Today we’d like to introduce you to Ben Harris.
Hi Ben, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
First of all, I’m a Georgia gentleman, born and raised. (The longest I’ve spent out of Georgia was about seven weeks in Kigali, Rwanda… but that’s a story for another time.)
I was born in Albany, GA, spent my first few years in Cordele, and eventually, around age 5, my family settled into Douglas, GA, Coffee County, down in the southeastern area of Georgia. My parents were building their own small business, Harris Furniture, after working in my grandparents’ business, Aubrey-O’s Furniture & Appliances, for a decade before. (And in fact, my grandfather had worked at his father’s mechanic shop growing up – so with whatever blend of smart, stupid, and stubborn that it takes to decide to build something from the ground up, I’ve got it in my blood!)
When my brothers and I weren’t engaged in heavy studying, my parents ensured we were exposed to a mix of martial arts, creative arts, and sports. And while we were all encouraged by our parents to explore our areas of interest, one commonality we shared was working at our parents’ furniture store throughout our young lives.
The largest retail furniture store in southeast Georgia for many years, Harris Furniture was where we grew up – first as children waiting for the end of our parents’ work day, and eventually, being given low-level (and low-risk) jobs like dusting lamps and sweeping floors. Eventually, I’d move on to unboxing furniture, putting end tables and coffee tables together, arranging floor displays & traveling on home deliveries, decorating the store’s window galleries, selling to incoming and calling customers, participating in and writing advertising campaigns, managing the delivery & warehouse crew, etc…
In essence, I got a business school education from my parent’s work ethic and their insistence that we work within the family business growing up. My father had always said he’d gotten something akin to a college education by reading all the books he could get his hands on, but my parents were insistent that we would indeed all go to college.
Eventually, I graduated from high school and went to college in Atlanta at Emory University, albeit a bit reluctantly at first. I’d wanted to postpone my college education until I could find an editor-in-chief for my first business, a newspaper catering to the teenage market of Coffee County, Georgia.
I’d negotiated a deal for my 16-page newspaper to be carried within the Coffee County News and for them to manage all layout and design – so from the start, we were reaching 12,000-15,000 homes per issue. During this time of my life, I sold advertisements to local businesses, solicited writings, articles, poetry, and artwork from my fellow youth, and penned editorials and writings.
Newsflash stirred up more than a little bit of interest and controversy, as a forum for young people in a rural community can do. (Perhaps embarrassingly, many of the six issues we produced still exist!)
But this innocuous start and, more importantly, its focus on community and knowledge sharing would continue to inform my work on my following business ventures.
From 2006 to 2012, I cofounded a company called Hobnob (no relation to the tasty Hobnob Taverns across Atlanta) with buddy and work colleague Phillip Chen. We wanted to help people find their callings, so we led the development of a curriculum focused on helping students better articulate their passions, talents, and values and locate the Venn diagram-like intersections between these and various courses of study and careers.
For years, we’d tried to make a “power to the people”, grassroots-led, decentralized approach to proliferating this curriculum work – before we eventually pivoted to place this curriculum into the hands of people already doing this type of advising – college career counselors.
We collaborated with the staff of career centers across Georgia to further customize our curriculum to their needs, and we soon began licensing the Hobnob Introspection curriculum across the country, from Atlanta-based institutions, like Emory University, all the way out to the West Coast with schools like UC Irvine.
In 2012, however, I encountered a challenge in my life unlike any I’d previously surmounted… and it ultimately resulted in me leaving my work with Hobnob, the company I’d spent six years building.
Little did I know that at that time, I was beginning a 10+-year journey that would lead to my current work and my own life’s calling.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Unfortunately, entrepreneurship isn’t the only thread that’s woven its way through my life.
Likewise, so has loss and grief.
The father I grew up shadowing, admiring, and learning from inside his workplace died when I was 20 years old, during my junior year of college. (Despite this taking place back in 2001, I still remember kind professors and teachers’ aides offering comfort as best they could – one of whom gifted me with a balancing bird counterweight, saying it had helped her remember to seek balance when she’d been faced with loss.)
Dad was my and my brothers’ confidante, mentor, and best friend, and I still remember being given a long time alone with him in the funeral home that evening to pour out my broken, grieving heart.
Unfortunately, my younger brother Christopher would follow our father’s passing four years and one week to the day. He’d experienced Dad’s death in our home, and I don’t believe he ever got over that experience. We lost him to a recreational drug overdose in 2005. I hope he’s finally at peace.
For each of these losses, I was staggered for years. And each time, I dedicatedly picked up the pieces as best I could and worked to make sense of them, as if sense could be made.
That said, I worked to incorporate these lessons – the shortness and fragility of life – into the mission of my work with Hobnob from 2006 through 2012.
We were helping people find their most passionate, most talented, and most values-aligned pursuits!
We were going to create a revolution of folks who’d go forth bringing their very best to the world!
And then…
Then…
In 2012…
Michael died.
Michael was our youngest brother, the baby of the family. Growing up, he’d simply been an annoying kid brother. But after Dad’s and Christopher’s passings, and as Michael got older and, in high school, began performing music across the state with Georgia’s All-State Jazz Band, we began to develop a relationship I still cherish to this day.
He decided to go to Emory, as I had, but within two years, he realized it wasn’t the environment he was looking for. (Honestly, I also believe he felt guilty about the hours I was pouring into working with the Emory Financial Aid Department to keep him in school during this time, with our mom struggling to make sense of the family furniture store amidst the grief of losing a child and her husband.)
Whatever the reason, Michael dropped out of Emory and joined the United States Marine Corps. He’d been offered the opportunity to join as an officer following graduation, but he wanted to serve as an enlisted man and build a career within the U.S. Armed Forces.
Following a particularly active and dangerous deployment to Afghanistan, where Michael and the men of 2/8 Echo Company (America’s Battalion) helped find and safely explode more IEDs than any other in the history of the Afghanistan War, Michael came home with the invisible wounds of war.
A machine gunner by trade, he’d kept his fellow Marines as safe as possible, with the story making its way back to me at Michael’s funeral of how he’d saved one of his fellow Marine’s lives by yelling at him to get to a knee right before a bullet cracked over where his head had been.
When Michael returned stateside, he knew he had PTSD and to get help for it – unconventional self-knowledge, perhaps, in 2012. But after months of warning signs, too many of which were missed, Michael died by suicide on February 6, 2012, at Camp Lejeune, NC, while still in active service to our country.
This February 6th, 2024, marked 12 years since his death.
His, Christopher’s, and Dad’s deaths have all directly led to the work I do now.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about United in Grief, Inc., DBA Everly?
Everly is the world’s first proactive grief care, and we work in partnership with funeral homes and preneed planners across the United States. What my family and I faced (three times, for that matter) is what’s considered an “at-need” experience – where you have to sort through funeral arrangements while “at-need” (in other words, during LITERALLY the very worst time of your life.)
But about 30% of the American population embraces “pre-need planning,” when they lock in a price and set their arrangements in advance, ensuring their wishes are known and that their family doesn’t have to worry about as many of the logistics, questions, and arguments of planning a funeral service for them.
We offer Everly as a side sale offered by our distribution partners’ agents to folks who are pre-planning.
Everly has three main benefits:
1. We start each purchaser off with an app-based digital time capsule. Then, through our tutorials and prompts, we guide each purchaser through uploading cherished digital artifacts like home videos, voicemail recordings, and photos. The Everly platform even allows for uploading text, audio, and video messages of love, wisdom, and support, tagged to exactly who you want to receive each artifact or message, and delivered right on time, securely and safely – even posthumously.
2. When our purchaser passes away, everyone they love is given lifetime access (through a QR code shared in the funeral program, Livestream, obituary, social media, etc.) to the digital time capsule contents shared with them.
3. Further, we provide a one-year subscription for video-based grief care to every single one of these grieving people.
What the funeral industry calls aftercare doesn’t get personalized enough, doesn’t serve enough people, and isn’t paired with the delivery of your loved ones’ messages and digital heirlooms to prompt the start of use.
But Everly does, and this is how Everly is forwarding the world’s first proactive grief care.
What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
I love my location and my neighbors in the Belvedere neighborhood, south of Decatur and Avondale Estates, where my wife Gabi and I have lived for 17+ years.
Between the nearby ITP cities, we (and our fur babies Milo and Lyra) have quick and ready access to some of the ATL’s best and most consistent independent eateries, bars, and breweries — Decatur and Avondale Estates are both a short 5-7 minute drive away!
We can easily get to Stone Mountain for hiking around the Cherokee Trail within 15-20 minutes.
And with downtown a quick and easy 20-minute drive away, I’m thrilled about the exciting ongoing news of Atlanta Tech Village Downtown, which is being headed by SoDo CEO Jon Birdsong.
I love Atlanta. Despite our pockmarks, potholes, and blemishes, we have deep roots, with our “City Too Busy for Hate” former slogan speaking to me.
I’ve always appreciated Atlanta’s sanctuary-like quality for folks from across the Southeast and our nation at large who might not be accepted as readily elsewhere.
Oh, and it’s a City in the Forest! I love the greenery we have everywhere!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.everly.care
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everlygriefcare/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EverlyGrief/
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/benharris207
- Other: www.linkedin/com/in/everly
Ben’s first formalized grief support began with the national nonprofit TAPS, where he would meet his Everly cofounder, CEO Gabriel Rao.
This cover feature in Funeral Business Solutions’ November/December 2023 issue was Everly’s first media publicity.
In his office, Ben keeps this framed photo of his brother and the American flag he carried on his person for the entirety of his deployment to Afghanistan.
The Everly booth at the National Funeral Director Association (NFDA) Convention, September 2023.
The Everly team at NFDA 2023.
Ben and the leadership of the Georgia Funeral Directors Association (GFDA) in June 2023 at the Georgia Funeral Directors Association summer convention in St. Simons Island, Georgia.
