INTRO
TONY: Welcome back to the podcast. Every entrepreneur has a to-do list. But maybe the more important question is what's on your not-to-do list. Because one of the biggest threats to a growing company isn't always competition. Sometimes it's opportunity. Another idea, another market, another product, another direction. And before long, the entrepreneur who created the growth becomes the person getting in its way.
Our guest today learned that lesson while building a company from a fifty-thousand-pound investment into a business ultimately valued at more than four billion pounds. Along the way, he nearly ran out of money twice. He was told his dream of becoming a successful entrepreneur was over. He learned why founders become bottlenecks, why copying your competitors can actually be smart, and why focusing on your strengths may matter far more than fixing your weaknesses.
And here's something remarkable. Looking back, he believes his company might have become twice as large if he'd simply learned earlier what not to do. There's a lot for us to unpack here. Meet Sir Richard Harpin. Hi, Richard. Welcome to The Tony DUrso Show.
RICHARD: Hi, Tony. Great to be here.
TONY: Oh, it's such a pleasure to have you on and to learn from you. My curiosity is really growing around how founders evolve from building a business to building a company that lasts. Richard, what led you to start HomeServe?

INTERVIEW – PART 1 (BACKSTORY: FROM P&G TO PLUMBING EMERGENCIES)
RICHARD: I was working in marketing for a great American company, Procter and Gamble. I'd always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I did lots of little businesses in my childhood, and I was looking for the big opportunity—but thought I would go and learn about marketing from a big company first.
The big need at the time in the north of England, where I was based, was a shortage of shared accommodation for young professionals. So with a business partner who was also at Procter and Gamble, we bought ten houses. We rented them out by the room—forty pounds a week. And the biggest problem? Every Friday evening the phone would ring and it would be one of the tenants saying, "We've got water pouring out of the radiator," or "We've got a blocked drain," or "The furnace has broken down." You could not get a plumber in Newcastle on a Friday evening for love nor money.
So we thought: this is the big opportunity. We called it One Fast Fix—to get us to the front of the Yellow Pages, which was where all the work came from. We hired a couple of plumbers, put our life savings—fifty thousand pounds—into the business, and watched the money go down the drain in six months. We nearly ran out of money twice.
Eventually, by copying a small water company in the south of England, we found a model that worked. It was like the Triple A, but for the home. A plumbing insurance policy. We could charge people who didn't have a plumbing emergency—not just the ones who did. That was the magic model.
TONY: You saw the need for a service that wasn't available, and you basically bet the farm that you could solve it. But that original model didn't work. What changed?
RICHARD: The cost of Yellow Pages was really high, and people only have a plumbing emergency every five years. Unless you overcharge the customer for the one-off emergency, the economics just don't work. We literally had the bailiffs arrive—we hadn't paid our sales tax bill. I borrowed money from my mother without my father finding out, because he was risk-averse.
Then someone called me and told me about a water company in the south of England that had the Triple A for plumbing—an annual subscription model. I drove down, stopped people in the street, and asked them whether they'd joined up and what they liked about the product. Then I copied it.
That was the magic model. People pay every year, and most people don't have a problem. When they do, the full repair bill is covered and we send out the plumber. That model is what eventually made it work.
TONY: That's brilliant. Now, as you built the company, I'm curious about the moment you realized you needed to become a different kind of leader.

INTERVIEW – PART 2 (THE EVOLUTION: WORKING ON THE BUSINESS, NOT IN IT)
RICHARD: I was eight years into the business when I had a sudden realization—I was a rubbish chief exec. I wasn't interested in the day-to-day. I was interested in ideas and business development. Running the day-to-day bored me.
So I hired someone to help on business development for a year. After that year, I called him into my office and said, "Jonathan, you're promoted. I'm making you Managing Director of HomeServe UK." That meant I could work on the business rather than in the business. And I started thinking: could HomeServe work in a foreign country?
TONY: And did you expand the model beyond the original plumbing product?
RICHARD: Yes. Once people bought the plumbing emergency cover, we mailed them saying, "What about your electrics? What if you had an electrical failure?" Then, "What about if your furnace broke down?" We extended the cover through cross-selling—covering all the things not covered by a standard homeowner's policy.
TONY: And once it was working in the UK, you took it internationally. How did you pick where to go first?
RICHARD: We decided to open in France next after the UK. When people ask me why France, I joke and say it's very difficult to hire people there, incredibly expensive if things don't work out, and unlike America, very hard to let them go. So I thought: if I go into the hardest country first and it works, I know it'll work anywhere.
The reality was we were part of a water company group—thirty percent owned by Générale des Eaux, the French water company. It took me a year to persuade them to do a joint venture. They told us our UK approach was all wrong for France, so we tried their way—new brand name, no direct mail. We called it Domino, which to me sounds more like a pizza delivery company than a plumbing insurance business. After a year it didn't work.
We went right back to the original English model: direct mail, branded as the water company—in this case Générale des Eaux, the French water company that owned thirty percent of HomeServe. And it worked. After that, I wanted to take the model to America. As a teenager dreaming of being an entrepreneur, I'd always imagined one day going to America and copying an idea to bring back to little UK. When I went to America for the first time on business in two thousand and one and discovered that utility-branded Triple A for the home didn't exist, I thought: that's the big opportunity.
TONY: As you were growing, what leadership habits did you discover you needed to change completely?

INTERVIEW – PART 3 (STRENGTH-FOCUSED LEADERSHIP: STOP FIXING WEAKNESSES)
RICHARD: I rigorously enforced twice-a-year performance reviews for every manager in HomeServe, including for myself—from my chairman. He would go through a small number of things I was really good at and a long list of things I was really bad at. I'd leave those meetings miserable and try to work on how I could get better.
Until I discovered that the magic model is focusing only on your strengths and forgetting about your weaknesses—and hiring people who can do those things better than you. When I did that that was the breakthrough.
And that's Sir Richard Harpin. You can learn more about him at RichardHarpin.com. That's H-A-R-P-I-N. RichardHarpin.com.
There's something important in what Richard just said. The company was working. He had finally reached the point where he could step away from the day-to-day—and what did that allow him to do? Think about what was next. Could this work somewhere else? Could this become something bigger?
That's particularly relevant right now. Entrepreneurs are hit from every direction. AI is changing how work gets done. Global trade is shifting. Technology that seemed cutting edge six months ago can suddenly feel ordinary. Richard's story is a good reminder that growth doesn't always come from doing more. Sometimes it comes from creating enough space to see the next opportunity.

SPONSOR BREAK – SHOPIFY
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And now back to Sir Richard Harpin. Before the break, he was talking about working on the business instead of in it, and finally giving himself space to think about international growth. Here's what happened next.

INTERVIEW – PART 4 (LETTING GO: THE HARDEST PART OF SCALING)
TONY: What I've observed in CEOs and founders throughout my career is that the founder is often very set in their ways—even when they bring in expensive experts, they still call the shots on things they know nothing about. When you talked about focusing on your strengths and hiring people for the rest, how did you actually let go?
RICHARD: Really hard. I learnt it first with my UK chief exec. A simple example—I used to still walk around the call center and talk to management. If I said something, they'd rush off and do it. Then the MD would say, "Hold on—what you are doing?" And they'd say, "Richard told us to."
I learned very quickly that whenever I had a conversation with someone, I had to say, "I'm not your boss. Anything I say—don't rush off and do it. Check with your UK chief exec first." Over time I learned that I can still touch the business and understand what's going on, but nobody should be doing anything for me because it's no longer my business. It belongs to the chief exec of each of the ten countries we went into.
I also learned to hire proven chief execs—not from big companies, because big company executives tend to rely on large teams to get things done. Instead, I brought in chief execs who had already grown a related medium-sized business. Eighty-five percent of the time they were successful. They had to operate according to the core HomeServe model, but they had full autonomy to hire their team and run the business as they wanted.
TONY: In your book—How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps—you talk about execution beating great ideas. That surprised me. Can you explain it?

INTERVIEW – PART 5 (THE NINE STEPS: COPY, PIVOT & EXECUTE)
RICHARD: Everybody has ideas. It's not actually about the idea—it's making it happen. My step number one is: copy, copy, and pivot.
We're taught at school that copying is bad. I want to convince every listener that in business, copying is good. If somebody is already doing something and still doing it that means it works. All you need to do is copy it, do it better, and do it bigger and faster.
How many of us have said, "I came up with this idea, but then I found somebody who'd already done it, so I didn't bother"? I would say the reverse: somebody's already done it, so it works. You just need to execute it better.
I'm not clever enough to have invented the HomeServe model. I copied a small water company that had thirty thousand policyholders on plumbing insurance. Today they have twenty thousand. HomeServe has eight and a half million.
TONY: Another point from your book—founders getting in their own way. When exactly does that happen?
RICHARD: I think it happens in the scale-up phase. In the founder phase, there's nobody better than the entrepreneur to be hands on—pivoting, testing, learning, finding the right model, having a small team. That directness is exactly right in the early days.
But when the business enters the expansion and scaling phase, the entrepreneur becomes a bottleneck. They're not easy to let go. They don't hire ahead of the growth curve. They say great people are too expensive. But you've got to hire great people, do it early, and then let them get on with it. Stop being the bottleneck to your own growth.
TONY: Richard, what never changed during those thirty years? What did you never toss out?
INTERVIEW – PART 6 (WHAT NEVER CHANGED: VALUES & THE CORE MODEL)
RICHARD: Two answers. The first is my personal values: courage, persistence, and integrity.
Courage meant making decisions with seventy or eighty percent of the facts—not waiting for everything to be perfect. Persistence meant the answer will be yes eventually. If you face a hurdle, keep going. Have the determination until that big American utility finally says, "Yes, we'd like to work with HomeServe." And integrity—what I call confronting the brutal facts. The unvarnished truth. As a leader becomes more senior, it becomes critical that your team feels safe to challenge you, to tell you when you're wrong. And that means being honest about the hard things—including having the kind conversation with someone who helped build the startup phase but has been outgrown by the business. We never look back and say we acted in haste letting someone go. We always look back and say we waited too long.
The second thing that never changed is the core business model. Offering home assistance cover, starting with plumbing, then electrics, then the furnace. Signing up utilities who lend us their brand name and customer base in exchange for an annual commission. That model has stayed true for thirty years.
TONY: That last sentence is worth stopping on. The model stayed true. Think about everything that changed around HomeServe during those thirty years—markets, technology, countries, competitors, scale. Yet underneath all that growth was clarity about what business they were actually in.
That's especially important right now because there may never have been more things competing for our attention. AI, new technology, economic uncertainty, new platforms, new strategies—and seemingly every day, another opportunity someone says we can't afford to miss.
That's one of the reasons I created the Vision Map Blueprint. It's completely free, and it helps you step away from all that noise and begin answering some very important questions. What are you building? That's your vision. Why does it matter? That's your purpose—because when things become difficult, and Richard's story certainly shows us that they will, purpose gives you a reason to keep moving. And what are you committed to accomplishing? That's your long-term objective, something measurable, something that tells you whether all the activity filling your day is actually taking you where you want to go.
Clarity creates momentum. If you'd like your free Vision Map Blueprint, go to TonyDUrso.com/vision. That's Tony D-U-R-S-O dot com slash vision. Download it, work through it, and write your answers down.
And thank you for being here. My goal is to bring you entrepreneurs and leaders who have actually done it—people who have made the mistakes, taken the risks, learned the lessons, and can give you something useful you can take back into your own business and life. Please follow the show, and share it with an entrepreneur who could benefit from this conversation.
And now back to Sir Richard Harpin. Before the break, he shared the core values that never changed—courage, persistence, integrity—and a business model that stayed remarkably consistent for thirty years. Now we turn to something that's changing almost everything around us: artificial intelligence.

INTERVIEW – PART 7 (AI: WHAT IT WILL NEVER REPLACE)
TONY: What is it that AI can never replace?
RICHARD: It can never replace the pros—the construction workers, plumbers, HVAC engineers, and handypeople doing repairs and restorations in every American home and every British home. AI is going to replace eighty percent of call center workers. The very best conversations will stay—genuinely intelligent, high-quality interactions. But for everyone else, we need more people working in our homes.
We're all reluctant DIYers. We'd much rather get a pro out to help. But there's a shortage of those skilled tradespeople today in America and in the UK. AI is going to release a whole group of white-collar workers who can retrain as oven cleaners, handypeople, garden tidy-uppers, plumbers, and HVAC engineers. Those are vital trades.
That's actually why, when I sold HomeServe and Brookfield asked whether I'd like to reinvest any of my own money back into one of the HomeServe businesses, I invested back in a UK business called Checkatrade—an online platform similar to Angi Home Services in the US. We have over fifty thousand vetted pros. We help them grow by providing leads, software to run their business, and we've incorporated AI into the pro app so it can answer their calls, issue invoices and quotations, and help them do more productive work and earn more money.
TONY: What are the biggest reasons companies fail to reach the next level?
INTERVIEW – PART 8 (THREE REASONS COMPANIES STALL: INVESTOR, COACH, PEER GROUP)
RICHARD: Three things. Number one: they don't get an investor. An investor isn't just about money—they bring experience helping entrepreneurs scale. They've got skin in the game. And importantly, once you've taken some chips off the table—paid off debts, secured your family—you can press the accelerator and take more risk because you've de-risked your life.
Number two: every entrepreneur should have a paid business coach and a mentor who comes for free. Someone with the experience, the gray hair, the mistakes behind them, who can help an entrepreneur in their earlier stages.
Number three: join a peer group. In America, those are YPO and Vistage. In the UK, there's the organization I run called Business Leader—for businesses turning over between three million and one hundred million pounds. We match a founder or CEO with nine others and they meet eight times a year. They share the learning. They follow the Nine Steps growth program. They become friends and figure it out amongst themselves, because someone in the group has already been through exactly what another is trying to navigate right now.

INTERVIEW – PART 9 (THE NOT-TO-DO LIST: FOXES, HEDGEHOGS & THE TWENTY-WORD STRATEGY)
TONY: What mistakes do you see founders keep making, even with all the training, mentors, and books in the world?
RICHARD: Entrepreneurs are foxes. We're always looking for the next opportunity. We need to be hedgehogs. When somebody comes along with a harebrained idea, a hedgehog puts up its prickles, ignores the idea, and keeps moving in a methodical direction.
I look back at HomeServe and I was too ambitious. I wanted to get into too many different businesses that were two steps removed from home assistance cover. We got into furniture warranties for retailers. We got into doing repairs for homeowner insurance companies—low margin. We got into smart home devices. We should have simply focused more on our magic core business model. If we had, HomeServe might have sold for eight billion. We could have been in twenty countries with seventeen million members and twenty thousand staff.
So every entrepreneur needs a not-to-do list. They also need a strategy written in one sentence of no more than twenty words.
Ask your management team three questions. First: what are we passionate about? That will normally be your purpose. Second: what can we be the best at? That will be your unique selling proposition. Third: what is our economic engine? How are we going to make money?
Now the hard bit: answer those three questions in one sentence of fewer than twenty words. At Business Leader, we did this a year ago and said: "Business Leader inspires founder and CEO members to fast-forward their growth through unique content and facilitated learning." Every one of the thirty-five people who works at Business Leader knows that statement by heart. They look at it every day and ask: does what I'm doing today fit that strategy? If it doesn't, it goes on the not-to-do list.
Every business person I talk to has a to-do list. Business is about executing—we talked about that. But very few have a not-to-do list, and that is far more important. If I hadn't been distracted by so many ideas, HomeServe could have been twice as big.
TONY: HomeServe sold for more than four billion pounds—and Richard just told us it might have been twice as big. Not because they lacked opportunities, because they had too many of them. Entrepreneurs are foxes. We see possibilities everywhere and we want to chase them. But the lesson after more than thirty years is that sometimes we need to become the hedgehog. Put up the prickles, say no, and keep moving in the direction that matters.

INTERVIEW – PART 10 (THE BAILIFF MOMENT: NEVER DREAMING OF GIVING UP)
TONY: Was there ever a moment where you said: I'm done, it's over, and I’m bailing?
RICHARD: The most frightening moment was with our first investor—a small water company called South Staffs Water. They put in half a million pounds. I grew the Yellow Pages operation, and I took the losses from ten thousand a month to fifty thousand a month. I burned through their money in barely a year. We got down to our last ten thousand pounds.
My business partner came to me and said, "Richard, your life dream from the age of four—becoming a successful entrepreneur—let's face it, it's over. You'd better go back and work for Procter and Gamble."
But when you have a life dream, you have to make it happen. And I'm an optimist. I believe that when your back is against the wall, sometimes you get a little bit of luck. Somebody called me and told me about the water company in the south of England with the Triple A for plumbing. I drove down, stopped people in the street, asked them whether they'd joined up and what they liked about the product—and I copied it. That was the breakthrough.
Twenty-three people in the business, when we nearly ran out of money for the second time, all thought they were going to lose their jobs. I never once dreamed of giving up. This was my life's dream and I had to go for it. My message to every entrepreneur, however hard things are out there: keep going. You may need to pivot your model, you may need to copy from others, but if you're determined, you will get there. The only time you fail is when you stop.

OUTRO
TONY: Is there anything from the book you want to make sure the audience walks away with?
RICHARD: I went to six other British entrepreneurs who had all built a billion-pound or more business and asked them to validate whether those were the right nine steps. Two examples: Ben Francis at Gymshark—a very successful gym wear business doing really well in America. And Greg Jackson, who used to work for me at HomeServe and started Octopus Energy. He took that business to ten billion in value in ten years, making it the biggest energy company in the UK from scratch. They told me two things: don't call them secrets—call them steps. And you've missed one: step number nine, the personal characteristics of the entrepreneur. I called that one "Hone Your Character." Focus on your strengths. Forget your weaknesses. Hire people who are better than you at the things you're not good at.
TONY: Well said. Once again, this is Sir Richard Harpin. We talked about scaling smarter and making a billion in nine steps. You can find him at RichardHarpin.com. His book is How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps—it's the bestselling book on Amazon Kindle in the UK right now. It's available on Audible now, and the US edition releases next May. I'll put the Amazon link in the show notes.
Richard, thank you so much. Good advice, real-world lessons, core values that have proven themselves over thirty years. It's just right on. It was so great to have you on.
RICHARD: Thank you, Tony. It's been a pleasure. Really appreciate it.
TONY: Wonderful, wonderful.
Well, there you go, guys. If you liked this, please share it with your friends. Tell them about Sir Richard Harpin. Tell them about what he's been through and what he's accomplished—starting with fifty thousand pounds, nearly going bankrupt twice, reinventing the company, and ultimately building to a four billion pound sale. And the lessons along the way: copy what works, focus on your strengths, hire great people early, build a not-to-do list, and never stop.
And wherever you're getting this, please follow the show. It helps to bring more amazing guests to you. All right. Let's use this and let's help you move on your journey to success. Thanks. Remember, just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds. And I'll see you on the next episode.