23. Creating A Business Driven By Love & Loss With Life Ledger Founder Ruth Blakemore

When someone passes away, the bereaved left behind have to face the administrative burden of trying to inform organisations of the death. Following her own personal experience of such complexities, Ruth Blakemore created a business as a legacy to her mum that can alleviate the burden many people face when losing the one dearest to them. Listen to the episode in full to find out more about how Life Ledger can help you.

Life Ledger - https://lifeledger.com/ 

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Transcript

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Hi, I'm Andy Eeley, Senior Funeral Director for G Seller Independent Funeral Directors. And we've been serving bereaved families since 1910. I'm sure you're all well aware there's lots of different myths, taboos, and misconceptions around what happens behind the scenes within the funeral profession. So we decided to put together this series of podcasts to answer those questions and hopefully dispel those myths. So please do like, share and subscribe and send those questions. Send them to liftingthelid@gseller.co.uk and we will do our absolute best to answer them for you. It genuinely is Our Family Caring For Your Family. Welcome to the latest episode of Lifting the Lid. Today I have something slightly different. I have Ruth Blakemore, one of the founders of Life Ledger hello, Ruth. How are you? Hello, Andy. I'm very well, thank you. Good. We'll hear about Life Ledger in a few moments, but first and foremost, Ruth, tell us a bit about yourself. Introduce yourself. Who are you and how did you get to this hot seat? I used to work wise I used to help run big companies, a bank, a building society, and various other things. And about 2016, my mother passed away, which I'm sure we'll talk about. And I had already started along the journey of doing things that were more passion projects for myself. So I'd already been running a global charity, Plastic Ocean. I'd already been running a music business, which I loved. Brilliant. And then for the first time, wanted to start my own thing. And so I started Life Ledger, which launched in 2021. Okay. We're going to come on to Life Ledger in a few moments. I'm interested in you. So you mentioned there, so it sounds like there's a huge driving force with mum passing away. Yes. So can we not delve into it as such, but can you give me a bit more detail there? I mean, did you have any support, for example? What was it like when mum passed away? Because I suspect some of this led into the Life Ledger and how it came about. It did. I was very lucky with my parents, I suppose most people would say that. Mum was very proud of us girls and expected a lot of us. And she had a great relationship with my father. Long marriage, very loving. And in I think about 2010, my mum was diagnosed with dementia. And she had actually done voluntary work overseas. She'd been working in Africa and places like that, developing barrier nursing techniques, she was a medical person, for Ebola and very and various other things. And because of that, she was always being treated or given vascular vaccinations for malaria. And they gave her lariam, and she developed lariam poisoning, which the armed forces have suffered from as well. And when she developed dementia, the lariam poisoning, it was a brain disorder which exacerbated the dementia. So she was first diagnosed in 2010, and by February 2016, she passed away. I see. Obviously, I have a sister and a father, and we managed our way through that together. What were your coping mechanisms there? How did you manage that together? Sounds like you got great support there, but how did you cope? It was a strange dynamic and in many ways very positive. My sister and I have always been really close. She's my older sister and she looks after me, and I look after her. My dad had always been super focused on my mother, and their love affair was an example to us all. And when mum passed away, he turned and faced us, two girls so we had more of his attention and time than we'd ever had. And more cuddles. So during that time, we became very close and talked a lot and tried to listen to each other. And I suppose that's how we got through it all. Brilliant. So Life Ledger. Yes. Obviously, an integral part of that, something that was born out of that period of time. Yes. So I think first and foremost, what is Life Ledger? Just for the people listening. I know, but what is it? I think it serves a problem in the community, which is that when somebody passes away, the bereaved left behind very quickly have to face the administrative burden. And this was something you'd experience, no doubt. It was, absolutely, of trying to inform organisations of the death. When my mum passed away, I partly wanted to do something which was a legacy to her. And I'd run and been involved with lots of big businesses, tech, all sorts of banking, media. So I looked around the world and tried to find gaps in the market that would help the elderly or the bereaved. And something happened which really made a massive impact on me. My dad was at home one day, maybe five days after my mum died, and I walked in and he was crying. And I'd never seen him cry in my life. He's a Yorkshire man and very direct, straightforward, doesn't like to be a bother to anybody. And he eventually opened up as to what the problem was. And he'd been to get a death certificate from a registrar and had that original death certificate. And as a Yorkshire man, he was very keen to make sure he did everything properly. And he started off trying to protect assets. So he went to the building society that my mother had an account with. And it was lunchtime, and he queued up at lunchtime and waited and waited and finally got to the front of the queue. And the lady who served him was lovely and said, I'm so sorry, sir, we don't deal with that over the counter. You need to make a special appointment. Oh, really? Yeah. And I'm sure everybody doesn't handle it in the same way. But typical of my dad, he didn't phone. He went. And when he got there, he wanted them to help him. And he had his death certificate in his hand. And he pleaded. He said, I have the death certificate here. I'm in my late 80s. My wife's just passed away. Could you just acknowledge the death certificate so I don't have to start again? And they said, I'm worried about the account. I don't know if it's safe. And they said, I'm so sorry, we have a way of doing things. You're going to have to go home, phone this number, and book an appointment with a special person who's very well qualified to help you properly. I understand how organisations want to streamline specialist services, and I'm very glad that this is deemed to be a skill that they want to learn and do properly. But I think increasingly, when somebody dies, you're dealing with maybe 30, maybe more organisations at a very difficult time on phone lines waiting for phones to be answered, and then you may be diverted to a specialist or have to phone back in, or have a call back and start a process which is very difficult when you've just lost a dear one. Absolutely. When perhaps your memory isn't at its best, perhaps your patience isn't at its best. You're dealing with all grief and everything, and you've got this on top as well, the financial side. So in looking around at all the smart, lovely ideas that I could have done to try and leave a legacy for my mum, I looked back and remembered that and thought, is that a mountain that's climbable? I don't know. No. So Life Ledger. So I talk to families a lot about the Tell Us Once service, when we discuss registration. When I talk about that, I talk about all the government bodies, DVLA, state pension, etc etc all notified in one go. The registrar does it for you. Lovely. Great service. Lovely. I always say that Life Ledger is the same. It consolidates everything, but all the personal bits, all the personal bank accounts, private bits, and pensions, and so on. So how does that make it easier? I mean, I answered it there for you. How does it make it easier for the family there? Actually, I started this journey by going to the government and spent quite a lot of time with government people asking their advice. What do you do already? What would you like to do? What are your ambitions for this area? Hoping they would say, don't you worry, we're going to close the gap. But of course, they can't afford to pay taxpayers money to support service providers in that way. So I ended up with their support, a lot of support and advice. They explained the Tell Us Once service and they showed it to me. And what we do now is with over a thousand service providers, some enormous and some not so great, but that massive proportion of the marketplace, work with us. And if they don't, we'll still send a notification. We will take information which is put into a file and we'll notify any and all service providers in the marketplace, and we will notify Tell Us Once, if you'd like us to. Brilliant. So it was going to be one of my questions, how does it work? We mentioned it, certainly on your website, it's free. It is free. Yeah. So how can you do this? How does it work? Right. We did look at lots of different business models and we came up with two. The first is I've obviously run big service providers myself, and in doing so, I know even 10 years ago how what an expense a call centre is and running that back end service is something that has to be done very professionally and very efficiently. And the complications of nonstandard processes is a tricky area for any service provider with a strong brand and a strong service ethic. And if you look at any of these service providers, the amount of work that goes into registering a death through their processes is not insubstantial. So what we do is we ask the service providers to remunerate us because we save them time and money. And so that anyone coming to us will be able to do all of this, register their information and make sure it's safe. We're very clear on data security and the identification. And then we keep their file absolutely safely. And that allows us not just to notify one service provider, but to notify all of them. And the other thing we do is, which is a very big growing area for our business is for your relative or yourself, you can preregister with us. So if you're, for example, writing a will, you can come to us, put your personal information in, you know, where your assets are, for example, or your utilities are with, your account numbers. And then when you pass away, the bereaved who are dealing with your estate don't have that hurdle to climb because that file is already there and we can notify people with the bereaved carefully and efficiently. So it goes hand in hand. We've sparked a huge change or trend. Pre-Paid funeral plans, people are a lot more switched on wanting to organise things and help the next generation with the bereavement, so they can really focus on their bereavement without having to worry about the funeral. So this is additional to that, isn't it? You can preempt it and pre plan it, and it's there, ready to make life easier for your children, I guess. When I look back, it's a bit like sliced bread, really. You look back and you think, gosh, everybody pretty much goes through this process of losing the one dearest to them. And within three to five days, they're on the phone to a bank holding, or anybody, an energy provider, holding, trying to register the fact that their husband, wife, mother has died. It's a terrible time. And surely, we can do better than that. And you have to revisit it over and over again. And sometimes there's a very long tale. People can be doing it three years later. And then, of course, there's the sitting in the queue, the phone queue, or in your father's case, a physical queue. Yeah, exactly. Incredibly difficult. And people get angry. And I don't think they are angry because they think the service provider is trying to be unhelpful. They're angry because the world isn't set up right. Yeah. I think it's a great service. From our perspective, it's incredibly simple how we share the information. It's one button. Brilliant. So it's really, really intuitive like that. It's great. You fill this niche, as you put it, this gap. So Life Ledger, it's day one. How do you feel as one of the founders? Gosh, well, I was very lucky. There was a very good friend of mine, Tremayne Carew Pole I'd known him for nearly 20 years. And I at the same time of wanting this business to be good and strong and to grow quickly. I also had my father who had just lost his wife and needed my help and care. So I knew I would be with him a lot of the time. So I wanted to help and do all I could, but I wanted somebody to be there 24/7 running the thing. And Tremayne, my great friend came in to run it. So on day one, I think we were both very excited. We could see a massive potential for helping people and a massive potential for changing a market. And I care about it very much. And I think I was very proud. Good. So how's it grown? So we start off with that small idea. Where are we at now? I mean, is it a success? I think I know the answer to this from a previous conversation because your role has changed as well. So talk us through that. How's it going? Yes. Well, we serve about 2% of the market now. We've got 21 people in the team and others helping who aren't employed. We've got offices in London and an operational base in Cornwall where we want to drive employment. We've got a lovely team, very proud of them. Lovely mixture of skills, experience and values, which is really important. Is it a small team? Is it growing? There's about 21 staff at the moment, and it's growing all the time, as you can imagine. It's fair to say we're growing fairly quickly. And some of the service providers that we've worked with for a while are now integrating with us digitally. So we tend to go through big step changes where a lot of registrars send us people who we can help, and we will then send their notifications to a service provider. But increasingly, more and more, the service providers are integrating us into their systems, and now we have all of their bereaved customers coming through us. So we have step changes of growth, which is great because we're helping everyone that comes through us. Absolutely. It's lovely. Future goals. Where are we heading? Are you integrating more with Tell Us Once? What are your thoughts? Where are you going? Where is Life Ledger headed? I think the service is important in both areas. So for us to be able to work with the individual bereaved, putting notifications through the service providers is very important. Register of life is very important to us, where we're preregistering people and we can help in all sorts of environments, in hospitals, in hospices. And I think that's an important area for us as people of estate planning. And I think we'll go more and more into that. And we may one day look at other life events where we're able to transmit and share data files on behalf of individuals who change names or change addresses. That may be in our future. But I don't see us diverting greatly from where we are, except potentially geographically, because this is a very important market, I think. It's a big market change and we want to do it very well. Good. I think you've made an incredibly good start with it. I've got a couple more questions about you. Yes, of course. But is there anything else you want to tell us about Life Ledger while you've got an opportunity? Tell me. I suppose I did want to just reiterate that the team we've got are amazing. They work very, very hard. With 21 people split across two bases, we work hard to keep together and we're evolving very quickly. That amount of change is difficult for everybody. But for us, we have to always remember that the people we are touching are either vulnerability or bereavement specialists within organisations or are the bereaved. We need to bear in mind that everything we do touches people who need us. So we have to act very carefully and I'm very proud of the team. Brilliant. Very strong core values, no doubt. Very strong core values, yeah. Ruth, perfect. So some personal questions? Yes, of course. Okay. So you wanted to do this for mum? I did, yes. Is it comforting? Do you feel you have achieved something there? I do. It's a mixture of two things that please me. One is I think when my mum was growing up, she was one of seven. I have 26 first cousins. Wow, okay. And she, as a woman and as one of seven, didn't feel she was given the opportunity to have a career in the way she wanted to. She first got a degree in her late 30s. And she had a lovely career in the end, but she always felt she would have liked to have started a lot earlier. And so she was always very proud when she saw me running organisations. And for her legacy to be something in business, I think, would make her very proud. But also, I think the other thing is that this is built off something I observed my dad struggling with. And it's at that moment when my mum would have stepped in and said, It's all right, Ken, I'll deal with it. And so in a strange way, I've been able to do that for her. So do you think it's something that you've used to focus your bereavement on? I think probably, somewhat. When my mum first died, I actually really seriously stopped sleeping to the point where I went to sleep clinics and things. And it took a while, really, for me to feel I was processing this stuff reasonably well. I stalled for a long time. And as I talk about the business, even if I'm not talking about my mother, I think it's all part of the process. Yeah, all part and parcel. Yeah. I think it's healthy. Brilliant. If you had one more minute with mum, what would you say? Oh, goodness. Well, first of all, I'd like her to know that dad's okay. He'll be 93 soon. But he's done really well. He was always a very sickly child, so I can't believe he's outlived everybody. But I suppose I'd want her to know I did this for her. And I think that would say everything. Yeah. And I think you should be proud of that. I hope so. Absolutely. I hope so. Ruth, thank you so much for your time. It's an incredibly useful, good service. It truly is. Thanks for giving me the time to talk about it. No problem. Thank you. So thank you. Thanks again to Ruth. Please do like, share, subscribe, send those questions. Send them to lliftingthelid@gseller.co.uk And as always, we do our best to answer them. Of course, we'll see you next time. Thank you.