For Greg Howard, running a cemetery is personal. River Bend Cemetery is a non-profit organization that’s been in operation since 1849 and is situated along the picturesque Pawcatuck River, Rhode Island.

Run by a team of caring and dedicated full-time staff, it’s very much a family-affair, which is why Greg wants to leave its legacy in the best place possible for the next generation.

In a recent conversation Greg explained how PlotBox is helping him to achieve that goal.

Thanks for speaking with us, Greg. Tell us a bit about your role.

My title is Administrative Director, and I'm also the Superintendent. I basically run the day to day operations of the cemetery, but mainly focus on the business aspects of the company.

I'm doing sales, handling the accounts, the record keeping, and coordinating with the funeral directors, monument companies, and all of our other vendors.

I have a Director of Grounds who has over 30 years experience, and he mainly looks after the operations side. He digs all the graves and runs the grounds crew.

He's responsible for the grounds, I'm responsible for the office and the administrative business side.

That would be your brother, Steve Howard?

Yes, he's my older brother and actually got me to start at the company about 15 years ago.

Wow, tell us a bit more about that.

For us it's pretty personal.

My grandfather, who was the patriarch of our family, grew up right across the street from the cemetery. 

My brother now lives in a house that was owned by my grandfather. That's not the house he grew up in, but is also right across the street from the cemetery, a couple houses down.

My brother started working here as a teenager, and he's 12 years older than me.

So by the time came of age at 18 or 19 years old, he had risen up to a management position, and hired me on the grounds crew pretty much right out of high school.

Our great grandparents, grandparents, aunts and uncles are all buried here, so yeah, we take it pretty personally.

The cemetery is 175 years old, so it really is the foundation of the town of Westerly.

There must be a real legacy there that you want to protect?

Absolutely. You know I have a son. He's only 7, but if you talk to him, you would think he ran the cemetery!

So I do envisage - and it's a possibility I would never put it on him - but maybe he takes over from me, and we keep this thing going.

Who knows, but regardless of who I hand it off to, it's definitely very important to me that I hand it off in better shape than when I received it.

So yes, it's very personal for me.

Tell us about the services you provide.

We’re pretty straightforward. We don't have a crematory or anything like that. We have various options for disposition - a casket or cremation burial.

We also offer stone cleaning as a service to a lot of our lot owners. We do all of the foundations of any monument or marker that goes in our cemetery. We dig and install the foundations, and do all our own landscaping.

We do some genealogy preplanning and things like that as well. We offer cemetery tours. We have different planting programs for both flowers and trees. 

That's a lot!

The one thing that we do outsource is our tree work. We have a licensed arborist that comes in and does [that].  Road paving and things, we outsource, but other than that, we pretty much do everything in house.

The planting programs - do you bring members of the community in to help with?

We don't as of now, but that's on my to do list. Here we have groups called, ‘Friends of the Cemetery’, and that's where you would get into that.

Maybe volunteers from the community that actually come in and do planting and things like that.

A lot of New England cemeteries do take advantage of that. We don't [currently]. A lot of time that's need-driven - a lot of cemeteries don't have money and resources to do these things on their own.

We are lucky [in that respect], but it's something that I'm definitely interested in.

And you’re president of the New England Cemetery Association (NECA)?

Yes, I am, and have just assumed the presidency of Rhode Island.

That’s fantastic, congratulations.

It’s a lot of extra work, but I'm lucky in that our organizations are filled with just absolutely tremendous people.

I don't have a history in cemetery management. I was going to college to be a landscape architect - I had no experience, and these organizations were like my college education. Going to the events and the conferences and learning and asking questions was invaluable for me.

So eventually I ended up getting involved with the board and worked my way up. But it's been a rewarding experience, for sure.

It must give great insight into the experience of other cemeteries and what challenges they face?

You get a kind of tunnel vision when you're dealing with your own issues. When talking to other people - they had a lot of unique insights [on things] I just hadn't encountered yet, but were probably going to show themselves…and they have.

You’ve touched on legacy, but why was it you decided to switch from your previous solution to PlotBox?

Our other software was just not really doing the job that was promised.

It was a very basic program. It wasn't cloud-based (although it was eventually upgraded to being cloud-based).

A lot of the things it was supposed to do, like scanning documents onto the system, none of the tools really worked.

I couldn't change anything ‘on the fly’, like add inventory. There were just a lot of problems. 

I met your solutions consultant at a conference, and having worked in cemeteries, he knew a lot about what we were dealing with.

I was going over some of the issues that I was having. He told me that a lot of advancements had been made, and that it was probably time to look into upgrading.

Why ultimately did you choose PlotBox?

Your solutions consultant made a really strong impression, but I did take the better part of a year to do my research.

I did know some cemeterians that had PlotBox and I know some that have your competitors.

I was able to talk to people and narrow it down to you and one or two others.

But one main person that has been a mentor over the years told me that in their opinion, PlotBox was the best.

And that meant a lot to me - that someone who had made a different choice for themselves, had since learned, (and had been familiar with other people with PlotBox), that in their opinion, it’s generally accepted that PlotBox is the best.

I really liked all the people that I dealt with and talked to throughout the process and it honestly ended up being a pretty easy decision for me in the end.

Getting into some of the specifics, you carried out a migration - or ‘transformation’ - of your records, deeds, and plots. What did that process look like in practice?

The data migration part of it was actually pretty simple. I simply requested a data export from our original provider. So we worked from that. 

The data migration team worked through looking for any potential issues. One of the common things we had was different people having entered in information differently over the years here.

So when you're migrating over, there would be confusing things [like that]. The [data] team would encounter issues, or something that didn't quite make sense and would send over a report detailing [them]. I’d then go in to make sense of it and offer a solution before we do the final data export .

I skipped one important part, which is the testing. We worked through the process of getting the data to the point where the data team thought it was correct.

Then they provided me with a test site. That was basically like a dummy site of what it would be.

They gave us the framework on how to test the site. They told us what to do, where we’d pull up a given section in the old system and compare it to what's in PlotBox.

If it’s off, you know that you're missing some records, or there's some duplicates, or something like that.

You just work through the process until you're comfortable that you’ve taken it as far as you can.

Did you feel supported during that data transformation process?

Absolutely. I had a lot of nervousness because I knew that there were a lot of skeletons in the closet, so to speak - things in the old system that just weren't quite right, that could lead to serious mistakes.

I was nervous going in, but the data part of it went very smoothly.

I'm kind of a problem solver, so I actually enjoyed them presenting me with problems and then I’d go in and get it all fixed up. I actually enjoyed the data [part of it]!

Yes, we talk about the team having a “find it, fix it, approach” as part of data transformation - it sounds like that worked well for you in practice.

It’s daunting when you're looking at it from the start. You don't want to have to go through this because it really is tedious work.

But it's necessary, because any one of these little minor issues could lead to a catastrophic mistake which could cost your cemetery tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on what it is.

The peace of mind really is a major difference - once you've gone through and done the work of actually checking and double checking to make sure everything's right.

I was stressed because some of these things are always gnawing at the back of your mind.

You know that these potential issues exist, but you know that this is a major step towards eliminating that stress and giving the confidence that [everything is OK].

That I can do my job without issue going forward, and for the people that come after me.

We touched on this before, about when handing it off - it kind of makes everything sustainable going forward.

You made a very good point - it's hard to put a price on alleviating that stress that you feel, that ‘niggle’.

Question everything, even the information that is correct. You have to question and double check and triple check, because you know that the information is not reliable overall.

Now you’ve been using PlotBox, how’s it helping to overcome some of those potential issues?

It helps you to identify specific problems. You know that there's problems out there, and that this could or could not be a problem. But this process has really helped us identify and fix them.

And you only have to fix them once - [after that] it just goes through the system.

Before, all I really did was input the burials into our software. All of the stone cleanings and foundations, even the interments I had to track somewhere else because the old software didn't do reports of any kind.

So I had to do everything 2 and 3 times over.

[Now PlotBox] just streamlines the entire process and eliminates mistakes.

We're still honestly in the process of figuring this all out, but week by week we're getting better and better at it, making real progress.

That's great. And how has it helped in terms of the communication between the office and the grounds team?

We'll start to benefit from that a little bit more over some time. We're a beach community. Nothing really happens here in the wintertime, so I'm not doing foundations right now, I'm not cleaning stones right now.

But as a brief example, if there was work to be done [on those], I would have had to handwrite the invoice and the work order, then I would take the work order, and physically go out into the cemetery to look for and track down the specific employee I wanted to do that job.

I’d then hand off the work order to him physically, then he would go do the work.

Whereas now it's all done and right, when the order comes in. I'm creating the invoice and the work order simultaneously. I can send it out to whatever employee I want to.

I don't have to physically go anywhere.

So that time is saved. It’s the phrase I came up with - PlotBox streamlines our processes a little bit in a lot of different ways, and so on aggregate, it makes us pretty close to infinitely more efficient!

And we're still in the process of fine tuning it, going forward this is going to be an absolute game changer for us.

Every day I'm probably picking up on something else that's going to help me.

I'm excited about it long-term. I really am.

You had the drone flights to create digital maps. Talk me through that process and the outcomes.

For us, that was one of the main points that drew us to PlotBox.

As I said, we’re 175 years old. Most of our maps were hand drawn - well over a hundred years old and illegible.

It makes it that much more important to get our maps digitalized.

But you know the long-term benefits of that - that's when you really get into locking in your safety, because a lot of the big problems that can happen, [such as] double selling graves. 

It's peace of mind, right there in real time.

Before, I would have to take a picture on my phone, then call back to the office so [the office manager] could go onto the computer and confirm that a lot's not sold.

Now, I'm right on my device, I can go onto the computer and see right there in real time what's sold. 

That eliminates a lot of the chances for double selling plots. Sometimes situations have a way of putting you in a position to fail, so you’ve got to have all your ducks in a row, so to speak.

The story of double selling plots is sadly a familiar one, and can be as simple as someone not having marked something off.

It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a double-sold a lot. When you’re showing a family a plot - even if you catch it before you actually make the mistake, it still makes you look unprofessional.

I remember once or twice showing a family a plot, but my office manager wasn't here so I couldn't call and double check. I then get back to the office, onto the computer and, “Oh, no, wait! That plot is sold. We’ve got to go back out there again and look again.”.

I didn't sell them the plot, but I still made myself look unprofessional, as if I didn't really have a handle on my cemetery.

Of course.

It's really important that you know exactly what's going on with your inventory.

Speaking of which, you had your mausoleum mapped?

We have our family-owned mausoleums, which are smaller [than cemetery mausoleums].

But yes, we had all of those mapped out with PlotBox, which we hadn’t done before. That was a pretty painless, easy process.

How has that helped in practical terms?

Now we've gone in and confirmed who's where, it’s more peace of mind.

And that was another one of those things that I was worried about - what's going to happen if I get that one call about one of these mausoleums if I have no idea what's really going on in there.

And sure enough, I did get that one call.

Really?

Yes, that was a couple of months ago, so it did bear fruit one time already!

That’s good. What are some of the other ways in which PlotBox is helping you to manage your burial processes?

One of the big things for me is the diaries.

Not only can you schedule your burials, but you can also incorporate your other appointments.

A big thing for me was scheduling conflicts. A lot of times I'm out in the field getting calls on my cell phone - maybe 2 or 3 people call me and schedule something.

I'd have to come back into my office and hand write on my calendar what those things were, and sometimes I’d forget to do them. Now, right on my phone, I can go into PlotBox, schedule my events, and keep track of everything.

That's something right off the bat that was really helpful for me.

It also helps with communication - people being able to go into their email and get any communications that I need from them - work orders, burials, anything.

We can communicate through the computer instead of actually physically having to go out and look for somebody over 54 acres.

I imagine that it helps from a physical point of view.

We only have a very small crew right now. In another month we're going to be bringing on another 8 people for 9 months of the year. They’ll be mowing and weeding, whacking, digging foundations and things like that.

There’ll be a lot of different people to communicate with and that will just streamline  that whole process.

We've touched on this before a little, but how has PlotBox being cloud-based helped in terms of the accessibility of your data?

Having cloud-based software for me was absolutely vital. As I’ve said, the only way I could access the system was to physically come into my office, and go into my computer.

The cloud gives you the ability to access your system on any device from anywhere in the world.

If I'm at a cemetery conference, or at my son's ball game, or my daughter's recital, and a funeral director calls in and wants to schedule a burial - I'm no longer having to scribble a note on a piece of paper, put it in my pocket and hope it's there when I get back to the cemetery on Monday.

Now I just go right into my phone and I can look up any information I need. Boom, done and done.

It's absolutely essential for me.

Have you found PlotBox easy to use?

I have, it’s the one thing I was a little bit pleasantly surprised about. The setup was pretty similar to my old system, so it wasn't hard for me, really.

The difference is, that it just works, you know? It does what it's supposed to do every time.

I found it incredible.

And what's the support been like?

That to me is the one area where PlotBox has far surpassed [everything] really.

Their level of support is nothing short of amazing. And that's from the start, right through to post implementation.

You have the support portal right on your site that you can go to any time, but even above that - the data migration teams are still sending me emails here and there, asking how we’re making out with things.

Or my case manager will advise on the best way to input contracts [for example].

The support is second to none, seriously.

Thank you. Just one last question that we ask everyone - would you recommend PlotBox to other cemetery operators?

Yes, I absolutely would. In my opinion, it's the best software in the industry, and that's exactly what I tell anyone who asks my opinion on the subject.

For me, it upgrades us in a lot of different ways. But the most impressive thing really is the people, and I mean that in multiple ways.

Like I said, I'm used to a company where you were dealing with only one person for everything.

Yes, we might call a situation like that having the potential for a, ‘single point of failure’.

With PlotBox it’s like you have a team of a dozen people that are there to support you. All absolutely incredible, intelligent, helpful, nice.

It’s awesome.

Thank you.

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