“As a longtime local businessman — and a widower — I can feel the need for this project,” Mort Townsend explained. “Frankly, I am shocked no one has proposed this before.”
Townsend was addressing a special meeting of the Stinkwater Springs Chamber of Commerce, requesting $20,000 from the organization’s small capital start-up fund for his latest venture: the nation’s first hospice for failing businesses. Townsend, a former Chamber board president, established the start-up fund ten years ago.
“I know Stinkwater is a very spiritual community which supports those facing personal death, and extends healing solace to their families. Yet I ask myself this question: ‘Where do the business owners go after the going-out-of-business sale?’
Townsend, a pokerfaced man with a wry sense of humor, raised his cheeks to hold back tears welling in his eyes.
“So many businesses are suffering needlessly painful deaths in Stinkwater right now. Can’t we try to bring some real sympathy and understanding to those suffering business death in today’s economy?”
According to Townsend, some simple comforts can be provided to those suffering business death. “Simply knowing that talented, hard-working and educated folks in well-capitalized businesses have failed in Stinkwater for over a century is very comforting.
“However, the business death and grieving process is long and difficult. Families, of course, have huge adjustments to make after business death. The month immediately after business death is particularly traumatic. Even after transitioning from a 120-hour per week business to a 35-hour job, marriages can suffer from the almost constant presence of the spouse back in the life of their loved ones. Families are often unprepared. Business death often creates a huge presence in the middle of the family — and everyone in the family needs to accept and learn to live with that presence.”
“What about your own business model?” Chamber president Buck Moore asked with evident sympathy.
Townsend expressed optimism. “Our central office is conveniently located at Saunders Circle just south of the Stinkwater Country Plaza, and our satellite office is located in the downtown historic business district. That’s a lot of walk-in business for starters. And our initial market research is very encouraging. We think we have good demographics here. The latest studies show that one out of three Americans dies in a hospice setting today. Since the average local resident has three or four businesses, we think we can triple that figure.”
Townsend was confident that many would benefit from the new hospice model. “We can promise afterlife after business death. Often, in the traditional hospice setting, this is the most challenging and painful aspect of the dying and grieving process. People lose faith. Hospices do their best to offer hope, but there is simply no proof of life after death.
“Yet, here we have staff — trained staff — who can attest that ‘life after death of a Pagosa business’ is something that the business owner can count on. It is really out there… on the other side of a business death.
“Vacation days, sick days, and weekly paychecks — government jobs with medical and dental insurance are out there. If you are willing to commute to Durango, you may get a Christmas bonus as well. All the things that Stinkwater business owners have only dreamed of.
“But for those in the throes of business death, none of that seems truly real. We have to take our clients step by step through the death and grieving process until they can see the possibilities for life after business death.
“We can draw on a few of the more traditional religious approaches to death — Stinkwater as a commercial purgatory of sorts.”
Townsend insisted, however, that the Stinkwater Business Hospice was a business and not a religion.
“While we try to tap into religious strength, we are dealing with soon to be ex-businessmen, and it is simply better business to reach them in a businesslike manner. We feel this a positive and businesslike approach, far better than working out fears and frustrations with voodoo dolls — as some pf our government boards are prone to do.”
According to Townsend, the Stinkwater Business Hospice has developed a treatment program which attempts to marry the perspectives of business gurus — drawing heavily from the work of Peter Drucker and Joseph Schumpeter — with the insights into dying and death provided by the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
“Kübler-Ross, who lived in next-door Arizona, is very relevant to those suffering business death in Stinkwater today,” Townsend declared. “Of course, Kübler-Ross was focusing on the universal experience of personal bodily death. We have taken Kübler-Ross’ fivefold process — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — and reworked and adapted it to the unique Stinkwater business death process.”
According to hospice business plan research, traumatic business death often involves a remarkably consistent eight-step descent:
- Partnership with gold-medal-winning local motel owner
- Denial
- Doubt
- Murderous and suicidal ideation
- Depression
- Sympathy for the homeless guy in front of the Liberty Theatre
- Purchase of Forest Service firewood tags
- Conclusion that you can get a damn good meal at Fishes and Loaves, after all
“In addition,” Townsend summed up, “We try to give business death sufferers a clear and sympathetic understanding of the historic Stinkwater business cycle, which has traditionally involved the circular flow of small usurious loans, vicious gossip, girlfriends, Zane Grey novels, second cars with very high mileage, and bestiality jokes. This circular flow is threatened by the appearance of any new entrepreneur, and this motivates existing businesses to plan the creative destruction of the newcomer.”
Townsend concluded passionately, “No business should ever die alone — ever. Once a business sufferer understands that failure is the drum roll for the rhythm of business life in Stinkwater, a lot of the shame and self-loathing connected with business death just disappears.
“It sounds trite, but the hospice care we will share really is miraculous.”