemic
- How social media has impacted the funeral industry
- Regulation and policies affecting the funeral industry
Connect with Larry Stuart Jr.:
Website - http://www.larrystuartjr.com/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/larrystuartjr/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/LarryStuartJr
LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/pub/larry-stuart-jr/1a/a52/138
Instagram - @larrystuartjr
Raven Plume Consulting (formerly Cremation Strategies & Consulting)
Website - https://ravenplume.com/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/RavenPlumeCons/
Instagram - @crematestrategy
Twitter - https://twitter.com/ravenplumecons
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/77610975
Connect with Jennifer/The Glam Reaper:
Facebook Page - Muldowney Memorials: https://www.facebook.com/MuldowneyMemorials/
Facebook Page - Rainbow Bridge Memorials: https://www.facebook.com/rainbowbridgememorialsdotcom
Instagram - @muldowneymemorials & @jennifermuldowney
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:03
Speaker
Hi, my name is Jennifer Muldowney, aka The Glam Reaper, and this is The Glam Reaper Podcast.
00:00:08
Speaker
We're on YouTube and we're in your ears.
00:00:11
Speaker
This show will focus on stories about love, life and loss, and we'll also have a massive input from the funeral world, since that's the world that I live in.
Guest Introduction: Larry
00:00:20
Speaker
It is my absolute pleasure to welcome this episode's guest because he is one of my favoritest people in the entire funeral industry and he's just a darling.
00:00:30
Speaker
Please welcome the incredible Larry.
Challenges in the Funeral Industry
00:00:38
Speaker
It's almost unfathomable how we don't value ourselves and that's why I think
00:00:48
Speaker
that we can't portray that value of our professional services to our families.
00:00:56
Speaker
You can't feel guilty.
00:00:58
Speaker
I asked a funeral director in, well, I'll say where, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
00:01:02
Speaker
He's a friend.
00:01:04
Speaker
I've holidayed with him.
00:01:06
Speaker
I said, tell me, what is the most expensive cremation funeral you've sold?
00:01:13
Speaker
Well, I didn't sell it.
00:01:14
Speaker
I arranged it.
00:01:15
Speaker
Well, you know, tomato, tomato.
00:01:20
Speaker
there's a sale involved.
00:01:22
Speaker
Come on.
00:01:23
Speaker
You have a contract for goods and services.
00:01:26
Speaker
You sold something.
00:01:28
Speaker
But he said, Oh my gosh, Larry, $13,000.
00:01:31
Speaker
And I said, Oh, that's not very big.
00:01:36
Speaker
Oh, I felt so guilty.
00:01:39
Speaker
The lady, she just kept adding things and adding things.
00:01:42
Speaker
And I was like, Oh my God, what is she going to do when I tell her the final?
00:01:46
Speaker
And she didn't even blink an eye.
00:01:48
Speaker
And I was like,
00:01:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:51
Speaker
And then you should have asked her if she wanted anything else.
00:01:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:55
Speaker
But he did.
00:01:56
Speaker
We don't think our stuff's worth it.
00:01:59
Speaker
Why are they going to think our stuff's worth it?
00:02:01
Speaker
So I don't think that's a blanket problem, but I think that in a way we all have an insecurity.
00:02:09
Speaker
I mean, I know sometimes when I, when I quote my hourly, like today I engaged with a new client and I told him what my,
00:02:17
Speaker
My hourly rate was because he wanted just stuff to be hourly, not a monthly retainer.
00:02:23
Speaker
And I told him and in the back of my mind is like, oh, is he going to say, okay, or is he going to say, holy crap.
00:02:30
Speaker
And he said, oh, okay.
00:02:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's perfect.
00:02:33
Speaker
I said stop with the insecurities.
00:02:36
Speaker
Yeah that's definitely something that's across the board I think for everybody.
00:02:40
Speaker
I am absolutely massively guilty of that myself.
00:02:43
Speaker
It's so common.
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah it really is and again I feel like we can punctuate this constantly with that's another podcast because I actually had to engage a coach to train me to when I was negotiating with people instead of
00:02:59
Speaker
leaving the offer on the table of what I knew my services were worth, I would already jump in and say, oh, well, you know, I mean, I could do a discount if we talk, you know, hours.
00:03:09
Speaker
Automatically assuming that you're not worth it.
00:03:13
Speaker
That is definitely a whole other podcast about worthiness and all of us day to day in our negotiations.
00:03:18
Speaker
And that goes across the board, not just in business.
Misconceptions and Emotional Challenges
00:03:22
Speaker
I'll comment one on that because my little brother taught me this years ago.
00:03:26
Speaker
And it's exactly about negotiation and sales techniques.
00:03:30
Speaker
When you present your offer, shut the up.
00:03:36
Speaker
Because the first person who talks loses.
00:03:39
Speaker
And that's always me.
00:03:41
Speaker
God damn it.
00:03:42
Speaker
It's fine though because it gets uncomfortable after a minute.
00:03:48
Speaker
And there I am sitting just going.
00:03:49
Speaker
You can't say anything.
00:03:55
Speaker
And, and you know, it, it's not like we're trying to sell something that has no value.
00:04:01
Speaker
Back to the security and security thing.
00:04:05
Speaker
If they want your service, you got to get paid.
00:04:08
Speaker
You live in New York city for God's sakes.
00:04:11
Speaker
I can't even imagine your rent.
00:04:14
Speaker
Let's not go down that Alice in Wonderland path.
00:04:18
Speaker
I do think that insecurity, I do think, goes across the board even more so in the funeral business.
00:04:25
Speaker
And actually, that guy Eric's book does talk about that and how we need to, as a community, start seeing our pricing as
00:04:33
Speaker
relationship not transactional because once it's transactional it is it does become less about the family and more cold hard and getting sales targets and things like that and one of the things I regularly say to Joe Public or anybody that doesn't necessarily know the community the funeral community is that sorry to break it to everybody but it is a business and so we've got to kind of step away from oh well such and such charge me this because he's
00:05:02
Speaker
you know, robbing me and I've just lost my family.
00:05:05
Speaker
And absolutely, is that the hardest thing to have to do is to charge a family when they've already lost maybe a child even?
00:05:14
Speaker
It can actually, as a funeral person, it can wrench your heart out.
00:05:19
Speaker
If a lot of the funeral people I know, if they could, they would give all their services for free.
00:05:25
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:05:25
Speaker
Most of them.
00:05:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:27
Speaker
That's honestly what I would nearly beg Joe Public to do is just for a moment, meditate, whatever, sit down, even over a cup of coffee and just think, could I start the funeral business tomorrow?
00:05:38
Speaker
Could I go into a funeral home tomorrow?
00:05:40
Speaker
It takes a lot.
00:05:41
Speaker
It takes a lot of courage.
00:05:42
Speaker
It's definitely this calling business.
00:05:45
Speaker
I do think some people are called for it.
00:05:47
Speaker
Other people are not.
00:05:48
Speaker
But I do think it takes a certain person.
00:05:50
Speaker
Like I firmly believe if you are born into hospitality, it's in you.
00:05:54
Speaker
It is for some people.
00:05:56
Speaker
It is not for other people.
00:05:57
Speaker
And I think the funeral business is very much like that.
00:06:00
Speaker
But people have to remember they have got to keep the lights on.
00:06:03
Speaker
They have got to keep their staff trained and paid and therefore well fed.
00:06:08
Speaker
And there are so many other aspects that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, he doesn't get attacked for
COVID-19 Impact on Funeral Services
00:06:15
Speaker
the pricing that he's doing or I'm just picking random people.
00:06:18
Speaker
But, you know, successful CEOs, you don't see them getting the attacks that say maybe the CEO of SCI or somebody else gets.
00:06:25
Speaker
Right.
00:06:27
Speaker
Because they're as big as they are in the funeral sector.
00:06:30
Speaker
All of a sudden,
00:06:31
Speaker
They must be monsters, absolute monsters.
00:06:33
Speaker
They're making money off people dying.
00:06:35
Speaker
I hate to break it to you.
00:06:36
Speaker
People are going to die anyway.
00:06:39
Speaker
And the tragedy of it is one of the things I actually said on a recent podcast I was interviewed on that they were lawyers and they were actually their minds were a bit blown by what I said was look at the entire reaction to COVID-19.
00:06:53
Speaker
We have been inundated with social media and applause and let's help all of the frontline workers.
00:07:02
Speaker
And I am not saying to take anything away from that.
00:07:05
Speaker
Absolutely, those people put their lives on the line daily.
00:07:09
Speaker
It still is horrendous, especially in New York, but all over the world.
00:07:13
Speaker
But not once did people throw a soft applause, anything, to the, what I call,
00:07:21
Speaker
final, like your final line worker.
00:07:24
Speaker
Like what about those people?
00:07:27
Speaker
If the funeral industry had a, where they were so heartless, they could have just said, nothing to do with us.
00:07:33
Speaker
They could have stood back and just let the bodies pile up and pile up and pile up.
00:07:38
Speaker
I know funeral directors that were working 24 hours a day.
00:07:43
Speaker
listening to calls from families, they just didn't know what to do with the body.
00:07:46
Speaker
And hospitals were so inundated that they couldn't hold on to them.
00:07:50
Speaker
And so what were going to happen to all of these people?
00:07:52
Speaker
But nobody thinks, and even still, during COVID-19, the funeral industry still got a bad rap.
00:08:00
Speaker
Oh my God, bodies are out in freezing units, in lorries, out on the side of the road, and this and that.
00:08:07
Speaker
And it's just, you can't win.
00:08:11
Speaker
A place just down the street from you.
00:08:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:14
Speaker
Putting the bodies in unrefrigerated.
00:08:18
Speaker
The dumbest thing I ever heard and it's horrific, but I don't know his side of the story.
00:08:23
Speaker
Did he just do what he had to do to, you know, the man's probably going to lose his license over that.
00:08:29
Speaker
And I can't say that I know whether that's just or not, because I don't know anything about the story other than the media and some friends I know.
00:08:37
Speaker
Let's take New York City, for example.
00:08:39
Speaker
The capacity of the city is the five boroughs is 88 bodies a day.
00:08:45
Speaker
That's it.
00:08:46
Speaker
Cremation, 88 bodies a day.
00:08:49
Speaker
And that's not enough pre-COVID.
00:08:54
Speaker
Never mind when more people are choosing cremation because they think that's the only way to kill the virus, which that's not even true.
00:09:04
Speaker
The virus doesn't live in the body forever.
00:09:07
Speaker
Anyone knows infectious disease, they know that the body has to be alive for something like that.
00:09:15
Speaker
It can't survive in a dead body.
00:09:17
Speaker
But between the time that it dies and the time you get that body, it could still be communicable.
00:09:24
Speaker
Even embalmed, it can still be communicable.
00:09:27
Speaker
We say we use universal precautions.
00:09:29
Speaker
So if we truly did, we wouldn't have to worry, but look at what the problems we didn't have masks.
00:09:36
Speaker
We didn't have gloves.
00:09:37
Speaker
We didn't have coveralls, head shields.
00:09:39
Speaker
I mean, we were freaking out as a profession.
00:09:43
Speaker
Well, if we were doing what we were supposed to do, we wouldn't have had that, you know?
00:09:48
Speaker
So the city itself in the politics.
00:09:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:54
Speaker
In New York, you cannot own a crematory unless you are a cemetery or that you are grandfathered.
Politics and Regulation in the Funeral Industry
00:10:01
Speaker
But the grandfathering, those units are so old that they shouldn't be operating.
00:10:06
Speaker
But sorry, guys.
00:10:08
Speaker
You know, the restrictive politics, there's, you know, there's only a couple of states, New York and New Jersey are two that have that law about cremation.
00:10:19
Speaker
And it goes back to cemetery versus funerals.
00:10:23
Speaker
And it's just silly.
00:10:25
Speaker
We're all trying to do the same thing.
00:10:29
Speaker
Turn a dead body into a living memory.
00:10:34
Speaker
Whether you're scrubbing the toilets at the funeral home or embalming or digging the grave with tobacco or driving the hearse, whatever.
00:10:43
Speaker
We all do the same thing.
00:10:45
Speaker
I'm just rambling now.
00:10:48
Speaker
Getting on my high horse.
00:10:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:50
Speaker
No, absolutely, Larry.
00:10:51
Speaker
And it's just, it's so topical at the moment because, like, as I said, when I said it on that podcast, they were floored.
00:10:58
Speaker
We never even thought of that.
00:10:59
Speaker
And I said, of course you didn't.
00:11:01
Speaker
And it's not that I was doing the shout out to be like, ooh, funeral people, you know, feel sorry for us.
00:11:06
Speaker
It's not that.
00:11:07
Speaker
To me, it just was so clear.
00:11:08
Speaker
It showed that.
00:11:10
Speaker
how the media completely zone in on negative, negative, negative, negative.
00:11:14
Speaker
You didn't see massive amounts of media attention on how hospitals ran out of equipment.
00:11:20
Speaker
Only if it was running out of equipment in a, okay, but let's get it, get some equipment in.
00:11:25
Speaker
And it was a positively spun story.
00:11:27
Speaker
So it's just fascinating for me how it's,
00:11:29
Speaker
constantly presented in a negative manner and you absolutely hit the nail on the head so many times we do not and I always use the word we we as a funeral community do not help ourselves I'm not pointing fingers at other people too I'm just as guilty of of the things that I talk about all the time you're 100% right that's that's such a good point
00:11:53
Speaker
It's sad.
00:11:54
Speaker
And here's the thing.
00:11:56
Speaker
It's how to fix it.
00:11:58
Speaker
You know, it's so much damage has been done.
00:12:00
Speaker
And definitely that Jessica Mitford book, while she had some very valid points kicked off.
00:12:06
Speaker
I mean, that was the 1960s.
00:12:07
Speaker
So we're 60 years on from that and we're still reeling from it.
00:12:11
Speaker
I do think regulation across the board will definitely help.
00:12:14
Speaker
But then to be honest, Larry, as well, I look at my little country of Ireland and there's practically no regulation.
00:12:21
Speaker
We have an NFDA style.
00:12:23
Speaker
You know, we have our own little funeral directors association.
00:12:26
Speaker
But what cracks me up and as somebody who's from Ireland and started there and seen that and now here touched on it and I'm going to dig a little deeper is politics.
00:12:38
Speaker
Politics ruin everything.
00:12:41
Speaker
They do.
00:12:42
Speaker
It really grates on my nerves.
00:12:45
Speaker
So while we've no regulation in Ireland, mostly, they're still trekking along fine.
00:12:51
Speaker
I could go home in the morning and set up my own funeral home and flourish.
00:12:56
Speaker
You could embalm, you could do all of it.
00:12:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:59
Speaker
And what do I think that's necessarily right?
00:13:02
Speaker
I don't.
00:13:03
Speaker
But I do think that barrier to entry does allow people who actually want to get on, allow them to get on.
00:13:10
Speaker
Whereas I know from starting my company in Ireland that the politics, if people on the higher boards decide they don't like you or they don't like your new innovative idea, and I know you understand this,
00:13:23
Speaker
They can squash you.
00:13:24
Speaker
They can get rid.
00:13:25
Speaker
They can keep the voice down.
00:13:27
Speaker
And it's just really unfair and not right at all.
00:13:31
Speaker
People think we've gone beyond the good old boys club.
00:13:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:35
Speaker
Not even close.
00:13:36
Speaker
The good old boys don't look like old fat bald guys anymore.
00:13:42
Speaker
Good old boys can be women.
00:13:43
Speaker
Good old boys can be young millennials, trust fund babies.
00:13:49
Speaker
Any group can, and this is politics, right?
00:13:53
Speaker
Any group can affect people's livelihoods.
00:13:58
Speaker
I mean, I think of social media and Facebook particularly.
00:14:02
Speaker
Just the fact that I know they can track everything I do online and target ads.
00:14:09
Speaker
Who's to say they're not doing nefarious things with that information?
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah, that is crazy.
00:14:15
Speaker
Yeah, that whole online thing, I don't think, I think I'll stick to my Disney Plus channel.
00:14:19
Speaker
I'm not going to watch that.
00:14:20
Speaker
Yeah, I won't watch that movie.
00:14:22
Speaker
But, you know, the barrier to entry is super important because, well, even in the States, Iowa, I think last year, the year before, they were looking at getting rid of the requirement for licensure because no one wants to be a funeral director in
Conclusion and Next Episodes
00:14:42
Speaker
Iowa.
00:14:42
Speaker
Right.
00:14:43
Speaker
I don't know that they did it.
00:14:44
Speaker
I haven't, I mean, with COVID, I have, haven't been to Iowa in a long time, but the UK and Ireland, there's no licensure, but they do have those oversight boards like the BIE, you know, and if you're not certified by them, you almost can't get much business.
00:15:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:09
Speaker
But in the rural areas, you know,
00:15:13
Speaker
The home funeral is still something very popular in Ireland, as you know.
00:15:17
Speaker
And we think it's just such a, oh, my God, you can't bring the body home.
00:15:22
Speaker
Well, why not?
00:15:24
Speaker
Come on.
00:15:26
Speaker
You know, there are regulations here that hamper that in a lot of areas.
00:15:30
Speaker
So for me, regulations are a 50-50 thing.
00:15:39
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening to the Glam Reaper podcast.
00:15:42
Speaker
It has been something I've been working on and muddling with for over two years now.
00:15:46
Speaker
So I appreciate your time to listen in.
00:15:48
Speaker
Every episode will have a new guest we hope you will find interesting as they tell their own story.
00:15:54
Speaker
So stay tuned for the next episode or have a look through the Glam Reaper episode collection.
00:16:00
Speaker
Find your nugget of gold as we talk all things life, love and loss with a dash from the funeral world.
00:16:08
Speaker
Until next time.