8 Secrets to Building a Billion Pound Business with Richard Harpin
Disruptors
Rob Moore
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2025
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Join Rob as he interviews Richard Harpin, who built and sold his company HomeServe for a staggering £4.1 billion. Richard shares his eight secrets to building a successful business, discusses his current passion for helping mid-sized companies scale up and explains why he's investing £200 million of his own money into promising businesses.
Richard Harpin REVEALS:
- How he started HomeServe with £50,000 of life savings
- How he nearly went bankrupt
- His key secret, to copy and pivot, finding successful business models and improving upon them
- He has always been entrepreneurial, starting by breeding rabbits at age 5, becoming "Ricardo the magician" at age 9 and establishing about six businesses before founding HomeServe at age 20.
- Why Richard is focused on helping the UK's 168,000 mid sized businesses scale up
- Why Britain lacks support for companies transitioning from startup to large enterprise.
- Why businesses need revolution at the start but should focus on constant evolution as they grow
BEST MOMENTS
"I think the UK is the best place to run a global business. I think it's a great place for entrepreneurs to start a business... The only issue is, as a country, we're not that good at scale-ups."
"I did [pay a big load of tax when selling the company] and I was happy to pay it because capital gains tax is at a reasonable level. I don't believe in all these entrepreneurs that sell up and move to Jersey or Monaco."
"We're taught at school that copying homework is bad. We might get expelled for it. In business, I think copying is good."
"Disruption is what you do at the start of your business when you're inventing the model... But once you've done it, don't disrupt twice. That is dangerous. Just keep evolving that model."
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ABOUT THE HOST
Rob Moore is an author of 9 business books, 5 UK bestsellers, holds 3 world records for public speaking, entrepreneur, property investor, and property educator. Author of the global bestseller “Life Leverage” Host of UK’s No.1 business podcast “The Disruptive Entrepreneur”
“If you don't risk anything, you risk everything”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Richard, so I understand you sold your company recently for quite a large amount of money. |
| 0:06.3 | Yeah, Brookfield came along and made an offer of £4.1 billion for homeserve. |
| 0:12.4 | Wow. |
| 0:12.6 | And an offer that was, we're a Futsi 100 listed company and an offer that we couldn't turn down. And so it's a really exciting next chapter |
| 0:26.3 | for homeserv under Brookfield's ownership. And did you start the company yourself? Yeah, the business |
| 0:32.0 | was started with a business partner and I. We'd met at Procter & Gamble in marketing and I always wanted to run my own business from very early age. |
| 0:43.5 | And so we set it up with a £50,000 of our life savings at the time and then turned it into a homesurf. |
| 0:52.4 | So you backed yourself and put all your savings in. |
| 0:56.6 | Is that, well, I mean, obviously now it doesn't look like a risk, |
| 0:59.3 | but is that a risk to do for entrepreneurs? |
| 1:02.3 | I think it was really high risk, |
| 1:05.0 | putting everything into a single business. |
| 1:08.9 | And it very nearly didn't work. We got to Christmas 1992. We'd set up an |
| 1:17.2 | emergency plumbing business that came out of the difficulty in getting a plumber in Newcastle |
| 1:22.8 | on a Friday night, which is where we were both working at Procter and Gamble. And we'd invested in buying |
| 1:30.3 | properties, letting them out buy the room to young professionals. And so that was the, |
| 1:35.1 | the big gap in the market that we spotted, put the money in. And literally, we saw our life |
| 1:41.1 | savings go down the drain over five months. |
| 1:44.8 | We ran out of money and thought, we really believe in this business, but we need to find |
| 1:50.9 | an investor and we need to try and find a business model that really works. |
| 1:57.1 | So you, when you sold, how much shares did you have in the company? |
| 2:04.1 | Yeah, I was a minority shareholder at that stage. |
... |
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