Transcript From Our Video Interview with Matt Van Drimmelen at Full-Circle Aftercare.
Heather:
Hi everyone. And thanks for checking in with us at Funeral Innovations, Trends, Tips, and Technology, where we chat with leaders in the profession to discuss marketing trends, business tips, and technology innovation. Plus, we talk about how digital marketing helps you better serve your families. I’m Heather Mierzejewski. I am the Marketing Director here at Funeral Innovations.
Alex:
Hi, I’m Alex McCracken. I’m the VP of Sales here at Funeral Innovations.
Heather:
And today we have with us Matt Van Drimmelen. He is the president and owner of Full-Circle Aftercare. Thanks so much for joining us.
Matt:
Thanks, Heather. Thanks, Alex. Nice to be here.
Heather:
Yeah. So will you just jump in, tell us a little bit about your business, where you’re located, what you guys do.
Matt:
Sure. Yeah. So we are located in Utah, just north of Salt Lake. We have been around for about seven years. I’ve owned the company for four and, and basically we have kind of changed the name of what aftercare is.
A lot of aftercare has either been some kind of a follow-up system or some kind of a pre-need sales lead. And our aftercare approach is really looking at what the family needs and what they’re going through and trying to help them walk through those next steps. So we are a concierge service where rather than hand the family, a checklist of things to do or give them a binder of, of the next steps we get on the phone with the family and help them apply for benefits, help them close the accounts, help them just do all the little things that need to be done after they lost a loved one that can be really emotionally taxing and difficult for them to walk through. We will do that for them. So we take a process that takes most families about 18 to 24 months to get completed. And on average, we’re done in one to two days with them working with us directly.
Alex:
And how long have you been serving in this profession and you know, what all roles have you played beyond owner of full service, Full-Circle Aftercare?
Matt:
So, yeah, I actually came from another profession. I was in civil engineering and worked in a government role where we would do right away work. And I just did not like working with government and I wanted to do more people oriented. So I had a friend who owned a pre-need company and he was telling me about this need, that there’s really no one to help families walk through these next steps. And just crazy statistics, like 82% of widows never received their full social security benefits, and there’s just no good service to help these families through that. And I said, I want to do so. I totally changed careers and came Melbourne about seven years ago.
Alex:
Well, I’m curious of what parts of civil engineering do you feel like has translated over to the death care profession?
Matt:
None. Honestly it just, it hasn’t, well, you know, my role in the engineering firm is when they would build rail lines or road widening, we would go in and help them negotiate for this property. And the only thing I really learned there is when you treat people like people, rather than numbers, rather than obstacle, you can just get so much more done. And and so just that love of really working with people and overcoming problems and overcoming what they have to deal with was the part of the job, that job that I loved. And that’s what I wanted to keep.
Heather:
Yeah. Terrific answer. And so you talked a little bit about that process that you go through with families. Can you give a little more detail on what sort of things you’re really helping the families take care of?
Matt:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think a good example of why our service is helpful and what we take care of is it’s kind of, I have a story about that. I hired an employee about a year ago and, and during the interview process, I was explaining what we do. And he goes, I know exactly what you mean. He said I had a friend, he was younger and he said, I had a friend who overdosed on drugs. And it was tragic. I went over to his house because I realized this kid’s room was a mess and I didn’t want his mom coming in and having to clean out everything. So he was over there cleaning out the room as a service. And the mom said this,”my son’s phone has been ringing off the hook. I don’t want to answer. I just want to turn it off. Because I don’t know if one of the people calling is the person who sold him those drugs.” So he’s in the room cleaning and he hears her get on the phone with Verizon wireless and she’s on hold for about 30, 40 minutes before she gets a live person. She gets on there and she says, “my son died. I need to turn off the cell phone.” Now the other end, “Oh, I am so sorry. I’m not the right person to help you. Please let me transfer you to someone else who can help you.” So she waits on hold again. The next person comes on. She explains “my son died. I need help to close out this account.” “Oh, you know what, that my condolences, I am so sorry, please. You know, actually we need to go to this department to handle this.”
And anyway, she got transferred around, I think, or four times at the end of an hour and a half, she still hadn’t had the phone turned off and she hangs up the phone and she is just an emotional wreck. And that’s the process families have to go through, you know, if you think about our lives, all the things we touch, our bank accounts or credit cards or cell phones, our property, you know, there’s so many people that are sending us information or we’re paying for every single one of those things need to be addressed after someone dies from social media accounts to government benefits, whatever it is, needs to be addressed. In fact let me grab this.
There’s a funeral home conglomerate that sells this to families, and this is kind of a pretty good comprehensive checklist of all the different things that need to be done. After the loss of a loved one. And, you know, I don’t want to go through a four inch binder myself and neither does any grieving family. And so what happens is families are putting this off. They’re not doing it or they’re not getting it done. So really anything that needs to be done, we’re going to either do for them, give them direction on, educate them on, or kind of walk them through that process.
Alex:
In that example of this Verizon you know, process, is it something that Full-Circle Aftercare would have the right person on the phone to coordinate that? Or would they just handle that altogether?
Matt:
Yeah, so we could, depending on the situation, a lot of families want to stick on the phone with us, but they don’t want to do any of the talking. And so just through conference call, there’ll be on they’ll listen, or sometimes even a zoom call. They can hear what’s going on, but they don’t have to do any of the speaking because we’re dealing with such a high volume of families. We know the right phone number and the right person and the right department to talk to at Verizon wireless or at this pension company or this credit card company. So we, we dial directly, we get right in. And, and then we’ll do the talking handy to report the staff. We need to turn off this account. I know we need to fill out this form. You know, we know that process and we can just help that family get through that much, quickly, much more quickly and easy.
Heather:
That’s great. It really saves them both time, but also that emotional labor. It must just be so painful to try to take care of those details. Do you work directly with funeral homes who then provide the service or directly with families and how many do you work with?
Matt:
So, yeah, we were, we white label our service under the funeral home name. So, so that way, the, the credit of what we do goes back to the funeral home. We found that most of the funeral homes we work with are more of the smaller, independent funeral homes who have probably been doing some level of this for years, you know their neighbor, their friend, or someone from the community is coming in and asking them these questions. But, but by having our team go and do this, they make sure that everyone gets covered because sometimes it’s the non squeaky wheel that needs the grease, right. It’s someone who’s suffering in silence and having us reach out the funeral home has, has has the peace of mind to know that every single family is getting called and all, every single family is getting this taken care of while they can focus on their business.
So right now we are white labeled under I think 68 funeral homes. Most of them have several locations, so I don’t have all the locations that we work with. We’re in 16 States across the country, but we’ve helped families in every state because sometimes the next of kin is in a completely different area from where that funeral home is located. But yeah, every time we talked to the family, we would represent that funeral home. You know, we’re this such-and-such funeral homes, aftercare department, and we’re here to help you with those next steps.
Alex:
Gotcha. Yeah, that’s really interesting. Is there like a type of, or is there a funeral home size that you work with number of calls?
Matt:
I think our smallest funeral home does about 35 calls a year and our largest funeral home does about 950 calls a year. So any size funeral home we can work with and, and we’ll have a state specialist, those are the, those are the people who work with these families. They’ll just be assigned to that funeral home. And so it’ll be kind of a consistent person calling all the time representing that funeral home and whatever the funeral home needs are.
Alex:
And I’m curious, you know, obviously when you implement an aftercare program for a funeral home, it’s very advantageous to the families and they’re getting all sorts of stuff. Are there any kind of unexpected results that funeral homes get after implementing an aftercare program that maybe they weren’t wouldn’t have been aware of until they actually implemented that?
Matt:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think every funeral home owner knows that they should do some type of aftercare, some type of reach out. And then the question is what’s going to benefit the funeral home the most. So I feel like the benefits that we give back to the funeral home are really threefold. Well, fourfold first is we’re a big differentiator in the service that they’re providing versus what their competition. The second is, it’s someone personally reaching out, you know, whether it’s cards or texts or whatever it is necessarily to reach out to the family afterwards. But having that personal phone call just feels like it goes a little extra. The next area is we get a lot of feedback from that family because we’re talking to them sometimes for weeks after that service. So we’re getting feedback on what their experience was like at the funeral home.
And it’s a way that’s not really a survey because surveys are meant to be you know, very numerical like four out of five stars, but really what does four out of five star experience mean as a business owner? If a family gives you that, what does that really mean? And what we try to do is, as we’re talking to the family, we’re getting these things done a lot of times we’re waiting on hold. And we just kind of talked to him like what really went well and how can we improve our service? And it’s more of a conversation. And then we capture that conversation. We give that conversation back to the funeral home owner so that they can get more of a feel of people’s attitude and feeling of really what stood out and what made a difference and what things maybe they’re doing that aren’t that important.
We’ve been able to be very successful at getting Google reviews from these families which has been a challenge, I think for funeral homes to get. And then the last area is funeral homes all want to sell pre-need to, to these at-need families, because they’ve just been through this experience. They know they need that help, but it’s kind of awkward approaching them on that because it’s like, Oh, we just got done with this funeral. Now let’s plan yours, you know, and it feels very salesy. So a lot of funeral homes shy away from that. We’ve been able to bridge that gap where as we’re talking through our processes, eventually we’d wrap up all the deceased’s affairs. And then we go to the survivor and say, let’s talk about protecting you, let’s put some fraud protection on you and your surviving and the deceased let’s talk about wills and trusts.
We’re kind of educating them and helping them get organized their own affairs. It’s a perfect opportunity for us to talk about pre-meet we get about 70% of the families that we talked to who say they want more information. And then we would just refer that back to whoever sewing pre-need at the funeral home. And that conversation has turned to them calling and saying, “Hey, I have this product. I want to sell you” to them calling and saying, “Hey, Kathy mentioned that you had some questions. How can I help you?” And so I know one funeral home in particular, they were selling about 250,000. It was a small funeral home. They’re selling about 250,000 a year in pre-need. And after our program got implemented they were just shy of 600,000 last year. So it was a great transition. They were really able to add that. I think that helped both on the differentiation side, they were able to get more pre-need leads people signing up for pre-need with their funeral home because they had our service compared to their competition. And then the pre-need leads that we sent in to help them as well.
Heather:
Yeah, that’s great. So I’m wondering about how the pandemic has affected you guys and what you do and, and your funeral home clients to what has changed for you guys.
Matt:
So it’s actually been, been great for our funeral home clients because families that before needed to go in person to a lot of, you know, different places haven’t been able to, and so navigating things through the phone and electronically has been very difficult, especially for their older clients and having our system in place just to take care of it has been like a godsend for these families. For our end, it’s complicated the process a little bit, because some of the things that were much easier for us to do in the past have been, become much more difficult. So an example of that is we were helping a new widow up in Alaska and she had she had fallen and broken her hip. She was the main caretaker for her husband, right when COVID hit. So he couldn’t come see here.
And there was really no one to take care of him. And he ended up passing away short time later, cause she was the primary caretaker for him. They weren’t able to have a funeral. They weren’t able to do really any of the things that they wanted to do. And during this process her, the death report actually went out that she was the one who passed away rather than him. And so social security got that information when we call social security to make sure she got her spousal benefits, they realized that they had it wrong, but there was no mechanism for them to fix it at that point because she would have needed to go in, in person to get that fixed. So now she had lost all of his benefits and all of her benefits, which was her only source of income. And we’re talking to social security and we’re like, “how can we fix that?”
And they’re like, “we can’t until COVID is over.” And she’s like, “what am I supposed to do?” And so just presented this very unique challenge for her, what is she going to do next? So I have an amazing staff out here and like they’re pit bulls. Like when, when there’s a problem, they’re not going to let go until that problem is resolved. So we kept on just going higher and higher in the ranks. And we finally got to the top of social security and they just told us no nothing could be done. So we started calling the Alaska and senators and congressmen and telling them what problem this was. So we’re calling Washington DC. We finally get a hold of one of their congressmen. They call social security. I got a call from social security saying, how can I fix this situation? We explained it, we got everything wrapped up and got her benefits started right away. And so like, that’s a great story. There’s some, there’s, there’s a lot of things that have made things more difficult for families. And I think the funeral homes and the families have appreciated that we’re able to navigate these difficulties that COVID has created.
Alex:
I might have to have you call my Senator for a couple of things on my to-do list too.
Matt:
Whatever it takes,
Alex:
I’ll circle back on that. So I’m curious of, you know, obviously COVID has really had to change how you’ve addressed aftercare with these families. What do you see in the, in the distant horizon is the future of aftercare? Like what things do you think your, your families are gonna need or ways that you’re going to have to adjust your business or other ways that you can help the funeral homes with this?
Matt:
Yeah. So I think families are expecting more of a service, you know, I think the funeral industry is becoming more commoditized, right? We see a lot of online. You see a lot of things like that. And so, so the way to differentiate is really through that next level of service. And we are already seeing a transition where in the past families were very private about these things where they were saying, “no, I’ll do that part on my myself, if you’ll just help me with these things.” But families are now expecting more and more service. You know, we’re getting our food delivered, we’re getting people coming and doing things like services, the key. And that’s what differentiates, that’s what brings value, not so much like ceremonies and that, that used to bring more service or really nice facilities and things like that. So I know from our end, we’re now transitioning to see family saying, “well, can you also take care of this? Can you also take care of this? Can you also take care of this?” And so we are trying to be more efficient on our end so that we have enough time and to help every family with everything that they’re requiring of us and still keep our costs as low as possible.
Alex:
Do you see any opportunity for aftercare to be more looked at in a pre-need situation? So obviously there’s things that you need to do after the death of somebody, but if there is a debt that’s imminent, or do you see ways for you to help families there in the future with maybe a state planning or just getting, you know, their affairs in order?
Matt:
Absolutely. and you know, like an ounce of prevention, pound of cure, right? Like if families can do just a little bit to set their state up right in the, on the front end, it makes a difference on the back end. So what we started launching our free content with a lot of our funeral home pound partners. So one of our funeral home partners down in Austin, Texas has been doing a series of webinars to the general public, educating them on what needs to happen. So they’ve had me, they’ve had the state attorneys come on and that free content out to the public really shows them as the expert of helping families. And we’ve had several of those families contact us with kind of clarifying questions and more information, which we’re then turning back out to the public saying, Hey, it sounds like a lot of people are having questions about these things. Let me clarify, do some videos. And our funeral home partners that are doing that are seeing a huge difference in what the community, their perception in the community saying, you know, “this funeral home cares about me. They care about more than just getting my money. They care about taking care of me and my family.” And it, it really makes a difference.
Heather:
So it’s sharing that useful content with your community ahead of time that really helps build their business and make them the go-to people in the community.
Matt:
Absolutely. And yeah, everything we do, we share openly with our clients, with families. It’s what we do is not rocket science. It’s, you know, it’s the fact that it’s emotionally difficult for families to do. And that’s why I don’t mind sharing content. I want them to have as much direction as possible, whether or not they use our service. But, but I also want, if they need some help to do it personally, we can take it off their plate.
Heather:
So this show, we talk about technology a good bit. We are a technology company in some sense. How do you see technology impacting end of life decisions or the end of life process now and going forward?
Matt:
Hmm. You know, it’s been interesting. I think the last nine months have totally changed people’s perceptive perception of technology. I think the number one pushback we had before COVID hit was families that wanted to meet in person rather than over the phone or via Zoom. And now everyone’s grateful that we’d meet over the phone or into, or, and now things are transitioning even as the younger generations come, people want to communicate back and forth with text or with messenger. I mean, all sorts of different kinds of apps and ways to send back and forth. It makes things easier for them. And so we’re needing to adapt to communicate in the language that they feel more comfortable in. Right. So we have, we have a state specialist who speak Chinese and Spanish and Portuguese and different languages, but we also need to transition not just to their native language, but the native language of technology is changing. And we need to be speaking in that language that, that makes sense to them.
Alex:
Wow. That’s that’s very profound. It’s something I think a lot of people overlook is like just some of the, you know, the slang and cliche of technology that people use as well.
Matt:
Yeah, absolutely.
Alex:
So you know, last question for you here, man. I’m curious of your time here in this profession what do you feel like your biggest lesson you’ve learned is.
Matt:
Think, I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned is “doing what’s right for people always ends up being what’s right for business.” You know two examples of that are when we started out one of our mission statements is we believe that women who choose to stay home with kids or can’t work full time. Oftentimes they get penalized in the workforce because they maybe don’t have the same experience or they haven’t, they can’t work full-time or they, they have been out of the workforce for several years. So I personally know several women who have chosen to be stay at home moms and they go to reenter the workforce. And honestly they could run a fortune 500 company, but they’re working at dollar tree, you know, because they don’t have any experience. So our entire staff are, are women who have at one time or another either had to work part-time or, or stay at home moms or reentering the workforce.
And that was something that was, we decided to pay them a professional wage and give them a completely flexible schedule when they want to work is when they want to work. And that felt very altruistic on our part, like we’re doing what’s best for them is the best business decision I ever made because it, they are caretakers that are, they’re smart, they’re intelligent. A lot of whom are former. You know, we used to work at law firms or social workers or nurses, but they just been out of the game a little bit and their caretakers they’re organized. They know how to do things and families feel that they really, really care about them and they go that next level. And I think our new clients are surprised and shocked about what impact these women have on these families. So, you know, our effort to do what was right for them ended up being one of the greatest assets of our company. And, you know, I think same thing as these funeral homes, they think of what’s right for our families and how can we best serve our families when you get it into that perspective doing what’s right. Always ends up growing their business.
Alex:
Yeah, that’s great. Well, yeah, it’s really awesome to see how you’re serving families, your employees, and the funeral homes that you work with. And we’re really excited to see the growth of Full-Circle Aftercare as you progress in this profession and hope for your continued success. And so we really want to thank you for attending this episode Trends, Tips, and Technology. Really appreciate your time today, Matt.
Matt:
I appreciate it. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, Heather.
Heather:
Thank you so much.
Alex:
And for those of you listening out there, you can find all of our other interviews at youtube.com/funeral innovations or on our blog page of our website. We appreciate you watching. If you have other certain topics that you would like to hear from, or other people in our profession that you would like to have on the show, please let us know. You can either go to our website www.funeralinnovations.com or feel free to shoot me an email at alex@funeralinnovations.com. We appreciate you attending, take care.
