We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mollie Lacher. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mollie below.

Mollie , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I lost my dad in 2012 and my brother in law in 2017 and in both experiences, there was so much that needed to happen after they died. How do we close out the bank accounts? Whose name is on the credit cards? What do we do about their online accounts? How do we get the cars sold and transferred. It’s a lot of time-consuming and burdensome tasks that all seemed to fall on the surviving family-who is grieving and often times has no energy to deal with these tasks. I wanted to find a company to take on these tasks for my sister in law and came up short-no one was handling these seemingly small yet very important tasks for families….so I started it myself and the business model has not changed since I started Sunny Care Services in 2018. I come along side families who have lost a loved one and I take on all the junk so they don’t have to. Calling US Bank, mailing death certificates to American Express, making phone calls to TIAA Cref pension…all of it so my clients don’t have to. And I LOVE IT. I am very much a do-er in crisis moments and love being able to bring my project management skills to families that just want someone to take care of this for them.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce Sunny Care Services to our readers?

There is a statistic that says that when a loved one dies, there are AT LEAST 100 tasks to complete after his/her death. It’s daunting and more over many surviving family members assume their estate attorney or financial advisor will handle everything task for them, but the truth is that most estate attorneys and financial advisors will not take on everything and for good reason-given an attorney’s billable rate and the fact that many of the tasks needing to be complete don’t require an attorney’s expertise, you simply just need someone to do the tasks for you-an extra set of hands.

This industry and the gray space of tasks that attorneys and financial advisors don’t handle used to not have a name so it was difficult to know what to call my business, much less my industry. Thankfully after finding a few other women running similar businesses to Sunny Care Services, we now call ourselves After Loss Professionals. I like to say we are your surrogate family member/right hand man/woman that walks families through the unknown world of losing a loved one and saying “what now?”. At Sunny Care Services, we meet with families several weeks after funeral services and based on the information we gather in an intake session with the family, we put together a plan of what needs to be done and then we complete the tasks for the families. Often times the things that need to be done are calling financial companies, closing accounts, taking names off accounts, finding appraisers, selling property, etc. but there are times when we are serving as detectives for our families-finding money, accounts and other assets in the lost loved one’s name and ensuring those assets go back to the surviving family.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I think a lesson I had to unlearn is this notion that a good idea and a good business will immediately be successful. In my experience and in many other entrepreneur’s experiences I know, good things take time. Sometimes A LOT of time. Especially when you are trying to create something new or a new industry. You have time spend a lot of time educating people on what they don’t know before you can share how you solve it and that takes a lot of time too. I just had to learn that I believed I was doing what I was called to do and that is all that matters.
Stick with it, keep doing the hard work and eventually the results will come.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

When I started Sunny Care Services, I wanted to be a safe landing place for families going through loss. There were so many times in my own personal experience with loss where people would make you feel small for not knowing what to do or how to handle something, and I wanted to make sure my clients never felt that way. In my opinion, no one should be an expert at loss or how close a loved one’s estate, so of course you won’t know how to do everything. That’s what my business does so you don’t have to know everything.

I think taking this empathetic approach with my clients has created a relationship of trust and mutual respect that I see lacking at times in the professional services space.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sunnycareservices.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sunnycareservices/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sunnycareservices/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sunny-care-services/?viewAsMember=true

Image Credits
Lauren Ladd Photography