Meet The Disruptors: Sam Grice Of Guardian Angel On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Resilience to being told no. Being told no is part and parcel of being an entrepreneur. Being resilient to it is key. That doesn’t mean ignoring advice, but it does mean you have to be prepared for people to think what you’re doing isn’t going to work.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sam Grice, CEO of Guardian Angel.
Sam Grice founded UK death-tech firm, Guardian Angel, in 2017 one year after his mother died unexpectedly in a car accident. He left his successful career in banking to launch Guardian Angel, with the aim of making planning for death more accessible and affordable. Today, they offer a one-stop-shop to plan and prepare for death — everything from funeral planning to lasting will of attorney. Sam has secured £1.6m of seed fund investment which has partly been used to build and launch a new tool called BOW that gives users a credit score for death.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
If you’d told me I would be leading a business in the death tech space 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. I was on a very different path entirely. I was knee-deep in the world of banking, working as an equity analyst. Enjoying analytical number crunching, but missing the space to solve real problems that we all face day-to-day.
Then my Mum died suddenly in a car crash in 2016. There is no sugar coating it, it devastated me.
The support we received from family and friends after Mum’s death was incredible. But it was equally overwhelming. My Aunt swooped in and sorted everything out, from the funeral logistics to the day-to-day bits that don’t stop, even though your world does. At the funeral, Dad referred to her as our Guardian Angel. We all need one of those.
It meant I was forced to dive into the weird world of end-of-life planning. I experienced how wildly inadequate it was so I set about trying to fix it. And so Guardian Angel was born. Looking back, re-engaging with this space for work was pretty bold.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
The space we’re in is ripe for disruption. In 2016, when Mum died tech was making our lives easier in almost every field — except for the death space — where, arguably we needed support the most. That’s where I started, by creating an online bereavement platform that helped families in the immediate aftermath of the death of a loved one and built supportive communities that lasted long after the funeral had been and gone.
But where we’re most disruptive is our approach to two of the key barriers to planning for death.
We knew from our own experience and from talking to our 100K community that one of the biggest reasons why people don’t put plans in place in case they die is that they don’t know where to start. Our solution — BOW. It’s like a credit score, but for death. Users take a quick quiz and we use our proprietorial algorithm to give each person a score, that tells them how prepared they are, as well as providing tailored suggestions on how to improve — based on their life situation.
The second key barrier to people getting properly prepared is that it feels daunting. We’re addressing this by saving people time and money with our one-stop-shop approach to end-of-life planning. BOW is the UK’s first consolidated planning tool, avoiding the inefficient and fragmented structure of traditional end-of-life planning. Once users have their score they can then take legal, financial and emotional actions to better prepare for death then and there. Now there is no need to fill out endless forms with lawyers, insurers and funeral directors when you can enter your key details once in BOW — saving you time, money and one too many headaches.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
The strangest was probably when I’d gone for a meeting with a funeral director and had failed to leave before a family arrived and started sharing all of their decisions about their loved one’s funeral with me and the funeral director. I ended up playing the role I planning of the funeral. Although actually, because it is something I’d been through myself I think I wasn’t totally useless. What did I learn? I guess the power of sharing our own experiences and providing people with emotional and functional support when they need it most.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Two of the biggest mentors have been Rod and Andrew. They’re both lead investors and were two of the first people who believed in my vision before we even had a working product. Not only have they helped with the business strategy and how to pull together a strong pitch for other investors, but over the years they’ve become more mentors than investors, and have been people I can turn to for all sorts of the strange things you need support with when running a business. I still rely on them today.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
This is a great point. We’re not interested in being disruptors for the sake of it.
A good example of this is in the products we offer and how we guide people through them. We’re a tech company but a lot of what we do as a business is using tech to facilitate in-person conversations about end-of-life plans rather than avoid or replace them. That might mean stripping away the jargon so you can focus on talking about what your wishes are rather than trying to decode documents. Or using technology to provide better frameworks for in-person conversations in the immediate aftermath of a death, e.g. Bereaved families can carve out time when they would like visits from friends and family, and when they need time alone in our Support Hubs.
We wouldn’t ever want to lose that balance. A good example is Life Insurance, this doesn’t need disruption like banking did — the underlying product is not broken. The way it’s distributed is.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
Resilience to being told no. Being told no is part and parcel of being an entrepreneur. Being resilient to it is key. That doesn’t mean ignoring advice, but it does mean you have to be prepared for people to think what you’re doing isn’t going to work.
I’ve found that being passionate about what I do, and knowing firsthand the impact we can have from my experience with Mum makes it so much easier to brush off the no’s, learn from the advice, and keep moving forward.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Absolutely no. Our mission is to make death easier. For us, that means creating a one-stop-shop to help people plan for and through death. Our focus is now on building that out so that we can bring everything under one roof with Bow, the UK’s first consolidated planning tool and help to save people time, money and stress when they’re going through this process.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely has to be up there. I actually got to meet him once which was a real fan moment. It resonates with me as someone that studied economics because so often the theories we study didn’t seem to apply in the real world around me. Being comfortable with focusing on the real-world solutions rather than being too married to the ‘right’ way to do something has been helpful to me in running a business. A lot of it is messy, hacky and oh-too-real. Getting lost in the theory of how you should approach a problem at this level can be distracting or too time-consuming.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Grief only exists where love lived first.” — Franchesca Cox.
Losing someone you love is really tough, and the more you love them the tougher it is. It takes a while, but you start to realise that the grief you’re feeling is just the love that you had for that person. I will never forget my Mum, 5 years on I am thankful for the relationship and memories that we had.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Hmm. If I could use our experience with Mum to encourage more people to put a plan in place for the people they love I’d be pretty happy — whether that’s with us or one of our competitors. I know how much of an impact that can have at the time where you really do need it most.
That’s why I always say to people your Will or your Life Insurance… isn’t yours. You’ll never use the plan you’ve put in place. But the people you love will. It might not be on their birthday wish list but it really is the most amazing gift to give them. Not only does it allow them to concentrate on the important stuff when their whole world will have been turned upside down, but it gives them the confidence of knowing that they’ve done you proud.
How can our readers follow you online?
You can give us a follow on Instagram or Facebook at @guardianangelnetwork
And you can find out your score at guardianangel.network/bow. Mine’s 70% — which is embarrassingly low given I look after a start-up trying to solve this problem
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Sam Grice Of Guardian Angel On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
