Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Dan Garrett, Co-Founder and CEO of Farewill, the world’s probate and funerals company on a mission to change the way the world deals with death. While working in a Japanese residential home in Tokyo as part of his Masters at the Royal College of Art, Dan was confronted as he says, ‘with the ineffectiveness of end of life care’. It was designed around comfort and mobility but completely ignored the emotions or practicalities of preparing a person for death. Dan saw an opportunity to modernise the Victorian funeral care industry and set about becoming an expert in Will writing while gaining experience organising funerals. In 2015 Dan and Co-Founder, Tom Rogers, launched Farewill, offering innovative products such as online Will writing and direct cremation as well as a vastly different customer experience from that offered by solicitors and funeral directors. Farewill now writes 1 in 10 of all new Wills in the UK. They’ve received multiple best provider awards and they’ve raised over £750 million for charity through legacy pledges. I say this and it’s the first time I’ve ever said this on the programme, and of course it’s not exactly an uplifting topic, but that’s the point Dan isn’t it, I think that’s exactly what this is all about, it’s about looking at a world that we don’t want to talk about and yet of course it happens to all of us, without stating the bleeding obvious. It’s great to have you here.
Dan Garrett
Ah, it’s lovely to be here and I completely agree with what you said. Often, you know it can be a bit of a conversation stopper if someone asks you what you do and you say, ‘I’m hawkin’ funerals’ and I think often the assumption is that it’s a you know kind of dreary, miserable thing to work in and the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. You know, yes, we are regularly helping people through some of the most difficult times in their life but we have an amazing opportunity to show people how well it can be done and to help them through that grieving process and ultimately, why it’s so difficult to deal with death is because you love the people who’ve died and finding good ways to connect people back to that idea is really at the heart of what we do at Farewill and why we started the business in the first place.
Elliot Moss
The trigger, as I mentioned, was this experience that you had back in 2014 as it were or it began the thing. When I ask people about ‘the trigger’ and they go well yeah, it kind of evolved, I mean how big of a ‘this is what I’m going to do with the rest of my life’ moment was it versus a ‘well that’s interesting, I’d like to have a look at that’?
Dan Garrett
It’s always such a good point and I think about this a lot and you know I feel maybe I’ll eventually get to the truth if I do enough interviews about why I started the business. I think the, there’s a few factors in it, as there always are for why someone starts a business. I for some reason always felt like I had a good, intuitive, empathetic understanding of how awful it was for people to lose someone that they cared about. I remember just one of my teachers at school who was a young guy and his wife died and I was so, I was just, I felt so bad for him, he was such a lovely guy who lost someone at a time that it absolutely shouldn’t have done and I remember that affected, you know being surprised by my classmates not being more affected by it.
Elliot Moss
How old were you at that point?
Dan Garrett
Ah probably, I don’t know, fourteen or something. I think a really big factor for me as well was when my grandpa died, and my grandpa was just the loveliest, most fantastic person ever, just like so full of life and really joyful and he, my mum as well is just very emotionally wired, she always knows how to deal with every situation and I think even though it was quite clear my grandpa was going to die of cancer, when it happened I think my mum, understandably, just had a really hard time dealing with it and you know as a kid, seeing your parent struggle with something like that, when your parents are so unshakable and always know what to do, I think that really left an impression on me of well, this can even knock my mum for six, who always knows what to do in every situation. So, it’s funny, my brother is a musician and without either of us ever talking about you know seeing my mum go through that, he wrote a kind of beautiful, poignant album and then the liner notes, it was very much picking up on that same experience of seeing our mum go through that experience as well. So I think that impacted me a lot. I went to the Royal College of Art like you mentioned before and one of the things I really got into while I was there was, I love the aesthetic end of design but the bit that really gets me going is very tricky, human problem-solving and while I was in Tokyo and working sort of around geriatric care, we just never talked about the fact that people were going to die. You know, you were literally in the geriatric home and some of these people were over a hundred years old and all of our design work focussed on the physical side of aging, getting in and out of bed and up and down the stairs, rather than getting anywhere near the subject matter of how you look after people who you really care about when you die and that’s when I think sort of the puzzle pieces started to come together.
Elliot Moss
It’s funny, I’ve got kids and I think they all experience life differently, they all have different levels of sensibilities or sensitivities and some people just feel things more keenly than others. It sounds like you’re one of those and it’s just a nature thing rather than anything else. How did you manage in those early months and years to convert that empathy into quite a hardnosed business idea that became a business plan that then went to investors to get funding? Because that’s quite a transition as well.
Dan Garrett
Yeah, so I was working with a couple of friends of mine at the Royal College of Art and you have a final project there and I remember there was, the year before there was this great business called Gravity Sketch which is still going, it’s fantastic, and they were the best thing in the show, you know 80,000 come to the show and we sat down and we were like right, we want to come up with the best thing in this year’s show. Jury is out whether or not we did but I find I have no process for coming up with ideas, it’s just, it’s very scattergun, everything you know everywhere, all at once and…
Elliot Moss
Do you scribble though? Do you write stuff?
Dan Garrett
Yeah, I do find having tonnes of whiteboard and space really helps me to think and the honest truth of it is, you know it’s such emotionally rich territory, helping people to deal with death, and the industry is 200 years in the past and I think the confluence of those two things, I just sort of suddenly saw, there’s got to be an opportunity to do this better for people day-to-day and it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot going on in that sector, you know drive past your local sort of high street funeral director and you probably could be in the ‘50s so I think it is that sort of identifying where there isn’t so much of a focus on innovation and where there’s major human potential to do something better, it’s those two that kind of came together for me.
Elliot Moss
And then bringing it to life, you had to do an exhibition.
Dan Garrett
Yeah, yeah, so my final project there was basically the first prototype of Farewill and it was a very simple, easy to use, online Will writing tool and we focussed on one number, which was the percentage of people who included personal messages or funeral wishes in their Wills. So rather than it solely being focussed on dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, it was asking the question of ‘Can we really get people to emotionally engage in the subject?’ and we went from 1% of people putting in that kind of information, which is the industry standard, to 80% of our customers writing the most amazing, poignant, thoughtful things to you know their partners, their kids, their parents, their best friends and that’s been in the strategic bullseye of how we’ve approached the whole sector and it’s kind of just really taken off from there.
Elliot Moss
And you did that in the exhibition?
Dan Garrett
We did that in the exhibition and actually it was quite funny because you know you put so much work into making this beautiful platform and a product that really works and we’d built it inside this kind of wooden box and inside the wooden box was a printer and you know out of nowhere materialised this kind of mini Will that was printed on A5 paper and you always think people are going to be so thankful for the great work you’ve done on the website, seeing a piece of paper materialise out from behind a wall, just that was what really blew people’s minds at the time.
Elliot Moss
But also these message and I’ve just got one here, I think it’s one of your favourites but I’d love you to sort of come back with another one.
Dan Garrett
Oh yeah, this one is actually fantastic, so and we have the permission to share this before anyone considering using Farewill thinks we’re violating your privacy, but this was a guy leaving his fossil collection to his wife in his Will and he said, “These are millions and millions of years old. I love being able to hold them and marvel at the age and intricacy of our universe and the short, sharp beauty of our lives. I loved living mine. I love you.” And I just think you can’t make that stuff up. What an incredible thing to say to someone and you know, when that person dies, it is an amazing thing to receive alongside their assets and the house and the rest of it, yep.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for much more emotion, it’s the secret or rather the obvious secret I guess in a way but the obvious is always obvious once you’ve uncovered it and that’s at the centre of Farewill and Dan Garrett’s business and he’ll be back in a few minutes but right now we’ve got a clip from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. MDRx CEO, Tom Grogan and CEO, Sian Rodway talk about the Metaverse, what it is, why companies would wish to explore it and the potential risks that we should all be aware of.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Dan Garrett, Co-Founder and CEO of Farewill, the wills, probate and funerals company. So the emotion first piece, it wasn’t a marketing trick, it was actually just the truth of what made this thing so powerful and then as you said, the other key point around this industry being 200 years old and the confluence of those two things, hey presto you get Farewill. I went on the website as part of my research I aways do and it’s like it’s super friendly, it’s easy to navigate, it doesn’t feel like a negative or pessimistic or down thing, it’s a perfectly pleasant place to be and spend time. Tell me about the designer in you as you thought about developing the various things that you offer because obviously design thinking is a key part of the success of the business so far.
Dan Garrett
Yeah definitely. I think there’s, I’ve got a few thoughts on that. One is, it’s just setting the intention right from the start that the quality of the products that you want to make is really high and I think that that’s really you know it’s motivating for me and it’s motivating for everyone else in the business to know where our quality bar sits. We aim to do nothing other than create the best quality products and for us, best means different things in different arenas. When it comes to dealing with death, you know literally, neurologically when you are dealing with a death, your brain doesn’t work properly, you can’t process information in the same way and as a result simplicity is the sort of first tenet of how we’ve approached all of this. The other part and I can tell you as we’re the largest Will writer in the UK, I can tell you conclusively that people do not want to make their Wills…
Elliot Moss
No that’s true.
Dan Garrett
I promise you, and that probably resonates with anyone listening to this is, people will do anything to get out of making their Wills and if you have any hurdle or friction in the product experience, you can say goodbye to conversion rates or how well you can you know help people get to the end point so…
Elliot Moss
So you’ve got to make sure that path has no doors that on…
Dan Garrett
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
Inside of it, you’ve got to keep them all closed, keep going, making you actually write the thing.
Dan Garrett
And copywriting, when I started the business you think everyone can write and actually having to develop that clarity of thought over what you’re trying to communicate and then working with really brilliant writers to bring that to life is so much of you know great modern web design. The other part of is on the brand end of things and I think you sort of alluded to it earlier. Farewill is bright yellow and it’s very encouraging and friendly and empowering and part of this is that a lot of the sector so far relies on you going to an expert, you know you have to go and see a solicitor for £2,000 and only they can help you understand your situation. Well actually, for the vast majority of people, they’re capable of understanding what they need to do themselves and we really come from a very sort of customer first perspective where we build our tools to empower people to get the thing that they want and I think that sort of momentum and energy and encouragement that we’ve built into our brand helps people to kind of believe that they can get the best out of it too.
Elliot Moss
And in terms of the team that you’ve constructed, you talk about the quality of the, quality bar is a lovely thought and you talked about the copywriting being critical and the colours and all these things, you’ve thought about it all. In terms of these people that help you deliver that, how do you identify a Farewill person?
Dan Garrett
We’re quite lucky in that a lot of people who work in technology, when you reach out to them and say hello, do you want to come and work in the death industry, will say no, I don’t, so there’s a…
Elliot Moss
Funny you should ask but no thank you.
Dan Garrett
Yeah, so there’s a kind of self-selecting quality of people who think you know what, this is interesting and I want to work in an area where I’m helping people to do something which is really hard and really awful and I want to be there at one of the worst times in their life which means that we’re inherently getting people who are very empathetic. I think the other part of it is for some reason we have a very multidisciplinary team, I think you make some early hires and it kind of pans out like that but we’re really a team of generalists so, everyone is pretty plugged into our product experience and the way that we write things and what’s going on in the rest of the company and overall I think that that’s helped to bring a consistency to how we’ve designed our products that’s hard to get elsewhere but yeah, I think there’s a real warmth and empathy in the people who’ve chosen to join Farewill and luckily for us it’s quite self-selecting.
Elliot Moss
And is there a warmth and empathy of General Dan, as he thinks about his troops?
Dan Garrett
Um, if General Dan, I was saying on the way here to record this that I was listening to a podcast about Napolean, I needed that to not overly influence my answers here, yeah, definitely, you know I think the culture emerges pretty organically from who’s in the business and I wouldn’t want to pretend that I’m always lovely and warm and friendly but…
Elliot Moss
No but you seem like a fair guy, I imagine you can be clear and firm because if the standards aren’t being met, you will say the standards aren’t being met but you won’t do it in a too tough way.
Dan Garrett
I think that actually hasn’t always been my strong suit, to be completely honest and actually the team that I have around me in my kind of direct leadership team, it’s we’re always looking to balance those sorts of things and you know, Jenny who is our Chief Commercial Officer is just so good at all the things that I’m not good at and she’s really fair and she sets really high standards and it’s been incredible to see, even you know as, it’s not like we started the company a year ago, even as a relatively developed company, people like Jenny, Nicky, Michael, Melissa, the people I’ve got in working directly with me, really influencing the culture, setting really high standards and you know compensating for some of my shortcomings.
Elliot Moss
You talked about your shortcomings and I’m not going to get you to list them all out here Dan, don’t worry, we’ll do that afterwards, but in terms of people around you that have been mentors to you, I know there’s been, there are a number, just talk to me a little bit about the role that they play to help Dan become the best version of Dan.
Dan Garrett
Work in progress, that one.
Elliot Moss
For all of us.
Dan Garrett
Definitely is some of the people who’ve hugely influenced me, the Chair of our Board, Tracey, who I’ve been working with for a long time and you know I started the business straight out of university so I had relatively little experience and Tracey has been with the business right from the beginning and for the majority of it as our Chair so, I’ve just learnt a huge amount from her, she’s the kind of most consummate operational expert that I’ve met and…
Elliot Moss
And how does she convey that because often we talk about you know blithely, oh yes, I’ve got a mentor and very useful but in terms of specifics, just give me one example of where her mentoring you has changed the way that you look at things.
Dan Garrett
Ah, yeah, I mean one of the things she does for me is run an annual review and there was a point in time I think where you know the people that I was working with directly, were getting really frustrated and I just couldn’t hear that feedback, you know I was being too stressful about everything and every time they raised it with me directly, I’d just you know come up with some excuse about where they were wrong and Tracey managed to really get me to hear that and change my behaviour. That’s just one example but the main way that she gets me to see the light is just by continuously proving me wrong and unfortunately, she has always been right about everything so, she’ll just calmly explain to me why I should think about something differently. Sometimes not calmly explain to me…
Elliot Moss
Depends. Depends whether you’re listening or not. And then I know I think you had a mentor called Lucy who passed away and I think that she was there when you, people don’t know, you had a, you kind of burnt out, literally, you collapsed on the street and kind of probably reassessed what Dan was all about and how to go about it. Just tell me a little bit about Lucy.
Dan Garrett
Well yeah so, I’d burnt out, I definitely was working way too hard and I always thought burnout was made up and then I literally collapsed in the street and it was interesting to go through that and I’m grateful for the experience, it was very useful for me and Lucy, I got introduced to actually via Tracey, who was then my coach for probably four years or something and I’d just never met anyone like her, she’s just the, was and still is the most incredible person that I’ve ever met in terms of, it’s hard to describe what a great coach can do but someone who really is on your side through every possible environment and can help you to you know make the right decisions and do things that ultimately help you to fulfil your potential and yeah, like you said, very sadly she died a couple of years ago of cancer and that was probably the worst grief that I’ve gone through on a personal level and yeah, I really miss her.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with my guest today, it’s Dan Garrett. And we’ve got some music from Emma-Jean Thackray, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Dan Garrett is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. I want to cover three things very quickly. You have enabled almost, I think it’s about three-quarters of a billion pounds to go to charities as a result of people putting them in their Wills. How does that make you feel? Before we get into how you do it.
Dan Garrett
Yeah, great, it’s such a motivating part of what we do and just to be clear, that’s been pledged inside the Wills rather than has gone to the charities but it’s a total delight to work with, with probably about 300 charities around the UK now directly and we’ve raised money for probably 2000 of them and we have a big kind of scoreboard in our office that’s the total amount of money pledged for charity. You know, we’ll do more in a year pledged than the biggest charity in the UK, ten times more than Comic Relief per head in our team, we’re pretty much the most successful fundraising organisation in Europe.
Elliot Moss
And was it an objective at the beginning? You talked early on about you know…
Dan Garrett
I wish I could say it was and that I had it all figured out in advance, I had absolutely no idea about any of this but what you realise is that one in three pounds in the UK that goes to the third sector comes through gifts and wills so, historically, the way that it’s worked is that you’ll have a big charity that will do a tv campaign and then twenty years later they find out if that was a success. What we’ve been able to do is work with charities to run digital first campaigns as well as tv ones but understand their results immediately, so we give them all the tools they need to analyse campaign results, they can basically say right, we invested 500 grand over here on this form of advertising and that’s going to translate into this degree of legacy income in the future, so we’re kind of giving them those modern marketing tools and the platform to be able to scale their legacy income.
Elliot Moss
So, if I’m a trustee listening, and I am personally a trustee of a charity as well, what do I need to do to plug into this if I’m thinking about how do I make this happen for my own charity?
Dan Garrett
So it kind of depends on the scale of the charity. We work with some really small, grassroots organisations where basically all you need to do is contact our team, which is on our website, Farewill.com, and we can get set up in a matter of hours. Basically works via voucher codes, so you would write to your supporter base and say ‘Do you want to make will for free?’ so basically charities pay for bulk wills and then we create co-branded landing pages and journeys and do all of the data integration side of it and that generally takes less than a day.
Elliot Moss
It’s back to the frictionless point you made. And then just briefly because I’ve got one thought as well about the cost of all this and I know that’s important to you. Recently I’ve had some people on the programme who talk about what happened in Covid and suddenly these incredible secrets come out, all the kind of un, you know people didn’t make a big noise about them because it wasn’t the right thing to do of course. If I’m right, you decided to give anyone who worked in the NHS the ability to write a free will during Covid and I think you, is that correct, firstly?
Dan Garrett
Yeah, yeah, that’s correct, yeah.
Elliot Moss
And it was almost 10,000 of them as well.
Dan Garrett
I think 10,000 in a couple of weeks which is reasonably significant, obviously you know in the type of business where during Covid demand went through the roof, I think at one point we onboarded thirty new people into the business over a couple of weeks. But yeah, you are totally right, for us pricing is, it comes back to simplicity in the first place of just giving people a clear price that they’re paying and then it goes to accessibility, you know there are lots of people who don’t have the opportunity to spend hundreds or thousands of pounds on a will, there are tonnes of families when they lose someone that they really love, they can’t afford a £5,000 funeral even though they pay for it, so for us making sure that we’re really leading the market in terms of quality of customer experience but also value for money, is so, so important.
Elliot Moss
In terms of the future, very briefly, just before I go to your song choice, what’s the shape of your business going to look like Mr Designer? Where are you designing this thing? How big is this going to be? Or is size not the thing you’re interested in?
Dan Garrett
Um, yeah, I don’t tend to think in terms of size first, I think that we’re going through a really interesting period of transformation in the death industry and we’re really proud to play a leading part in that. I would love to get to a point where people really understood what their options when death comes around and they were able to make smart, well-informed decisions, as you would for any other purchase, you know there is no other instance in which you go down your local high street and spend £7,000 on something without shopping around and the end point for us is, we refer to internally as ‘brighter goodbyes’, it’s the someone who has a Will, it does the job for them and it also has these you know thoughtful, emotional parts to it that for someone who is going through a funeral that they have the opportunity to really think about what the best way is to celebrate that person’s life and for someone going through the probate process that they have a fair price and the best possible experience and as we’ve been working over the last seven years to bring this to life, I think it’s started to have a ripple effect on other people in the sector so, you know we’re part of how this is changing and for me, I really want to see us build a very well recognised and loved brand because I think there’s a lot of the solution to the problem people not knowing where to go.
Elliot Moss
It’s been great talking to you, Dan, thank you, thank you for your openness, I’ve learnt a lot and I’ve learnt about the death industry, which is kind of a, again, we don’t talk about these things enough and it’s time to start smashing these taboos properly now. Just before you disappear, what’s your song choice, why have you chosen it?
Dan Garrett
Ah, my song choice is a song called Lazy Nina by Greg Phillinganes and I’ve listened to Jazz FM since I was about twelve years old and two of my friends are both really good jazz musicians and they got me listening to music that I liked way more, Max and Amelio, and I remember often listening to this song with Max after school, just one headphone each and yeah, I absolutely love it and listen to it all the time.
Elliot Moss
That was Lazy Nina from Greg Phillinganes, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Dan Garrett. He talked about setting the intentions early in the business, right when you started up so that you get that quality bar as high as it possibly can be. He talked about the importance of simplicity, how easy is it to fall into the trap of complicating whatever it is that you’re doing and finally, the thought around connecting empathy and emotion and channelling that as you create a really powerful business, whatever it is that you’re thinking about doing. Great stuff. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.