8 Secrets to Create a Billion Pound Business with Richard Harpin
Disruptors
Rob Moore
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 2024
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Rob talks with Richard Harpin, who recently sold HomeServe for £4.1 billion. Richard reflects on his entrepreneurial beginnings at just 5 years old and discusses his current goal of investing £200 million to help medium-sized businesses grow. He shares his thoughts on business and entrepreneurship, including his unconventional perspectives on university education and the effectiveness of paper marketing. Richard also reveals his 8 secrets to creating a billion pound business and offers his views on how mirroring successful business models can lead to personal success.
Richard Harpin REVEALS:
- How he built six businesses by age 20
- How he grew HomeServe from £50,000 life savings to 8.5 million members
- Why he advocates a "copy and pivot" strategy in business
- The three essential entrepreneurial traits: courage (making bold decisions), persistence (determination), and integrity (confronting brutal facts)
- Why he believes the UK needs fewer university graduates and more apprenticeships
- Why direct mail marketing is more effective now than 10 years ago
BEST MOMENTS
"Direct mail shots get a greater share of the doormat today than they did 10 years ago when digital marketing was still in its infancy."
"I don't believe in all these entrepreneurs that sell up and move, I was happy to pay my tax and say, this is a great country."
"Fail fast. Fail small, learn from it, and then you can go on and make it really big."
"I'd be bored if I went on holiday for more than about a month so I want to keep working until the day that I die."
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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. |
| 0:06.5 | Yeah, Brookfield came along and made an offer of £4.1 billion for homeserve. |
| 0:12.5 | Wow. |
| 0:12.8 | And an offer that was, we're a Futsi 100 listed company and an offer that we couldn't turn down. |
| 0:23.1 | And so it's a really exciting next chapter for homeserv under Brookfield's ownership. |
| 0:29.8 | And did you start the company yourself? |
| 0:31.7 | Yeah, the business was started with a business partner and I. |
| 0:35.1 | We'd met at Procter & Gamble in marketing. |
| 0:40.3 | And I always wanted to run my own business from very early age and so we set it up with a 50,000 pounds of our |
| 0:48.1 | life savings at the time and then turned it into a homesurf. So you backed yourself and put all your savings in. |
| 0:56.0 | Is that, well, I mean, obviously now it doesn't look like a risk, |
| 0:58.7 | but is that a risk to do for entrepreneurs? |
| 1:01.0 | I think it was really high risk, |
| 1:04.1 | putting everything into a single business. |
| 1:07.6 | And it very nearly didn't work. We got to Christmas 1992. We'd set up an emergency |
| 1:16.4 | plumbing business that came out of the difficulty in getting a plumber in Newcastle on a |
| 1:21.8 | Friday night, which is where we were both working at Procter and Gamble. And we'd invested in buying properties, letting them out buy the room to young professionals. |
| 1:32.9 | And so that was the big gap in the market that we spotted, put the money in. |
| 1:37.9 | And literally we saw our life savings go down the drain over five months. |
| 1:43.2 | We ran out of money and thought, we really believe in this business, |
| 1:47.5 | but we need to find an investor and we need to try and find a business model that really works. |
| 1:54.5 | So when you sold, how much shares did you have in the company? |
... |
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