Transcript
Speaker: Hi, my name is Jennifer Muldowney, aka The Glam Reaper, and this is The Glam Reaper Podcast.
Speaker: We're on YouTube and we're in your ears.
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.
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.
Speaker: Please welcome the incredible Larry.
Speaker: It's almost unfathomable how we don't value ourselves and that's why I think
Speaker: that we can't portray that value of our professional services to our families.
Speaker: You can't feel guilty.
Speaker: I asked a funeral director in, well, I'll say where, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Speaker: He's a friend.
Speaker: I've holidayed with him.
Speaker: I said, tell me, what is the most expensive cremation funeral you've sold?
Speaker: Well, I didn't sell it.
Speaker: I arranged it.
Speaker: Well, you know, tomato, tomato.
Speaker: there's a sale involved.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: You have a contract for goods and services.
Speaker: You sold something.
Speaker: But he said, Oh my gosh, Larry, $13,000.
Speaker: And I said, Oh, that's not very big.
Speaker: Oh, I felt so guilty.
Speaker: The lady, she just kept adding things and adding things.
Speaker: And I was like, Oh my God, what is she going to do when I tell her the final?
Speaker: And she didn't even blink an eye.
Speaker: And I was like,
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then you should have asked her if she wanted anything else.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But he did.
Speaker: We don't think our stuff's worth it.
Speaker: Why are they going to think our stuff's worth it?
Speaker: So I don't think that's a blanket problem, but I think that in a way we all have an insecurity.
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,
Speaker: My hourly rate was because he wanted just stuff to be hourly, not a monthly retainer.
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.
Speaker: And he said, oh, okay.
Speaker: Yeah, that's perfect.
Speaker: I said stop with the insecurities.
Speaker: Yeah that's definitely something that's across the board I think for everybody.
Speaker: I am absolutely massively guilty of that myself.
Speaker: It's so common.
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
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.
Speaker: Automatically assuming that you're not worth it.
Speaker: That is definitely a whole other podcast about worthiness and all of us day to day in our negotiations.
Speaker: And that goes across the board, not just in business.
Speaker: I'll comment one on that because my little brother taught me this years ago.
Speaker: And it's exactly about negotiation and sales techniques.
Speaker: When you present your offer, shut the up.
Speaker: Because the first person who talks loses.
Speaker: And that's always me.
Speaker: God damn it.
Speaker: It's fine though because it gets uncomfortable after a minute.
Speaker: And there I am sitting just going.
Speaker: You can't say anything.
Speaker: And, and you know, it, it's not like we're trying to sell something that has no value.
Speaker: Back to the security and security thing.
Speaker: If they want your service, you got to get paid.
Speaker: You live in New York city for God's sakes.
Speaker: I can't even imagine your rent.
Speaker: Let's not go down that Alice in Wonderland path.
Speaker: I do think that insecurity, I do think, goes across the board even more so in the funeral business.
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
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
Speaker: you know, robbing me and I've just lost my family.
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?
Speaker: It can actually, as a funeral person, it can wrench your heart out.
Speaker: If a lot of the funeral people I know, if they could, they would give all their services for free.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Most of them.
Speaker: Yeah.
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?
Speaker: Could I go into a funeral home tomorrow?
Speaker: It takes a lot.
Speaker: It takes a lot of courage.
Speaker: It's definitely this calling business.
Speaker: I do think some people are called for it.
Speaker: Other people are not.
Speaker: But I do think it takes a certain person.
Speaker: Like I firmly believe if you are born into hospitality, it's in you.
Speaker: It is for some people.
Speaker: It is not for other people.
Speaker: And I think the funeral business is very much like that.
Speaker: But people have to remember they have got to keep the lights on.
Speaker: They have got to keep their staff trained and paid and therefore well fed.
Speaker: And there are so many other aspects that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, he doesn't get attacked for the pricing that he's doing or I'm just picking random people.
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because they're as big as they are in the funeral sector.
Speaker: All of a sudden,
Speaker: They must be monsters, absolute monsters.
Speaker: They're making money off people dying.
Speaker: I hate to break it to you.
Speaker: People are going to die anyway.
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.
Speaker: We have been inundated with social media and applause and let's help all of the frontline workers.
Speaker: And I am not saying to take anything away from that.
Speaker: Absolutely, those people put their lives on the line daily.
Speaker: It still is horrendous, especially in New York, but all over the world.
Speaker: But not once did people throw a soft applause, anything, to the, what I call,
Speaker: final, like your final line worker.
Speaker: Like what about those people?
Speaker: If the funeral industry had a, where they were so heartless, they could have just said, nothing to do with us.
Speaker: They could have stood back and just let the bodies pile up and pile up and pile up.
Speaker: I know funeral directors that were working 24 hours a day.
Speaker: listening to calls from families, they just didn't know what to do with the body.
Speaker: And hospitals were so inundated that they couldn't hold on to them.
Speaker: And so what were going to happen to all of these people?
Speaker: But nobody thinks, and even still, during COVID-19, the funeral industry still got a bad rap.
Speaker: Oh my God, bodies are out in freezing units, in lorries, out on the side of the road, and this and that.
Speaker: And it's just, you can't win.
Speaker: A place just down the street from you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Putting the bodies in unrefrigerated.
Speaker: The dumbest thing I ever heard and it's horrific, but I don't know his side of the story.
Speaker: Did he just do what he had to do to, you know, the man's probably going to lose his license over that.
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.
Speaker: Let's take New York City, for example.
Speaker: The capacity of the city is the five boroughs is 88 bodies a day.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: Cremation, 88 bodies a day.
Speaker: And that's not enough pre-COVID.
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.
Speaker: The virus doesn't live in the body forever.
Speaker: Anyone knows infectious disease, they know that the body has to be alive for something like that.
Speaker: It can't survive in a dead body.
Speaker: But between the time that it dies and the time you get that body, it could still be communicable.
Speaker: Even embalmed, it can still be communicable.
Speaker: We say we use universal precautions.
Speaker: So if we truly did, we wouldn't have to worry, but look at what the problems we didn't have masks.
Speaker: We didn't have gloves.
Speaker: We didn't have coveralls, head shields.
Speaker: I mean, we were freaking out as a profession.
Speaker: Well, if we were doing what we were supposed to do, we wouldn't have had that, you know?
Speaker: So the city itself in the politics.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In New York, you cannot own a crematory unless you are a cemetery or that you are grandfathered.
Speaker: But the grandfathering, those units are so old that they shouldn't be operating.
Speaker: But sorry, guys.
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.
Speaker: And it goes back to cemetery versus funerals.
Speaker: And it's just silly.
Speaker: We're all trying to do the same thing.
Speaker: Turn a dead body into a living memory.
Speaker: Whether you're scrubbing the toilets at the funeral home or embalming or digging the grave with tobacco or driving the hearse, whatever.
Speaker: We all do the same thing.
Speaker: I'm just rambling now.
Speaker: Getting on my high horse.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, absolutely, Larry.
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.
Speaker: We never even thought of that.
Speaker: And I said, of course you didn't.
Speaker: And it's not that I was doing the shout out to be like, ooh, funeral people, you know, feel sorry for us.
Speaker: It's not that.
Speaker: To me, it just was so clear.
Speaker: It showed that.
Speaker: how the media completely zone in on negative, negative, negative, negative.
Speaker: You didn't see massive amounts of media attention on how hospitals ran out of equipment.
Speaker: Only if it was running out of equipment in a, okay, but let's get it, get some equipment in.
Speaker: And it was a positively spun story.
Speaker: So it's just fascinating for me how it's,
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
Speaker: It's sad.
Speaker: And here's the thing.
Speaker: It's how to fix it.
Speaker: You know, it's so much damage has been done.
Speaker: And definitely that Jessica Mitford book, while she had some very valid points kicked off.
Speaker: I mean, that was the 1960s.
Speaker: So we're 60 years on from that and we're still reeling from it.
Speaker: I do think regulation across the board will definitely help.
Speaker: But then to be honest, Larry, as well, I look at my little country of Ireland and there's practically no regulation.
Speaker: We have an NFDA style.
Speaker: You know, we have our own little funeral directors association.
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.
Speaker: Politics ruin everything.
Speaker: They do.
Speaker: It really grates on my nerves.
Speaker: So while we've no regulation in Ireland, mostly, they're still trekking along fine.
Speaker: I could go home in the morning and set up my own funeral home and flourish.
Speaker: You could embalm, you could do all of it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And what do I think that's necessarily right?
Speaker: I don't.
Speaker: But I do think that barrier to entry does allow people who actually want to get on, allow them to get on.
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,
Speaker: They can squash you.
Speaker: They can get rid.
Speaker: They can keep the voice down.
Speaker: And it's just really unfair and not right at all.
Speaker: People think we've gone beyond the good old boys club.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Not even close.
Speaker: The good old boys don't look like old fat bald guys anymore.
Speaker: Good old boys can be women.
Speaker: Good old boys can be young millennials, trust fund babies.
Speaker: Any group can, and this is politics, right?
Speaker: Any group can affect people's livelihoods.
Speaker: I mean, I think of social media and Facebook particularly.
Speaker: Just the fact that I know they can track everything I do online and target ads.
Speaker: Who's to say they're not doing nefarious things with that information?
Speaker: Yeah, that is crazy.
Speaker: Yeah, that whole online thing, I don't think, I think I'll stick to my Disney Plus channel.
Speaker: I'm not going to watch that.
Speaker: Yeah, I won't watch that movie.
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 Iowa.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I don't know that they did it.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But in the rural areas, you know,
Speaker: The home funeral is still something very popular in Ireland, as you know.
Speaker: And we think it's just such a, oh, my God, you can't bring the body home.
Speaker: Well, why not?
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: You know, there are regulations here that hamper that in a lot of areas.
Speaker: So for me, regulations are a 50-50 thing.
Speaker: Thank you so much for listening to the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: It has been something I've been working on and muddling with for over two years now.
Speaker: So I appreciate your time to listen in.
Speaker: Every episode will have a new guest we hope you will find interesting as they tell their own story.
Speaker: So stay tuned for the next episode or have a look through the Glam Reaper episode collection.
Speaker: Find your nugget of gold as we talk all things life, love and loss with a dash from the funeral world.
Speaker: Until next time.
