By Joey Haas
Transcription: Interview with Jodi Clock from Clock Timeless Pets
Heather:
Alright, welcome. And thanks for joining us at Funeral Innovations. In these videos, we chat with industry leaders to discuss marketing trends and technology innovation and discuss how digital marketing helps you better serve your families. I’m Heather, the Director of Marketing at Funeral Innovations.
Joey:
And I’m Joey, I’m the Marketing and Design Coordinator.
Heather:
And today our guest is Jodi Clock from Clock Timeless Pets to talk about the pet services that she offers. Jodi, we’re so glad you could join us today.
Jodi:
Hey, thanks for putting up with me this afternoon. Let’s have some fun!
Heather:
Indeed. So how about if you start by just telling us a little bit about who you are and about Clock Timeless Pets, and maybe kind how that got started and the rest of your business?
Jodi:
Oh boy. Well, we don’t have enough time for that. So I’ll try to cut to the chase. So essentially Clock Timeless Pets was founded because our funeral home Clock Funeral Home in Muskegon, Michigan, we had a therapy dog and the therapy dog, his name was Max. He died and none of us were ready for that. And he was kind of a little celebrity. We had ran all of our ads based all of our branding and we became, you know, we were in that forefront of funeral homes actually bringing pets into the workplace. So people would say, no, I want to go to the place with the dog, you know, and he was that mascot. And so when he died, we’re like, ooh, you know, how do we put the word out there? What do we do? And so since he was a community dog, we decided to have a community service and we invited leashed pets into the building. And I just thought it would probably be our staff they’re humoring me and a few of my crazy pet friends. And there was well over a hundred people that came and that is how it got started. Long story, very short. And the interesting thing about it was, is I didn’t have any money. My husband thought I was still, well, I am a little crazy, but he thought I was really out there at the time because this is before people talked about it. And so I did it on a shoestring. I started out outsourcing. I had a friend who lived in a different county, a couple hours away. And so he kind of had put his toe into this and he was trying it in Kalamazoo County and we live in Muskegon County and I will give a shout out. His name was Scott Betzler the Betzler Funeral Home. They’re very proactive and on top of things. And so he was kind of exploring the same options. And so he allowed me to outsource my pets to him. And so I just went on the sole premise of I’m going business to consumer or business to pet family. And I, I affectionately say my little hobby of a pet death care business became a real business.
Joey:
That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s great. And so then could you kind of share about how the pandemic has impacted Clock Timeless Pets, and you know, if things are getting back to normal where you are and how it’s impacted your business,
Jodi:
There’s nothing normal about this pandemic either on the human side or the pet side. What I will say is if anything, it has not impacted it on the pet side. We have been crazy, crazy busy during this whole thing. I mean, there really isn’t a day that doesn’t go by that are because everything is located through our funeral home. So we’re not a standalone. So our funeral home, even over this last weekend, we had three emergency pet death calls. And you know, the thing, that’s a little nice about this compared to the human side during the pandemic. A lot of times people are dying alone and it’s very sad and they’re at hospice and maybe the hospice people will let one or two family members in, unless that person is at home when people come into their home, but none of these pets have died alone. You know, so they were there with their family. So you know, it’s sad that they die, but these pets were not alone. Unlike humans who are dying alone.
Heather:
Yeah. That’s a really good distinction to make. And I think it just drives home both how important pets are to us. And also just the huge human toll that this pandemic is taking on the grief process. So that’s kind of a big deal.
Jodi:
Then the other thing I want to take note on is a lot of people, the pets are their family. I mean, that’s it, that’s their little buddy. That’s who they hang out with. And since they’ve been on lockdown and I happen to live in the state of Michigan. So let’s just say, legitimately today is the first day restaurants are starting to open. I mean, here, as you can see hairdressing salons, look at my nails, nothing’s done those, those haven’t been opened since March 13th. So these little guys that’s been their company, the heart and the soul of what some of these people are doing. So the grief that they’re experiencing is a little more than just typical grief because people haven’t been able to go anywhere.
Heather:
So you talked a little bit about what made you decide to open the pet portion of your business. Could you talk a little bit about what you’ve learned since you started or recommendations you might make to people who are interested in doing the same? How do they know the time’s right. That sort of thing?
Jodi:
Well, the time is right as if you want to roll up your sleeves and walk your talk because if there’s a mistake to make, I’ve made the mistake and to create I’ve created it. So I mean, you name it, but the biggest thing is it’s not easy. It’s definitely not inexpensive to get into having been on well, and I still am in the human side, it seems to be a little more rewarding because when the pet parents come to you, there’s no family squabbles. There’s, there’s none of that. It’s just pure, pure love. There’s no money. Now. The money issues are very small. So all of the things that go grand scale with humans, it’s, there’s, there’s there just seems to be more gratitude. And I don’t mean to say that human families are not gratitude or they’re not grateful, I guess is the better way to say it. It just seems to be unconditional buddy. Nobody’s been judging them. So, you know, some of the mistakes to avoid, if you think you’re going to be overnight and overnight success, that’s just simply not going to happen. I was, I was the first pet loss and at that point in time, I had established a separate building. So there was a separate entrance, a separate everything in Muskegon County. And I couldn’t get the veterinarians to talk to me for anything. You know, I just thought it’d be easy. I’d open up the doors. You know, I’m, I’m fun. I’m a crazy pet parent. I’m heavy into the rescue scene. I, I volunteer, you know, that that just didn’t happen. So it’s not a build it and it will come. There’s a lot of hard work and the hard work actually comes twofold. You really need to figure out where you want to go because there’s two different value propositions. The first value proposition would be professional, you know, business to consumer or pet parent. So that’s, you know, the first one, so your marketing and your key messaging would go directly to those pet parents. The second one is to the end of life professional, whether that’s an in-home euthanasia, a traveling vet, there’s many fabulous ones out there, or a wonderful vet clinic partners that are out there. But up until folks like myself came along, they dealt with just strictly that B2B vendor. And so they didn’t talk about grief. They didn’t talk about continuing education credits. They didn’t talk about the presentation of the packaging. When that little guy goes back to their parents, when they’re returned, they didn’t talk about the keepsakes, the little paw print charms of the dogs or the pussycats. And more importantly, they didn’t talk about grief. You know, so our vet clinic friends they did a good thing. They made the deceased pet go away, right? So that’s all they knew what to do. They didn’t know what to do with all of that other stuff that goes along with it. And then they didn’t know how to retain their clients because a lot of vets their biggest issue with attrition or churn is somebody doesn’t want to go back to a place where they euthanize their pet. So we will be, you know, people like myself, we are able to partner with vet clinics and let them do what they do best. And then when it comes to that end of life experience, kind of let them tell our story or give them the tools or the materials. So our story can be shared. So in tandem, it’s a good end of life experience. So that’s, you know, that’s the very long putt and hard route. The easier one is the business to consumer, but in a town like Muskegon, Michigan, you’re barely going to break even because it’s just sheer volume. I mean, if you’re in Detroit or Chicago in Arbor, you know, a big city, there’s a lot of, lot of pet parents out there to talk to. But when you get to the smaller places, you gotta find that balance. And so that’s why we brought it into the funeral home and it circled all the way back. But that’s the why, because if I had to go out and I had to buy the rolling stock, I had to pay a full time. Employee had to pay the answering service, my phone, my gas, all of the urns you know, the different things that go with it. The packaging you’re in the red before you say hello, and it takes a long time to get there. But through the funeral home, I already had the cars. I already had the staff. We already had everything in play except for training. So then the other tools we had to get separate refrigeration or cold storage obviously fast forward, I ended up buying my own retort and that came pretty quickly into it because I was busy. But so the money that I had to go directly to the, the heavy lifting.
Heather:
Can you say, explain real briefly what services you offer pet parents?
Jodi:
Well, we offer an are pretty simple. We just do a straightforward, private cremation. We don’t, we don’t do communal. So one pet is in the machine at one time. So we always do, you know, the packaging. We always have a clay paw print of, for clipping. And we always make a little Christmas ornament, was that for clipping in it as well. And then we’ve got their important documents and those types of things. We also have a separate room where they can reflect they can buy merchandise, you know, they don’t need to do it then. And then we also have the grief and I want to touch on the grief aspect if, if you’re certified in grief and or pet loss and grief companioning, the other way to get your name on the map is to Mark yourself right down to your local hospices, because if you’re a funeral home like ours we try to give folks that tangible stuff. And we took aftercare. I’m going to say on the grief side, not on the, not on the next step sides, but on that grief side, our hospice, they do an amazing job. So why not let them be good at what they’re best at? So we partnered with them. I went down and I had a conversation with them about pet loss and pet grief wasn’t even on their radar. So they actually take, gave me a room and they put our name on it and it was all co-branded. And in all of their materials that went out to all of their families, our name got out on it. So my marketing literally was on a shoestring by just partnering with the right people and telling your story over and over in the different circles.
Joey:
Great. And do you think you could talk a little bit more about how your marketing kind of integrates between, like how you distinguish your pet services from your human services, through your marketing and what that looks like?
Jodi:
Well, it’s been an evolution. You know, it was interesting when we started this out, I think my husband wanted to separate himself as far away from it as he could. And you know, there was Clock Funeral, home and Clock Timeless Pets that we were, we would always say a sister company and, you know, our logo and our branding colors were kind of the same. And we always talked about the value, you know, in our websites or in our pictures, we started to be that pet friendly funeral home again. So again, when people would come into our facility to make, at-need arrangements, there was a separate pet room. So they would see that. So, you know, just by the, the things that are around the funeral home itself would lead to those next questions. You know, the positioning of the urns would have one area, well, actually one full room dedicated to pet loss. So there’s a big wall of I don’t want to say just pet urns, but keepsakes. And just anything you can imagine, you know, we’ve got lots of pictures of pets on the wall. It’s kind of a happy dead space if you will. I mean, people go in there and they’re like, ooh, I want that. And there may have died years ago, but they didn’t know they could get that stuff. And that’s a very open space. So pre-COVID we have a reception facility off of that side. So people would be going through the reception and, you know, having their cake or punching cookies and then walk through and then see it, or that city would get curious and take a walk. And it became very easy that way, you know, it’s just kind of subtle it’s it’s in your face without being in your face. And then we started to change our logo and we’ve got one that’s called and we’re migrating a hundred percent that way. It’s Clock Family Services. So now we can take care of your entire family. So it’s our regular logo, but then we’ve got a picture of a Shelties our mascot. So we’ve got a picture of a Sheltie in there as well. So it just kind of subtly reminds people. So then let’s fast forward to pre-COVID when we met with families after each service on the transitional care side I think I touched on saying that we want to give them the action plans and the next steps of what to do versus telling them how to grieve. And so part of that action plan is if there is a pet in that home, who’s going to take care of that pet. So we’ve got one little section dedicated to, you know, if the husband’s going to take care of the pet, that’s great. But what happens when that spouse dies? Where’s that pet gonna go? So, you know, we talk about pet trusts for pet end of life. We give them information on Clock Timeless Pets, and more importantly, when they go to their trusted advisors at the end of life, you know, the elder care attorneys or the estate attorneys, we want them to talk about a plan for their pet, because if I had a dollar for every elder care attorney who said, yeah, they didn’t leave any money, but there’s cats in the house. Can you go get them? Or what can you do? I’m like, well, I can go get him, but we need to have a plan. And if they’re going to take these, these little kiddies to a no kill shelter, somebody is going to have to donate funds to that shelter. So those are the types of conversations that I not only have with Mmm. The next of kin, but we have with the professionals in the community, and it’s not just me, that’s the core belief of our whole care team. And so we kind of try to take care of that from beginning, threading it through till the end.
Heather:
That makes sense. You talked about this a little bit already, but what, well, first of all, when did that start? What year, how long ago was that?
Jodi:
Believe it or not, it’s going on year 15.
Heather:
Wow. That’s great.
Jodi:
And you know, the first, the first two years, we were just more of a marketing company and, you know, I can remember it being a really good year cause we had 30 pets. And now in our little area we cremate a thousand pets and you know, let’s put that in perspective. Our human side does about 400 at need services.
Heather:
Yes. You’re serving a lot of people in your community.
Jodi:
So I want to touch back on something about marketing. We are now seeing Mmm, the loyalty change, if you will, because we took good care of their dog, good care of their cat, you name it. We’ve had it. Because we’ve taken good care of their pet. A couple of things happen. We get multiple pets because you know, most people have more than one pet. Alright. So that’s where that goes. But then when that human dies or someone within their family, we have top of mind awareness. And so they’ll reach out
Heather:
And trust. You’ve built trust there.
Jodi:
Yes we do. We have a solid relationship there.
Heather:
So the question I kind of had was what has been the response from your community? And it sounds like it was slow to begin with, but how do people react that you offer this service now?
Jodi:
Well, I’m going to push back on that just a little bit. The community, they accepted what I did right away. And so did the pet businesses. There was a really strong pet community if you will, between the shelters and the groomers and all of that. And they kind of helped me launch, you know, just like you have that BNI networking type of thing. We kind of did our own little pet networking thing where the resistance came was from the vet clinics. They, well, aye, aye. I impacted their profit margin. And you know, if you, you look at this to its core and this isn’t right, this isn’t wrong. This is when I started how I jumped in and how I, how I viewed it. My approach was, you know, Heather, let’s just say something happened to a family member. And so you’re taking your brother or your sister to the ER and they go into the ER and they arrest and that doctor comes out and they say, gosh, there I am. I’m really sorry. But you know, I’ve got a good business partner who I work with and they can go ahead and cremate your sister and they can bring her back next Tuesday and you can just pick her up. Would that be okay? And I’ll just add it on my bill. Right. But that’s what was happening. Right. There were no things like, were you able to have a final farewell? Did you want to go and see the crematory? You know, you don’t have to be present for the cremation, but do you want to, do you want to go see what’s there? You know, they would say all of that was just swept under the carpet. So I looked at it as, you know, why don’t you offer them a choice if they want your good friends and your trusted advisor or business partner to take care of their animals. That’s great. But also let them know there’s something else out there. And so I was, and I still am. I’m very careful because that’s a fine line. The vets do a great job. But you know what we do too. We do too. So together, we should be able to, you know, work to the greater of the common good. And that’s been my approach and the community, however they want to be served.
Heather:
Correct. You know, just to put the choices out there, give the information and let people make informed decisions.
Joey:
So do you think you could talk about then how you balance your time between building up those relationships with businesses versus like families and how you focus on building up those relationships in two different places and how that’s been. Cause I know you earlier, you talked about the challenges of B-to-B, business to business, versus business to customer. But if you could talk a little bit more about how you kind of manage your attention and where to focus on, like in your marketing and your messaging for those two.
Jodi:
Well, it takes a village, you know, it’s grown bigger than me. It’s grown bigger than me. Our funeral home has been around for gosh, almost a hundred and over 125 years. So the, you know, that trust and that part is, is there. And it’s solid. The addition to what we’ve done didn’t happen overnight. And it was repetitive. We have some pretty amazing people who are part of our care team and they tell the story too. And so they became, you know, either you get it or you don’t, and if you don’t get it, it’s probably not, not a good fit to work with us. And so, you know, we’ve got lots of people telling her, you know, people are raving fans telling who I consider to be our, our tribe. And so that’s, that’s where that happens. And then there’s the check-ins, you know, people, people want us, I’m going to pick on me for a minute. You know, I, I spent a lot of time working on the business and I’m in the business, but I’m also in the trenches. So, you know, right now, one of, one of our care team appointment, my neither one of our care team members is going through some health issues. So it’s not uncommon to see me go do the vet clinic runs or see me out there doing the, for clippings or paw printing or helping with the cremation or the packaging, you know, to set it up and walk away. You know, it’s not on common for me to go into the vet clinics and just, I don’t wanna say, hang out, cause they’re too busy, but you know, always treat them and thank them you know, for working with us. And so that’s, that’s kind of how we do it. It’s a, I like to think of it as a friendship that you work at, you know, we’ve had, we, haven’t had a lot of turnover in terms of client base and vet clinics. We’re not for everyone. And I don’t think I want to be that one size fits all, but we’re definitely at our bandwidth right now. So if, if we grow anymore, I’m going to have to consider another machine, you know, more staffing and, and maybe that will happen. But you know, we’ve kind of hit capacity because we’ve had everybody on board seeing the same thing going the same direction. Did that answer your question?
Heather:
It did. Yeah. I think, yeah. I think that hit it right on the head. It sounds like a lot of you have a story and then everyone tells that story and you really work on that human to human connection with both your B-to-C and your B-to-B.
Jodi:
Yeah. We’re not a commodity. And I don’t want to be a commodity.
Heather:
That makes sense. So Jody, we have one last question. We ask this question of everyone and that is, what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned serving in this industry and it can be on the pet side or the human side. So go ahead.
Jodi:
It’d be humility. You know, I have had a wonderful couple of mistakes, if you messed up just, just own it, you know, don’t, don’t kick the can down the road, you know, just say, listen, I dropped the ball. I am so sorry. You know, you get one chance to get it right. And sometimes you don’t, sometimes you just don’t and you know, and whatever your isms or languages is to impart to say, yeah, this, this, you know, we get one chance to get it right. And we didn’t, you know, how can we fix this? Or here’s what should have happened. Allow me to do this with your permission. That combined with I was the vendor for many years long before I married Dale. So my role was to teach folks to talk to the Mrs. and the Dale’s of the world. And that was on the preplanning side. And it was real easy to walk into someone’s business and shake it up for an hour, maybe even a half a day and give them the high level of here’s, what you need to do. Here’s how you need to do it. And here, let me help you build your plan, shake it up and leave. Okay. So I always used to say, you know, kind of show up and throw up, you just leave it behind and you you’d go. And you’d kind of coach them and mentor them and be their cheerleader. But you know, my day or a funeral director’s day can, can change in five minutes. And I, whatever I’m doing is low on the list. So when I say humility, it’s maybe empathy may be a little better word, but know that you’re not, you’re not high on their list. These people that you’re talking to are having a bad day and they don’t care that you had a bad day, they don’t care that there were five other families you sat with today because this is the first time they’ve sat with you. And I don’t care if that’s on the pet side or if that’s on the human side. So somewhere between those two words is what I’ve learned. It’s not about me.
Heather:
Wow. What a great answer. Thank you.
Joey:
Well, that is all we have for questions. So I just wanted to say thank you so much, Jodi, for your time. We really appreciate it. And thanks for joining us this week on Funeral Innovations: Trends, Tips, and Technology. So we’ll be posting this video on our blog, on our YouTube channels and you’ll have access to it on your Facebook feed. So definitely check that out and we’ll be back with another show soon. So check back in with us next week. And for those of you watching this recorded, if you have any topics you’d like to see discussed or someone you’d like to hear from in an interview, make sure to comment down below and be sure to visit our website at funeralinnovations.com. Thanks so much and have a great day. Thanks Jody.
Jodi:
Bye bye.