In this interview I speak to Richard Harpin, the founder of HomeServe, a global consumer services company that reached FTSE 100 status before its £4.1 billion acquisition by Brookfield Asset Management. A lifelong entrepreneur, Richard’s passion for business has driven his success.
Born in Huddersfield and raised in Northumberland, he studied economics at York University before working in Brand Management at Procter & Gamble and later in Management Consultancy at Deloitte. His early ventures included a high-fashion earring brand, “Hookers.” HomeServe was founded in 1993 as a joint venture with South Staffordshire Water after Richard identified a gap in the emergency home repairs market. Despite initial struggles, the company grew into an international business spanning 10 countries with 9,000 employees.
Beyond HomeServe, Richard launched Growth Partner in 2015, a private investment firm backing fast-growing UK challenger brands. Growth Partner has invested in 14 high-potential consumer businesses, including Passenger Clothing and Stubble & Co.
In 2023, Richard became a Sunday Times Business columnist and acquired Business Leader, including its awards platform and event series. His mission: to double the number of large businesses in the UK – from 7,500 to 15,000 – by helping ambitious, mid-sized companies scale. This mission is supported by initiatives like Growth Workshops, peer-to-peer events, and his bestselling book, How to Make a Billion in 9 Steps. Drawing on lessons from scaling HomeServe and mentoring dozens of high-growth businesses, the book offers a practical blueprint for entrepreneurs with big ambitions.
Q: What does it really take to build a scale-up business?
[Richard Harpin]: I think people need to understand that building a business is really, really difficult. That shouldn’t put anyone off, but there’s no easy road to riches.
I genuinely believe there’s no better place than this country to set up and grow a business. But I do wish entrepreneurs here were admired the way they are in America—maybe that’s part of why the U.S. sees more business success.
Starting a business from scratch is certainly not easy. In 2023, 316,000 new businesses were launched, yet 309,000 closed. What’s even harder—and far less talked about—is scaling a medium-sized business. There’s plenty of help and advice for starting up, but far less support for growing beyond that stage.
That’s where my focus lies: we must not forget the mid-sized businesses. They are the ones that can become the UK’s next large companies. Right now, we have only 7,500 large businesses, and doubling that number would make the single biggest difference to our economy.
So let’s create a clear road and a growth plan—a set of practical steps—to help mid-size entrepreneurs scale up successfully. And let’s ensure they develop the right characteristics to get there.
Q: What are those characteristics of the leaders who can build scale-up businesses?
[Richard Harpin]: … it takes all of those qualities Jim Collins calls level 5 leadership: curiosity, resilience, persistence, courage, hard work, attention to detail, and low ego. These are exactly the characteristics every business should seek in its top leadership.
That might mean a founder recognizing it’s time to bring in a chief executive with those traits—someone who can run the day-to-day operations and continue growing the business—while the entrepreneur leverages their own strengths. The skills that worked so well early on—copying, pivoting, proving out the model—can now be applied to a bigger question: could this business go global?
To explore that opportunity, the founder may need a COO or CEO managing the daily operations or the UK side of the business, ensuring growth at home while they focus on expanding internationally.
Q: Can you talk to the concept of copying and pivoting to create scaling businesses?
[Richard Harpin]: How many times have we all heard someone say, “I had a really good business idea, but then I found somebody else had already done it—so I gave up”? I’d say the opposite: fantastic! If someone’s done it, is still in business, and it’s working, that’s proof you’re onto a solid idea. Forget what you were told in school about copying homework being bad—in business, copying can be a very good thing.
Let me give you an example. There’s an amazing business in Spain I backed called Synergym—a low-cost gym chain that was itself a copy of PureGym in the UK, which was originally inspired by a German low-cost gym chain. A couple of guys, one of whom was a former HomeServe colleague, told me at our annual HomeServe alumni meeting in London, “We’ve copied PureGym. No one’s really done it in Spain. We’re calling it Synergym, we’ve opened 12 gyms, and we’re looking for an investor.”
The moment I heard “copy,” I knew it was for me. I invested and backed them to help scale faster. In just five years, Synergym has grown from 12 gyms to around 120—and they’re opening a new location every six days. At this rate, they’ll hit 200 gyms before we know it.
It’s a fantastic model. They didn’t invent it, but they improved it. For example, they use local influencers and community ambassadors to promote new gyms to their followers. They throw opening parties, run operations efficiently—no one sits at reception because they use fingerprint entry—and they combine live classes led by personal trainers with additional classes streamed directly from their own film studio in Valencia to big screens inside the gyms.
Q: What are some of your key messages to entrepreneurs around investment?
[Richard Harpin]: …when I look back, the first thing I’d say is this: you absolutely need some funding to get started. But ideally, that should come from remortgaging your house or borrowing a bit from friends, family, or parents—just enough to have a small amount of money, but not too much. That way, you can copy, pivot, test, learn, and prove out your model on a small scale. You don’t need to prove it on a big scale—that’s what costs real money.
Once you’ve proven the model and you’ve got solid proof it works, that’s the moment to go big: roll out across the UK, hire a great team, and then approach investors. That way, you can get the funding you need without having to hire cheap people who aren’t up to the job.
And when you do go to investors, try to find someone who can add value beyond just providing cash. Don’t give away a majority shareholding the way I had to with HomeServe. I ended up giving away 52% of the shares with my partner for a £500,000 investment we took when we’d run out of money—a terrible time to raise capital. We burned through it quickly because I hadn’t found the right business model yet. I should have had the discipline to stay smaller for longer, prove the model first, and avoid giving away majority ownership.
There is money out there, but I do think it’s a minefield with imperfect information. We could do a much better job of signposting the options—showing the different routes and clearly laying out the pros and cons.
Why is it that we have IFAs to help individuals raise money for a mortgage or remortgage, but we don’t have BFAs—business finance advisors? There are some finance brokers, but I think we need a stronger system of independent advisors for commercial finance. They could provide clearer signposting, offer truly independent advice, and guide people more effectively when they’re looking to raise funds.
We also need more money flowing into the sector. Look at startup loans: they’ve been hugely successful over the past 10 to 15 years, providing significant funding to new businesses. But there’s no equivalent for scaling up. We need scale-up loans—just as effective and accessible as startup loans.
I sit on the mid-market council, which is a fantastic initiative led by NatWest, and we’re actively talking with the government about creating scale-up loans. I genuinely believe that would make a big difference.
… fortunately, we only ever needed half a million pounds of capital. Once I’d found the magic model, the business became cash generative—going from losing half a million in the first year to making three-quarters of a million the following year—and we didn’t need any further investment.
If we had needed more funding to scale before then, it would have been much harder—at least until we became a listed company in 2004. We chose to float on the main stock market to make HomeServe independent from its parent water utility, to build our B2B name, to attract higher-quality management excited about joining us, and to introduce both a long-term incentive plan and a Sharesave scheme for everyone in the business.
Q: How did you develop your skills as a leader on the journey?
[Richard Harpin]: The first real mentor I had was Nigel Morris, the co-founder of Capital One—and that wasn’t until 2009. By then, we’d already been in America for six years. I had a brilliant chief exec running US HomeServe, but he was British. It was Nigel who opened my eyes. After I tracked him down, persisted like mad, and eventually persuaded him to give me a couple of hours of his time, he showed me how Britons can truly conquer America: you have to do it with Americans, because Americans buy from Americans.
You also need to be based in the right part of the US to hire the best American talent. Ideally, for a British business, that’s Boston, New York, or Washington, D.C.—it keeps the time difference manageable at five hours instead of six or eight.
That experience inspired a term I coined: coachment. We’re even hoping it makes it into the Oxford English Dictionary one day. Coachment means three things.
First, get a mentor—someone with grey hair who’s made all the mistakes, like I did. They can share nuggets of wisdom stored in the back of their brain, whether those lessons come from success or, even more valuably, from failure. Yet 80–90% of entrepreneurs and chief execs don’t have a mentor, even though they should. If you want to know how to find one, listen to the Business Leader podcast: John Roberts, CEO of AO.com, talks about identifying mentors he admired in America, persuading them to help him, and receiving incredible guidance that helped him scale AO.com.
Second, you need a coach. A few years ago, I would have struggled to explain the difference between a mentor and a coach. But after spending 12 days in 2023 training as a business coach at INSEAD Business School in France, I understand it clearly. A coach helps you work through a problem or opportunity: they guide your thinking, help you explore options, and support you as you decide your own path. But they never tell you which choice to make—it’s self-help. Think of it in medical terms: the coach is the x-ray machine, helping you understand what’s wrong with your arm—whether it’s a fracture, a severe break, a stretched ligament, or nothing at all. The mentor is the GP or consultant who looks at the facts and says, “You’re going to need a metal plate.”
So you need both—and while you’ll likely pay a coach, a mentor, if you persist, will usually give you their advice for free.
Third, you need a peer group. I had one at Procter & Gamble when I was a lowly brand assistant on Fairy Liquid. There were 11 other graduates in Newcastle—we all started together, worked on different brands, learned on the job during the day, and socialized in the evenings. Inevitably, we talked business. It was a ready-made, enjoyable way to learn with peers.
Looking back on my 30 years at HomeServe, it was often lonely. I didn’t have a peer group of fellow chief execs and entrepreneurs to meet with regularly and learn from. That’s why I set up Business Leader. The biggest part of our growth programme for members is placing them in a peer group with a facilitator-coach who also provides one-to-one coaching. We help them find mentors, and that combination is how they accelerate their growth.
Q: How should founders view making money as an objective?
[Richard Harpin]: The best entrepreneurs—the ones most likely to succeed—start with the mindset: I want to run my own business, and I’m going to go out there and find a consumer need. It might even be a need that someone is already addressing, but not as well as they could. That’s where the idea of copying comes back in.
They think, I’m going to meet that need better than anyone else—maybe even in a revolutionary way—but I’ll build on what already exists. Their objective is purpose: being the best at serving that need. Only then do they figure out how to make money from it.
It’s about creating a better model and having a genuine purpose. Revenue, profit, and wealth will follow—but those should never be the starting point.
Q: What would be your advice on the what next after the sale?
[Richard Harpin]: … a lot of entrepreneurs experience seller’s remorse. Within three months of selling their business, they’ve been to the beach, enjoyed some leisure time, and then suddenly think, Oh dear, I’m bored. Where’s my purpose gone? What am I going to do next? Why did I sell?
That’s why I’d say: before you sell your business, figure out what your career plan will be post-sale. You don’t want to go from working flat out to doing nothing—that kind of abrupt change is bad for your health, your system, and everything else. It needs to be evolution, not revolution.
My ex-chairman, the fantastic Tommy Breen, laughed when I shared my 25-year career plan with him—just before we completed the sale of HomeServe to Brookfield. He said, “I’ve never come across anything like it—someone nearly 60 writing a career plan for the final 25 years of their life. That’s phenomenal.”
The truth is, business is my passion. For me, life is about balancing health and fitness, friends and family, and business—and juggling all three. But I absolutely want to keep working. After I sold HomeServe, someone who didn’t know me very well asked, “What are you doing in your retirement, Richard?” I said, “You must be joking! I’ve gone from working five days a week to six.”
I’d like to scale that back to five—or maybe four and a half—days a week, but I love it too much. We’ve got to double the number of large companies in the UK, and I want to invest my own cash in great entrepreneurs and back them with minority investments.
Q: What is the concept of evolution versus revolution?
[Richard Harpin]: It means that if you don’t keep evolving, you’ll become the next BlackBerry, Blockbuster, Nokia, Yellow Pages, or Kodak. But at the same time, if you try to launch something revolutionary that’s two steps removed from your current model, the risk of failure is high. Overcommitting resources to that kind of leap could even jeopardize your strong core business.
Take Next, the retail business, as an example of evolution done right. They started as a womenswear chain, expanded into menswear, then moved into homewares. Next Directory followed—the printed catalogue—before they shifted online with only the Next brand. Later, they decided to sell other brands, then created Total Platform to handle fulfilment, warehousing, and logistics for those brands. They even began acquiring businesses like REISS and Joules, expanded further into homewares, and pushed internationally.
Lord Wolfson has done an incredible job of guiding that constant evolution. Looking back 25 years, nobody would have bet that Next would one day be making a billion pounds a year in annual profit.
Q: How do you know when to say no?
[Richard Harpin]: I look back on my HomeServe journey and admit I was a really bad role model—I said “yes” to everything and “no” to nothing. We ended up venturing into areas two steps removed from our core model, which didn’t succeed. We bought businesses, invested time and resources, and ultimately had to sell those off to refocus on what we did best.
So, what I’d say to every scale-up is this: your strategy needs to be summed up in one sentence of no more than 20 words—and that sentence must answer three key questions:
What is your purpose? What are you truly passionate about in your business?
What can you be the best at? What’s your unique selling proposition—how will you be just a little bit better than every competitor?
How will you make money? What’s your monetisation model?
We followed this approach at Business Leader about eight months ago. We defined our strategy as:
“At Business Leader, we inspire our founder and CEO members to fast forward their growth through facilitated learning and unique content.”
Everyone in the business—the 35 team members and our fantastic new chief exec—has that sentence pinned on their desk. They know it by heart. And they ask themselves every day, week, month, and year: Does what I’m doing align with this strategy? If it doesn’t, it goes straight onto the “not-to-do” list.
Q: What does legacy mean to you?
[Richard Harpin]: …it’s summed up in just two words—my career objective for the next 25 years: inspire breakthrough.
When I look back, I think of the 10 chief execs at HomeServe who each ran one of our 10 countries. They were the ones who really made it happen, not me. And I believe they’d say I challenged and inspired them—and together, as a team, we achieved more than we ever dreamed possible.
Now, I want to inspire breakthrough across all the medium-sized businesses in the UK—around 75,000 to 80,000 of them. These are the forgotten middle. I’d like to work personally with 7,500 of them and say: If you have the ambition, free up 10 days a year to join Business Leader, engage in our growth programme, and we’ll help you go from mid-size to big size.
Maybe some of them can even become the UK’s next billion-pound businesses. Today, there are only 56 such companies where the founder-entrepreneur is still involved. Of those, 12 are Business Leader ambassadors helping our members build the next wave of billion-pound businesses.
So that’s it—just those two words. In 25 years’ time, I want to look back and say, We did it. Not me alone, but my team at Business Leader and Growth Partner, and the 7,500 entrepreneurs and chief execs who engaged, were inspired, and achieved that breakthrough.