By Thomas A. Parmalee

Matthew Van Drimmelen was a civil engineer working in the government sector. It was the type of stable job most people spend years trying to get – and when they get it, they hunker down and stay put.

But he realized pretty quickly that he was not going to last.

“I was getting reprimanded for doing a good job and creating high expectations for others,” he said.

For someone who was striving for excellence, it was frustrating. “I decided I wanted to shift, and I had a friend who owned a preneed general agency,” he said.

And so began his journey into the world of death care.

“My friend was lamenting how none of the families wanted to talk about buying preneed … there was simply too much else going on,” he said.

There were also challenges on the sales side of the business, as many funeral directors were reluctant to push too hard on preneed, Van Drimmelen learned.

His engineering mind was intrigued, and he started asking questions, such as whether or not these challenges were contained to only certain types of firms or certain types of people. And the answer he heard was no – it was across the board.

So, he joined his friend at a company called Final Assistance, which eventually became Full Circle Aftercare, with Van Drimmelen taking over as the sole owner in 2016.

“His desire was to create something very automated and technology-based, and I wanted to create something that would have that human connection,” Van Drimmelen explained, when asked about the pivot. “So, I bought him out and kind of revamped the company.”

He grew the business, aiming to make everything as affordable as possible, focusing on two channels: Funeral homes and hospice care organizations. The company has only recently expanded into a third channel – law firms.

“The main thing that is happening there is they are using our services for probate cases,” he said. “We do things the attorneys don’t do that families want done. I don’t want to call Verizon Wireless – can you do that for me? They add our services to help families during the probate process.”

Sometimes, Full Circle Aftercare finds itself in the position where it may need to recommend legal services, although it generally does not collect referral fees, he said.

Today, Full Circle Aftercare serves clients in 38 states as well as two provinces in Canada. All told, it helps about 1,700 families per month.

It started working in Canada last year, which Van Drimmelen is excited about.

“We will serve every province except Quebec,” he said, noting its laws vary from the rest of the country. “We came into Canada because we had a firm in the United States that also owned several Canada locations, and they wanted us to serve all of them.”

He added, “We started in the West, so we have grown most in the West,” Van Drimmelen said. “We could definitely grow more in the Northeast and the South.”

Asked about what “aftercare” really means, Van Drimmelen observed that if you ask 100 different funeral home owners this question, you’d probably hear 100 different answers.

“It is this nebulous thing that they are told they need to do, and yet it has not been defined,” he said.

Often, when Van Drimmelen asks a funeral home owner what they do in regard to aftercare, their response will be “not enough.” It is generally an afterthought, he said.

Many funeral home owners seem content with having some type of follow up, which has led to text messaging and the mass mailing or emailing of cards, Van Drimmelen said.

“I’m not saying that’s not nice … but it’s just kind of fluff,” he said. “It is not actually serving families. For funeral homes that are looking to provide actual services to families, that’s going to be estate closing services or grief services like ours.”

Funeral homes have to be careful not to lump in aftercare with preneed, he said.

“It needs to be its own thing in my opinion,” he said. “If someone calls you to help you, but really they are just trying to sell you something, families can feel that, and it feels disingenuous. When you are able to jump in with no ulterior motive, that is where the magic is. That is where you create delighted customers who are loyal to your brand … and that sells more preneed. You can’t go directly at it.”

Aftercare typically ends up being more of a strategy than part of operations, Van Drimmelen said. “You need to take a step back and think how you grow your business over the long term – and aftercare needs to be a piece of that.”

The Van Drimmelen family.
The Big Pivot

Full Circle Aftercare didn’t really hit its stride until it moved from a direct-to-consumer model to a business-to-business model, Van Drimmelen said.

The ah-ha moment came after the company helped a family member with ownership in a hospice company who mentioned he’d  love to leverage the solution as a business owner.

Today, hospice care organizations account for about 35% of Full Circle Aftercare’s business.

“They are great clients,” Van Drimmelen said of hospice care organizations. “One thing we are really working on is how to get families from hospice back to the funeral home.”  He added, “One of our goals is to educate hospices on the value of funeral services and how it helps families.”

The majority of its clients – 60% — are funeral homes. The remaining 5% consist of law firms, Van Drimmelen said.

Going B2B instead of direct to consumer has proved to be a winning formula, largely because of what Van Drimmelen calls “The Home Depot effect.”’

He explained, “When you are at Home Depot and looking at something and seem kind of confused, an employee usually comes up to you and asks, ‘Can I help you?’”

And the typical response is for an individual to refuse the help, and later, they often second guess themselves, wondering why they didn’t take the employee up on their offer.

Van Drimmelen and his team noticed the same thing happening with the families it served: They thought they were OK, but they really were not engaging in a conversation.

“But when we started going B2B and white labeling our service under the hospice or funeral home, families started engaging more,” he said.

Since families already had established relationships with hospices and funeral homes, they ended up seeking and receiving more help from Full Circle Aftercare, which was important to Van Drimmelen.

“My goal is to help a family as completely as possible,” he said. “We can accomplish that better as B2B compared with direct to consumer.”

The move paved the way to embark on a whole new mission: to help funeral homes provide more services to families while boosting the value of their own businesses.

“I realized funeral homes are looking to differentiate and add value to families,” he said, noting that firms that work with Full Circle Aftercare end up selling more preneed services and collecting more positive Google reviews.

Overcoming Challenges

As an engineer, Van Drimmelen is inclined to want to “optimize things,” which was the biggest challenge to overcome as he sought to grow the Full Circle Aftercare business, he said.

“What do you get when you optimize?” he asked. “You go from orange juice to Tampico, and pretty soon, there are no oranges in the juice – just sugar, orange coloring and orange flavoring. Everyone would rather drink fresh OJ. So, the big challenge for us is we wanted to keep things authentic for families.”

The goal for the business has always been to provide “a real service and not something made out of fluff,” he said. “Keeping things simple is really hard, it takes a lot of effort, but it is such a better experience for everyone involved,” he said.

The “simple” in this case is doing the hard work after a loved one dies to keep everything simple for families, Van Drimmelen said.

“Making that decision over and over is hard. It hurts the bottom line – it is hard to scale and to keep your quality control up,” he said.

Another big challenge has been to avoid taking on debt or investors, which Van Drimmelen admitted has been tempting.

“It has been hard seeing other companies come in with a bunch of investors and they grow very quickly,” he said. “Most of our growth comes through word-of-mouth referrals. We don’t have a big marketing budget. But our growth has been slow and powerful. We lose almost no clients.” He added, “It’s great being able to own and control the process, but it’s difficult growing slowly and living on that shoestring budget.”

How the Service Works

Full Circle Aftercare offers white labeled services that are sold by the funeral home or hospice care organization, Van Drimmelen said.

“When families are sitting across from a funeral director, the funeral director usually asks, ‘How many death certificates do you want?’ And the family usually says, ‘I don’t know, what do I need them for?’”

And then, the funeral director will typically pull out a list of everything the family needs a death certificate for, he said.

“Families start looking at that list, and it’s like someone put two big sandbags on their shoulders,” he said.

When a funeral home owner works with Full Circle Aftercare, however, they can then tell the family they have a team that will help them with all that they have to do – and that it’s included with the funeral service at no charge.

“Most funeral homes include our service in the cost of the funeral,” Van Drimmelen explained. “Few sell it.”

After that interaction, someone from the Full Circle Aftercare team will call the family on behalf of the funeral home to help them close out the affairs of their loved one. They set up an appointment and go through important items, such as the credit report of the deceased, any insurance they had, what money is coming in and going out and what subscriptions might need attention.

“We come up with a plan of what needs to be done, and some things we can do for them,” Van Drimmelen said.

One of the primary ways Full Circle Aftercare can serve families is by assisting in transferring Social Security benefits to the surviving spouse, Van Drimmelen said. “We get on the phone and do that dialing,” he said, noting that families can often spend several hours on the phone at a difficult time, adding to their stress, when his team can typically get everything done in two hours.

“We know what to say, what to do and how the process works,” he said. “We can do it in a more efficient manner and protect the person from being on hold saying their wife just died.” He added, “That is a raw emotional state for a family member to be in, and the person on the other end of the phone is ready to have a business conversation. We act as an intermediary, where we can have that business conversation while protecting the emotions of the family.”

The whole process of transferring Social Security benefits is a bigger chore than most funeral professionals realize, Van Drimmelen said.

“What does every funeral home owner say to the family? ‘Don’t worry about Social Security, I will take care of it,’” he said. “And what they really mean is don’t worry about notifying them of the death. But you need to go in person to claim your lost payment and deal with survivor benefits. Most families walk away thinking they don’t have to worry about Social Security, but that’s simply not true.”

Many times, in fact, the surviving spouse is missing out on their full survivor benefits, sometimes as a result of miscommunication with the funeral home.

“Funeral homes are not doing this to be malicious,” he said, noting that they are sometimes just not familiar enough with all the moving parts.

“They do not understand that what they do does not help them get benefits … and we explain to them that they do the first part but not the second part.”

Often, that is the biggest struggle in Full Circle Aftercare winning new clients – explaining to funeral homes what it can do for families, and why the service is so valuable.

Typically, a family may take 14 to 18 months before taking care of all the affairs of a recently deceased loved one. With the help of Full Circle Aftercare, however, it’s usually all taken care of within a week, he said.

Moreover, there is no limit to the service Full Circle Aftercare provides, according to Van Drimmelen.

“There are some things we must assign a family to do, and we provide clear instructions,” he said. “For instance, we cannot close a bank account, but we can provide them with paperwork and coach them through the process. They might need an outside service, like a law firm or tax adviser. We don’t pay for those, but we won’t charge the family anything through the process. And we don’t upsell them. Our job is to represent the funeral home.”

Along the way, it provides the funeral home with some valuable deliverables Van Drimmelen said. The first is that families are often overjoyed and “blown away” that the funeral home has gone the extra mile to help them. “They do not expect that the funeral home will be there to help them after the service is over,” he said. “This creates goodwill, loyalty and word-of-mouth referrals.”

By interacting with the family, the Full Circle Aftercare team also gets to know the family fairly well, and they get to ask what the funeral home did well or what it could have done better.

“I call what we provide a safety net,” Van Drimmelen said. “We get so much feedback that they would never write in a survey or a review, and we send all that feedback to the funeral home.”

When there is a problem, the funeral home learns about it right away, and if Full Circle Aftercare hears a particularly good compliment, it asks the family if the funeral home could use the testimonial in their marketing. “We get verbal confirmation, and we’ll send that back to the funeral home,” Van Drimmelen said. The funeral home, in turn, may make a social media post out of the comment or use it in some other way.

And obviously, if the Full Circle Aftercare team likes what it hears from the family, it will send them a link, so they can write a review of the funeral home on Google. “We have a very high success rate with Google reviews,” he said. “In November alone, we were able to generate 300 Google reviews for our clients, which was awesome.”

But perhaps the most critical deliverable that Full Circle Aftercare provides to funeral home clients is it helps bridge the gap between the at-need services a funeral home provides and its desire to help more families prearrange. As a result, a number of preneed marketing companies and preneed insurance providers encourage funeral homes to include the Full Circle Aftercare solution with every funeral service, Van Drimmelen said.

“What usually ends up happening is a family comes to a funeral home, has a service, and then the service ends – and then a month later, they get this call from a preneed salesperson asking if they want to buy something else,” Van Drimmelen said.

Some families end up feeling as though that experience cheapens what they just want through with the funeral home, he said, as they – right or wrong – think the funeral home only wants to make more money.

“We try to bridge that gap,” he said. “Eventually, we wrap up the deceased’s estate … we update beneficiaries, and we educate them about wills and trusts. We are not selling – just educating.”

Full Circle Aftercare gently informs the family that its team can assist family members in getting funeral arrangements in place. “We get an average of 40% to 70% of families, depending on demographics and the area, request a preneed agent reach out to them,” he said.

Such a turn of events changes the entire dynamic with the family, because now when the funeral home reaches out, it’s not a sales pitch – their preneed sales agent is calling to answer questions, Van Drimmelen said.

Full Circle Aftercare team members at a convention.
Pricing and More Details

Full Circle Aftercare charges funeral homes $159 per family to provide its service along with a funeral – and $200 to the funeral home if it is offering it as an add-on option to the family.

Law firms sell the solution as part of the estate planning services they provide, he said.

A small number of funeral homes offer it to families as an add-on option, typically charging $200 to $400, Van Drimmelen said.

While the firm does not actively try selling its services directly to consumers, it states on its website that it is available for $499, which is higher than any funeral home offers it for, so funeral homes can correctly say they are offering it at a discount.

Funeral homes that include Full Circle Aftercare with every service (about 85% of funeral home clients approach it this way) don’t always pay $159 per family, Van Drimmelen said.

“So, if a funeral home sends us a family who ends up not needing our service –maybe there is not much to do – we just charge a $14 consultation fee,” he said. “I don’t want a funeral home to pay us for services that we don’t complete. So, for a funeral home that uses us, it usually ends up being about $100 per family if you average out our consultations with our full service.”

If a firm is creative, it can find a way to do business with Full Circle Aftercare and provide a higher tier of service to families – even if it’s serving families that typically opt for less service, Van Drimmelen said.

“We had an online direct cremation company, and they were doing direct cremations for $699 and told us that there was no way they could include our service,” he said.

So, what Van Drimmelen proposed was this: Give customers two options — $699 for a direct cremation or $899 for “direct cremation plus,” which would include Full Circle Aftercare’s services.

The first month the firm gave families the option, 55% of them opted for the higher-priced package, he said.

He added that when a selection of funeral homes polled their customers about how much the Full Circle Aftercare service should cost, the average was $750, so firms are very happy to pay $159 per family as they know they are getting a considerable value at a fair price for families.

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