Nancy Burban talks with cemetery photographer John Thomas Grant. They discuss the beauty of cemetery monuments in the eastern states and why John Grant began to photograph cemeteries.
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Episode: 010
Guest: John Thomas Grant
Date: 02/15/11
Contact John Thomas Grant:
Facebook
John Thomas Grant
Show Notes:
Passion Projects
Douglas Keister
Green-Wood Cemetery
Interview Excerpt:
Nancy Burban: Well John, do you have any favorite cemeteries?
John Thomas Grant: Of course. I lived for 20 years or there about in Brooklyn. You can’t get any better than Green-Wood. That’s my home away from home. I don’t know how many times I’ve been to that place. Some of my finest pictures come out of there. As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t start terribly long ago so, I have not traveled that far in pursuit of the pictures. It’s still life and I’m still trying to get my photography to a point where it could be a form of subsistence, if you will.
John Thomas Grant Interview Transcript
Funeral Directors Chat Home
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Nancy Burban talks with Beacham McDougald: author, fourth generation funeral director and President of McDougald Funeral Home and Crematorium. They discuss the importance of creating a meaningful funeral ceremony and also economics and service, cremation rates, Beacham’s local funeral study group and the legend of Concetto Farmica.
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Episode: 009
Guest: Beacham McDougald
Date: 12/27/10
Contact Beacham McDougald:
Facebook
McDougald Funeral Home and Crematorium
Show Notes:
Mortuary Management
Learn about Concetto Farmica
Alexandra Mosca on Facebook
Thomas Lynch on Facebook
Melissa Johnson Williams on Facebook
Funeral Home Viewing Bed
Olive Wood Ornament
Interview Excerpt:
Nancy: Now you said that cremation is almost up to 50 percent nationwide and 45 percent in your area in the south.
Beacham: Right. We put a crematorium in, in 1997. I had to wait until after my father passed because he was adamantly opposed to cremation.
Nancy: He was.
Beacham: In 1997 I installed one and our cremation was 13 percent of our services at that time. As I said, last year it was 43 percent and this year it’s hitting 45 percent. So I see it continuing to increase. I know that in the next few years it’s going to become over 50 percent here.
Beacham McDougald Interview Transcript
Funeral Directors Chat Home
Nancy Burban discusses the current state of online obituaries with Jeff Taylor of Tributes.com. Jeff tells us how your funeral home can display Tributes.com obituaries on your website with little effort.
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Episode: 007
Guest: Jeff Taylor
Date: 10/02/10
Email John Heald to display obituaries on your website.
Interview Excerpt:
Nancy: You launched in 2008, Legacy.com launched in 1998, is that correct?
Jeff: Correct.
Nancy: Legacy.com is pretty popular and is pretty profitable. Can you tell our funeral directors what the difference is between tributes.com and legacy.com?
Jeff: I think first of all as a compliment to Legacy, it’s a large business. I founded Monster.com in 1994 and Legacy is really in that first wave of companies. One of the things I’ve seen is a lot has changed, especially with the World Wide Web. And with the advent of Friendster and Napster, early and Myspace and Facebook, we’ve seen a transition from the traditional one point zero website to a two point zero website and as a result we’ve learned al lot along the way. I think the other thing about Legacy, it’s really a software as a service business for the newspaper industry. With about 800 newspaper clients in North America, Eurpe and Australia, their central focus is really on servicing the obituary software function of the newspapers. When I was thinking about founding and starting Tributes, I thought it might be interesting to focus on the consumer, very much in the way Monster focused on the consumer. And one of the things I realized right away is the consumer’s first real relationship was with the funeral home. So I went about doing the research and discovered that with funeral homes, there was a much different service model with the newspaper that I thought we could provide. So one of the main differences with Tributes is that our central client is the funeral home and ultimately the family and that is very different form legacy with the newspaper as their primary client.
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Nancy Burban discusses financial options with Chuck Gallagher, COO of American Funeral Financial. Chuck illustrates how the immediate financing of a funeral can be beneficial for the family and the funeral home.
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Episode: 006
Guest: Chuck Gallagher
Date: 09/10/10
Contact Chuck
ChuckGallagher.com
Interview Excerpt:
Nancy: It makes a lot of sense actually when you think about it because funeral directors are not trained in finance. They are trained in service. They are trained in taking care of the client families and they don’t do this very well. They don’t handle the financial piece very well. And this is probably one of the biggest reasons why independent funeral homes are in trouble right now. Because they try to do something, they try to enter into a field that they really don’t have any training or expertise in.
Chuck: You know Nancy, you are actually a 100% right with the comment that you just made. I have been in this industry since 1991 and with Stewart Enterprises from 1993 to 2008. I have been involved in small operations with 60 interments a year to large with 2400. And the thing that I have found across the board is we as professionals in the funeral industry are trained to provide outstanding and expert service. We aren’t bankers. We just absolutely abhor having to deal with that conflictual issue of money. And when a funeral home can bridge that gap, and turn that responsibility over to people that know what to do, how to do it and are efficient at doing it that makes a whole lot of sense.
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Nancy Burban has a lengthy discussion with the forward thinking Joe Sehee of the Green Burial Council. He reminds us that the world is moving toward a more green approach to living and dying and touches on the many threats and opportunities to green burial.
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Episode: 005
Guest: Joe Sehee
Date: 07/29/10
Contact at the GBC
Interview Excerpt:
Nancy: What do you think about the government? Do you think the government will get involved in green burial at any point?
Joe: Only if we don’t do a good job policing ourselves, and I think that’s always the case. Once there’s some scandals out there and people are effected. I’m working with a funeral association and estate that’s trying to help put forth legislation to define green cemeteries. Because there is a guy in this state who got ordained online and then got an exemption from the cemetery bureau started taking money to sell burial plots and had his property foreclosed on and left town.
And we had to work with his partner to refund money and to prevent a real scandal. Thankfully no one was buried, but these are the kinds of things that can happen if there’s no oversight and no one is looking under the hood to say, what’s going on, fellas? Is there really a legally enforceable mechanism that runs with the land? Is there a deed restriction or a conservation easement?
Or how are you requiring that future operators enforce these promises that are being made today? You know? And how do we know that these protocols are going to result in the outcome that you’re promising? It’s a much bigger issue, by the way, at the cemetery level than it is with funeral homes or product manufacturers.
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