Episode 1321: How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps with Sir Richard Harpin

What if the biggest thing holding your business back isn't the market, but how you are leading it? In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene interviews Sir Richard Harpin, Founder and Former CEO of HomeServe and Sunday Times Bestselling Author, who shares the lessons he learned building HomeServe from a £50,000 startup into a global company that ultimately sold for more than $4.1 billion. He explains why copying proven models can be smarter than chasing originality, how founders become bottlenecks, and why hiring the right leadership is essential when a company reaches its next stage of growth. Richard also explores the difference between real growth opportunities and shiny-object distractions, the importance of acting quickly on talent decisions, and the traits he looks for when investing in entrepreneurs and scaling companies. Key Takeaways: → Testing a business model at small scale before expanding can reveal whether the economics are strong enough to support growth. → Entrepreneurs can lose momentum when they keep adding ideas instead of staying focused on the opportunity already working. → Businesses often get stuck around the $10 million to $15 million revenue range when owners become distracted and stop fully developing their strongest business. → One of the hardest growth decisions for a founder is hiring someone better suited to run the day-to-day business. → International expansion often requires local leadership because credibility, relationships, and buying behavior differ by market. Sir Richard Harpin is an entrepreneur, investor, and business leader who co-founded HomeServe in 1993 with a £50,000 investment. HomeServe was built to make home repairs easier and more reliable. It grew from a fragile startup into a multinational FTSE 100 company serving millions of customers before being sold in 2023 for £4.1 billion. Raised in Yorkshire, Richard began trading as a child and, as a teenager, built and sold his first business. His leadership philosophy emphasizes focus, disciplined execution, persistence, and close listening to customers. Today, Richard helps mid-sized companies scale into enduring businesses by investing, writing, and advising founders and leadership teams. A regular columnist for The Sunday Times, he shares lessons shaped by decades of growth, setbacks, and hands-on experience building successful companies. Connect With Sir Richard: Website: https://www.richardharpin.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/richard_harpin/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rharpin/ TikTok: https://www.instagram.com/richard_harpin/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BusinessleaderUk

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Sharkpreneur Podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world's first trusted authority on cutting-edge direct response marketing, a bestselling author, and the only three-time marketer of the year nominee. On the podcast, Kevin and Seth interview sharkpreneurs who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Forty-nine faces looked to him in triumph. Over the last 12 months, they had each taken turns and promoted his business for a week at a time, driving over $987,342 in revenue. What if you had a network of 50 centers of influence who promoted your business every week for a year? Grab your copy of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with a Podcast at 33% off the Amazon price by going to ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Again, that website for 33% off the Amazon price is ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Welcome to the podcast. This is your host, Seth Green. Today, I have the good fortune to be with Sir Richard Harpin. He's got an unusually strong entrepreneurship background.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  He co-founded HomeServe with $50,000, grew it for three decades to a global company until he sold it for over $4.1 billion. His book, How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps, was a Sunday Times bestseller. He was knighted in 2025, all of which we're going to dive into. Sir Richard, thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Great to be on the program, Seth.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Well, we're happy to have you. So let's go back in time a little bit. How did you co-found HomeServe back in the day?

• 1:48Speaker 02

  I was working at Procter & Gamble in marketing, and I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. And the big opportunity at the time was buying real estate, letting out the real estate to young professionals by the individual room, and bought about 10 of these houses. And do you know what the biggest problem was? Always on a Friday evening, one of the tenants would call and say, we've got water pouring out of a radiator, or the furnace is broken down, and it'd be the middle of winter, or there was a blocked drain in the backyard. You could not get a plumber for love nor money on a Friday evening. So we thought, that's a big opportunity.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  We'll set up a business called A1 Fast Fix to get in the Yellow Pages, which was a big way to generate work at the time. And we put our life savings into the business, £50,000, and we saw that money go down the drain in six months. The model didn't work. People only have a plumbing emergency every five years, so there was no repeat business. And the bailiffs arrived to take away our computers and office furniture.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Wow. So obviously, you came very close to running out of money. What did you change that finally unlocked the business?

• 3:08Speaker 02

  We came across a little water company in the south of England that were offering like AAA for the home. And that was annual plumbing insurance cover. I remember getting in my car, going down to try and recruit some of their customers. I ran a research group and literally designed our own AAA product there and then. With the final £10,000 before the business did go bust for a second time, we sent out a mail shot, 1,000 customers.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  We sent it to, branded as our water company that had put in half a million investment. 38 customers sent in their check for £50, a 3.8% take-up from direct mail.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  That's an incredible response rate. When did you realize that this could become much bigger than you originally imagined?

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Once we then sent out 100,000 mail shots, and we got the same 3.8% take-up rate, then we went around all of the UK water companies and said, we've invented this affinity marketing model. We will run the service. All we want is your customer base and to rent your brand. We'll pay you an annual commission. We'll own the customers. We'll run the service, and we'll fund the marketing. So it was when we got a few of those first UK water companies signed up that I knew the model was going to be successful. We took half a million pound loss in the first year to three quarters of a million pounds profit the following year.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  That's an incredible turnaround, and obviously, the business grew exponentially from there. What inspired you to write the book, How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps?

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Because my journey was 30 years, and I look back and think, it took me too long. If I'd known the nine things I know now at the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, maybe we could have got there in 15 years, not 30. So those are how to make a billion in nine steps, starting with copy, which we did. We copied somebody else's model and then went bigger and quicker. Getting a coach or mentor, finding an investor, bricks and clicks and paper.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  So I really believe in the omnichannel model, that direct mail still works today, even in a digital marketing world, because you get, your mail shot gets a bigger share of your doormat. The new junk mail today is our email inboxes. Direct mail, paper, still works. But I also believe in bricks, which is have a retail presence. That doesn't mean that you need to have necessarily your own stores. You could have pop-up stands at major events.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  You could get your product into other people's stores, but that will help drive your direct-to-consumer online business at a higher margin.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  You mentioned step one being copy. Tell me a little bit more, and why does everything else depend on that?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  How many times do we hear a budding entrepreneur says, well, I had a great idea, then I researched it, and I found that somebody else had done it, so I didn't bother. And I would say to them, that's great. If somebody else is doing it, and they're still doing it, then it works. All you need to do is copy it and do it that little bit better, and go bigger and faster, but only once you prove the model.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Which of the nine steps did you personally get wrong for the longest amount of time?

• 7:26Speaker 02

  The fact that I didn't have a not-to-do list. Every entrepreneur is like a fox. We're always looking for the next opportunity, and we need to focus just on the opportunity in hand. Keep a really simple business model, and tell yourself to stop coming up with stupid new ideas that will complicate the model.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Is there a particular revenue level when most businesses tend to get stuck, in your opinion?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's probably when they get to $10 or $15 million of revenue, and then maybe they're bored, and they think, well, I'll get into other areas, and they neglect their great business, that if they'd really stuck with it and focused on it, could have been a 100 million revenue business, or one day, they could have been selling for over $1 billion like I did.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  That is absolutely incredible. You talk about doubling and then doubling again. What has to fundamentally change every time a company doubles?

• 8:37Speaker 02

  The management. And my step number five is the most difficult lesson for all entrepreneurs, hiring our replacement. And I was eight years into HomeServe when I realized I was a rubbish chief exec, that I didn't like running the day-to-day. So I hired somebody, promoted them internally when they'd been business development director for a year, gave them my job as managing director of HomeServe UK, and that was when we were only a UK business.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  That then meant I could work on the business rather than in the business. And I started thinking about, I wonder whether HomeServe would work in a foreign country like America?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  That makes a lot of sense. At what point does the founder who created the company become the bottleneck preventing its next stage of growth?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  I would say it's three to eight years in and that you do need to hire somebody that is much better at running the day to day. And then you can work on the next lever for growth. And in the case of HomeServe, that was, I wonder whether HomeServe would work in a foreign country. And we went first to France. It nearly failed, but we persevered. We went back to the original model that worked in the UK eight years before. And guess what? That was a model that worked in France. Then we took the business to America. And

• 10:26Speaker 02

  for several years, the business struggled on, even though I got a great chief exec. We were following the UK model, but we didn't have the credibility in signing the big American utility companies. Why? Because I'd got a Brit that was running HomeServe America. You've got to hire a local. Americans that are taking their business into Europe, perhaps Germany, or taking it into Canada or Australia, please hire a local on the grounds because Americans buy from Americans, Australians buy from Australians. You won't

• 11:10Speaker 02

  be taken seriously unless you've got a local chief exec.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  How, you mentioned shiny objects. How do you distinguish between a genuine growth opportunity and a shiny object distraction?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  A shiny object distraction is two steps removed from your current business. A legitimate growth lever is only one step removed. So it's evolution, not revolution. I got into doing furniture repairs for furniture retailers. That was two steps removed. I got into doing repairs for home insurers. That was two steps removed. I got into doing furnace repairs and then furnace replacements. That was one step removed from home assistance

• 12:05Speaker 02

  cover. And guess what? That was the one that worked. That was a legitimate evolution of the business.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  You said in the book, one of your biggest regrets was not moving quickly enough to bring in the right talent or move out the wrong talent. Why do you think CEOs wait?

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Because it's a difficult conversation. And because we all need to confront the brutal facts. And in every business, in every country, there are management that are not the right management. And we all need to learn, it's the job of the CEO to have that conversation with their direct report that may have been great, but the business has now outgrown them. And have that kind conversation to say, Seth, you've been great. And I really appreciate the years that we've worked together, but you're going to do really well now in

• 13:07Speaker 02

  somebody else's business. I want to wish you well. I want to give you a financial agreement to leave. We're going to remain friends. I'll give you a great reference, but goodbye. And recruit somebody that is now the right fit in that particular role. So we all shy away from those conversations. And we need to get on and have them today.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  You're now an active investor in other businesses. Who's an ideal candidate for your portfolio?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Number one, I invest in the founder entrepreneur, because we all know that business has bumps in the road, mountains that need to be overcome. You can't always predict that those are going to happen. But a great entrepreneur will be able to get through those problems. So I look for entrepreneurs that have got resilience, they've got determination, persistence, they need to have curiosity to learn from others, they're voracious readers, they listen to all the best podcasts like yours. And then they need to be low ego. And it's not

• 14:26Speaker 02

  about them, it's about the good of the business, it's about their people and supporting them to be successful. And then, then I'm investing in businesses that are growing their revenue at 30 to 50% a year, that are already profitable businesses to the tune of between $1 and $5 million of EBITDA. And therefore, it's about helping them to scale bigger than they thought they could ever be.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  You have helped so many people and touched so many lives throughout all of your ventures. What's your biggest challenge now?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Is to keep helping more people. So I went to Harvard Business School to work out what my career objective should be for the next 25 years. After three days, I came up with only two words. Those words were inspire breakthrough. And I want to keep doing that. In America and in the UK, we're great at starting businesses, but we're not that good. And particularly in the UK, we're not good at scaling businesses. So I want everybody to be able to read and understand my nine steps, to be able to apply those in the right

• 15:49Speaker 02

  order to their business, and to take their business from medium size to large, and hopefully to create more and more unicorns, businesses that are worth a billion dollars or more.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  That is absolutely incredible. Your passion is obvious. What do you like best about what you're doing?

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Standing back with those entrepreneurs in five years after I've invested, or in due course, when they've been on our Business Leader Growth Program for five years, and saying, look what you achieved. And all I did was help you to avoid some of the mistakes that I made, and see the rewards of their efforts. That's why I'm doing it. That's what will make me proud in the future.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  That is incredible. Well, we know your time is incredibly valuable. We greatly appreciate you spending some of it with us. For our folks watching or listening who want to learn more, wanting to learn more about you and Growth Partner and the book, where are the best places for them to go?

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, they can buy a copy of How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps on Amazon, or on eBooks, on Audible. Look up businessleader.co.uk, growthpartner.co.uk. I will be bringing Business Leader to the Growth Program to America in a few years' time. So look out for that. But in the meantime, do please read my book.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  All right. The book is How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps. We've been here with Sir Richard Harp. And Richard, thank you again for joining us.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  My pleasure, Seth.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for watching or listening. We'll talk to you or see you next time.

• 17:37Speaker 03

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