Zillah Byng-Thorne is on one of the longest journeys it is possible to take in business. The Scottish chief executive, with a distinct Glasgow accent, moved last year from the glamorous world of magazine publishing at Future – based in Bath and home to glossy titles including Marie Claire and Country Life – to funeral provider Dignity.
We meet at Dignity’s cavernous death palace on an industrial estate in Walthamstow, east London, from where many funerals in the north and east of the capital are organised.
Byng-Thorne is philosophical about the abrupt career change. ‘At the heart of it, it is still about delivering services to consumers.
‘We are helping people with something that really matters. It’s at a point in their lives when they don’t have muscle memory or experience and need to be guided through it,’ she earnestly explains.
Death is all around us as we speak. An acrid smell of formaldehyde pervades the atmosphere. But the floor below us is a hive of activity.
Shining black hearses are lining up for the day’s burials and cremations. New bodies, ‘guests’ as they are referred, head for short-term preparation and refrigeration.
Revival: Zillah Byng-Thorne is engaged in a complex turnaround at Dignity
In the next room embalmers are at work preparing bodies for dispatch. In the workshop a carpenter is hammering a silk lining into a dark, teak coffin replete with shining brass handles.
As she takes me from department to department Byng-Thorne, clad in dark trousers and a colourful top, seems remarkably at ease with all that is going on around her.
It is hard to avert one’s eyes from a sign outside the arrivals cold store which reminds colleagues not to forget the trays designed to collect bodily fluids draining from the deceased.
When Zillah was asked to become chief executive of Dignity, which had been taken private by insurance pioneer Peter Wood and associate Gary Channon at Castlenau Investments, she wasn’t sure she could deal with the subject matter.
‘So as part of my due diligence I wanted to go and visit some of the funeral directors and make sure I was happy spending my days talking about death… it made me realise how much care and compassion they have every day,’ she says.
Wood and Channon, who seek to restore great British brands including philately specialist Stanley Gibbons to past glory, paid £300 million for Dignity in May 2023 – £800 million including debt.
Byng-Thorne showed her entrepreneurial skills to Wood when he injected his comparison website GoCompare into Future in 2021.
‘When I go out now someone asks me what I do, I smile and say that I am a funeral director. It’s a conversation stopper,’ she says.
Byng-Thorne, a mother of five sons – three of her own and two stepsons – is engaged in a complex turnaround.
Dignity, with 600 branches across the British Isles, has down the decades been allowed to atrophy. It is also engaged in a running battle with the City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), over inherited funeral insurance plans which went wrong.
It must also contend with the consequences of a competition finding that eroded profit margins.
More recently it is having to contend with a ‘shocking’ rise in costs for a workforce of 4,000 due to the Chancellor’s swingeing rise in employers’ National Insurance.
One of the unresolved challenges are the 60,000 funeral plans which Dignity, as the largest player in the market, took on when the operators went bust. It was hoped that the cost of providing these burials would be covered by funds locked up by the trustees of the plans.
Instead, Byng-Thorne says, they are ‘incentivised to take as much time as possible to payout because they earn more fees’.
Adding to her woes is the FCA, which bills Dignity every time there is a complaint from a grieving relative about not getting the funeral they paid for.
So far it has shelled out some £5 billion on the burials it took on and has an exposure of another £50 million. ‘It’s not made my life any easier,’ she says. As for the FCA Byng-Thorne is totally dismissive: ‘They are being totally unhelpful, pathetic and ineffective arguing that because the plans were not regulated at the time it has no jurisdiction.’
‘It is a long, lingering mess at the most traumatic moment in someone’s life,’ she adds.
‘It is on a smaller scale, but it’s sort of like PPI (personal protection insurance) and car finance scandals.’
With a large family of men and five female bull terriers to look after, Byng-Thorne has striven to develop a work-life balance as she has climbed the corporate ladder.
She trained as an accountant while working for Nestle before taking on senior finance roles at GE Capital, HMV, Threshers and Fitness First before ascending to the top job at Future where, in 2021, she accumulated salary and bonuses of £8.8 million.
She managed to cope with her job and household with the assistance of two nannies, a mother she called upon in emergencies and by restricting extra-curricular activities. As a matter of principle she avoids evening events such as corporate dinners making the effort to be at home with family and dogs.
Byng-Thorne has a mammoth task ahead modernising Dignity and making it viable again. ‘The reality is we were overleveraged. We have too much debt.
‘The tech infrastructure is poor and we still print off invoices and send them off in the post…We’ve been through four chief executives in two years, hopefully I will make more than six months.’
A good send-off: Funeral firm Dignity has 600 branches across the British Isles
She thinks the assisted dying bill could help reset things ‘if people start leaving their affairs in a certain order’.
Byng-Thorne’s own mother has said to her that there is no point in writing a will as she has no money.
‘The reality is that it is about leaving your affairs in an orderly, and slightly less emotional state.’
It starts with writing a will then buying a funeral plan and moving on and having a broader conversation, with Dignity providing probate services too.
Dying in the capital can be an expensive affair. In Dignity’s south London cemetery, the cost of a grave has reached £20,000.
In some areas of the country there are no plots at all. The company is obliged to maintain burial sites (often on hundred-year leases) which are full.
It has also had to learn to set up Muslim burial grounds within cemeteries facing towards Mecca. Sorting out Islamic funerals, which are meant to happen without delay, can be a nightmare due to Government legislation around doctors’ certificates, which has made it harder to release the deceased into Dignity’s care.
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