Jones-Wynn Selected as Runner Up for the 2014 Funeral Director of the Year

Like many of her peers in funeral service, Dana Jones Wynn, the president and CEO of Jones-Wynn Funeral Homes &  Crematory in Villa Rica, Georgia, was destined to be a funeral director – born into the business as the daughter of Clyde and  Shirley Jones, who founded the funeral home – then named Jones Funeral Home – in 1950. “I was brought home from the hospital to the funeral home in 1952, so I’ve been here quite awhile,” joked Jones Wynn, 62. When Jones Wynn’s mother died in 1983, her father decided to exit the business, and Dana took it over with her husband, Charles Wynn, who became a licensed funeral director and embalmer. The couple opened a second location in Douglasville in 1999, but Charles Wynn died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 49. “The questions came hard and fast,” Ellen Wynn-McBrayer, a funeral director, embalmer and the chief marketing officer at Jones-Wynn Funeral Homes & Crematory, wrote in a history about the funeral home. “Will the company survive? What will the community do? Will Dana survive? With any president/CEO of a company dying so young and so suddenly, the possibility of the company surviving seemed somewhat low.”

The adversity, however, brought Jones Wynn’s true leadership to the surface. “First, she realized that she had to protect her family, followed by her company, her funeral home family, her community, and then herself,” Wynn-McBrayer wrote. “Sue put all others first, just like a soldier at war. All she knew was that she had to survive.”

Jones Wynn said that when she met Charles, “My dad said he could see a good funeral director a mile off, and he told me that this gentleman would make an excellent funeral director. And Charles went on to get his license, and we married in 1971. Later on, we changed the name of the business to Jones-Wynn.” Jones Wynn later remarried to someone outside of funeral service but kept her last name. Keeping the business going after the death of her first husband was difficult, but Jones Wynn never wavered. “He was an excellent funeral director, our lead funeral director, and his death was a blow to us all –to our family and our community,”

Jones Wynn said. “But I decided theday it happened that we would remain the same. We had a terrible thing happen to us, but we would show that our ship was steady in the water, and we’d continue giving the service we gave, and we’ve continued that promise up to today.” To honor her late husband, Jones Wynn established the Charles W.Wynn Memorial Scholarship, which is given to a student at Gupton-Jones College of Funeral Service in Decatur,Georgia. Despite the blow of Charles’ death, the business has remained strong: It serves more than 300 families per year at its two locations and added a crematory two years ago. It also owns a 30-acre perpetual care cemetery, Meadowbrook Memory Gardens, which it developed in 1977. The cemetery includes a chapel mausoleum that can seat about 125 people. The cremation rate at the firm is approaching 40 percent, and while the funeral home helps all families, Jones Wynn thinks that it’s important for cremation families to have a permanent place to remember their loved ones. “People need some way to remember,” she said. “I had a family the other day that chose cremation, and they created a gazebo in their yard and planted shrubbery and roses, and that was their garden of remembrance,” she said. “If they moved, they plan to create another garden.” But not all cremation families recognize the need for such a thing, she said. The funeral home has been recognized numerous times with the NFDA’s Pursuit of Excellence award, and it was one of just eight recipients of its Best of the Best of Pursuit of Excellence Award in 2007. Other honors include being awarded the 2006 Initiative Award by the NFDA, which is given annually to an exceptional woman who has made noteworthy professional contributions to funeral service, and she was the recipient of the 2001 Small Business Person of the Year Award for Douglas County. It was also under her leadership that the funeral home won the Cox Family Small Business of the Year Award in 2010.

Jones Wynn has also served as a mentor for the NFDA’s Meet the Mentors program, which is something she’s particularly enjoyed. “I was a little apprehensive at first, but being a mentor was awesome,” she said. “I learned from them, and they were very polite, and they learned from me. It was just a really enriching experience, and I’m so glad I did it.”

An active member of her community, she’s a member of the First Baptist Church of Villa Rica, where she’s served on numerous committees, and serves on the University Board of Trustees at the State University of West Virginia, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1974 and a master’s degree in education in 1977. She’s also a member of the Carroll County Chamber of Commerce, the Douglas County Chamber of Commerce, the Douglas County/Douglasville Cultural Arts Society and numerous other community organizations.

Jones Wynn also encourages her employees to be active in the community: Instead of giving out Christmas bonuses, she hands out incentive checks based on an employee’s amount and type of community service and involvement. “With bonuses, people expect them, and because I believe in community service, I think if you can’t work in the community then you really don’t know how to serve families,” Jones Wynn said. “So I decided we would sit down and do a review to see how much community service someone was doing, and we rate that on a five point scale.” Jones Wynn has doled out bonuses of more than $1,000 based on a person’s community service, and the funeral home also gives employees time off to conduct community service. “We make our community service fun,” Jones Wynn said. “At one community event, we served 500 senior adults at a picnic. There are a lot of people involved in it, but our staff serves the food, and it’s so much fun to see how fast we can serve 500 people. We just have a good time.”

The best part about being a funeral director, Jones Wynn said, is the ability to help others. “I like showing them that I care, and that I want to help them, walk with them and do all I can to make their journey and their path a little easier,” she said. “No one chooses what journey to go on, but you want to be there to walk with them and show them that it’s not as lonesome as it can be – that there’s someone who cares and will hold their hand.”