Turning Points: Richard Harpin

Early in his career, Richard Harpin had the bailiffs knocking on his door. “We'd run out of money. Our life savings had gone,” he recalls. “Customs and Excise came to take away our office furniture over an unpaid VAT bill.” His business, A1 FastFix, a joint venture with South Staffordshire Water, was floundering before it had a chance to take off. The year was 1993.

“My business partner Jeremy came to me and said: ‘Richard, that lifelong dream, let’s face it: it’s over.” But Harpin doesn’t shy away from adversity. He had to find a way to make his dreams come true.

With just £10,000 of his savings left, Harpin took a bold risk before the business collapsed entirely. Inspired by a UK water company in Surrey, he sent out 1,000 direct mailshots promoting a plumbing insurance service. Thirty-eight people responded, each sending a cheque for £50. This moment proved to be a crucial turning point in Harpin’s life and career. He realised that if this uptake rate could be replicated at scale, the business had the potential for growth.

The business that was to become HomeServe went from losing half a million pounds in its first full year, to making a profit of around £700,000 the following year.

“I remember getting on my office desk, in front of those 23 people that were about to be made redundant and said: ‘Yes! We’ve made it!’ The rest is almost history. That was the breakthrough moment.” 

A lifelong passion: Harpin’s childhood lessons in enterprise

Harpin’s path to becoming an entrepreneur traces all the way back to a childhood moment in Huddersfield, perched on his father’s shoulders, and watching a helicopter land behind the wall of the big house on their cul-de-sac. He was four years old.

“Dad, I want one of those,” he remembers saying. The reply: “Don’t be in the civil service like me. You need to make some money, and you do that by running your own business.” That spark would fuel a lifetime of entrepreneurship, before he even understood the meaning of the word.

Harpin’s first forays into business were inventive. After being gifted a rabbit by his grandfather as a boy, he quickly saw the potential for profit – breeding, selling, and even running a rabbit kennel for classmates’ pets during school holidays. By nine, he was “Riccardo, the famous magician of the North,” performing children’s shows for 50p a go. At the time, this was big money – substantially higher than his 5p weekly allowance. 

At 12, Harpin launched a mail order business selling hand-tied lures to anglers, enlisting friends and family to help, with operations run from a shed attached to the family home in Northumberland. He’d identified a niche in the market. When he left home to study economics at York University, he persuaded his mother to take over while he was away. These humble but formative first ventures taught Harpin the basics of commerce and – more importantly – the value of hard work.

How Harpin learned the ropes: From Proctor & Gamble to Deloitte

After graduating university, Harpin’s early jobs – first at Procter & Gamble (P&G), which he joined on the graduate scheme, then Deloitte – were chosen as much for the learning opportunities as for the salary.

“Marketing was my vocation,” he says of his time at P&G, where he learned the value of brand and the mechanics of running a business. 

Then at Deloitte, he focused on expanding his experience. But the corporate world was never the end goal. “I knew that I didn’t want to work for a large company, that I was only there to learn marketing and to work out what was going to be the big idea,” he recalls.

Harpin and a colleague from P&G identified an opportunity in Newcastle’s property market: buying large houses and renting them out to young professionals. “There was a shortage of professional accommodation,” he explains.

They took a leap and bought around ten houses, quickly filling the rooms with tenants. “And guess what the biggest problem was? They would always inevitably call on a Friday evening.” It seemed plumbing emergencies – leaking radiators, blocked drains or broken-down boilers – tended to happen as the weekend was beginning.

“We could not get a Geordie plumber for love nor money in Newcastle on a Friday evening. They were all out drinking,” Harpin explains. But in finding a solution, a new venture was born. “That was the big business idea,” he notes. “An emergency plumbing service.”

They approached 15 water companies to invest in their fledgling start-up, but all declined except one: South Staffordshire Water. The company offered to put in half a million pounds on the condition that it’d receive 52 percent of the equity. “We had no choice, so we did it.”

At first it was a relief. “I could now press the accelerate button every month, and the business grew,” Harpin remembers. “I assumed that we would get to economies of scale and profitability and guess what? We didn’t.”

“All I succeeded in doing was taking a business model that didn’t work from losing £10,000 a month to losing £50,000 a month,” he adds.

After A1 FastFix all but depleted his life savings and teetered on the brink of going bust, Harpin’s 1994 breakthrough – specialising in emergency insurance and repairs – turned his fortunes around and set the stage for rapid growth in the following years. 

Taking flight: What going global taught Harpin about staying nimble

After moving from heavy losses to significant profits, personal milestones followed. In the space of a few years, Harpin got married, learned to fly, and bought a helicopter – as well as his first plane – finally realising that lifelong dream that less than a decade earlier had seemed impossible. 

A key turning point, Harpin says, was a moment of self-reflection in which he decided that he was “a rubbish chief exec”. By appointing Jonathan King as managing director of HomeServe UK, Harpin was able to “work on the business, rather than in the business,” and decide whether HomeServe would work abroad.

In the 2000s, the business went international, expanding into France, then the US, teaching Harpin the importance of local leadership and adaptability. The move to America provided a lesson in humility: “However good your British chief exec is, you need an American to run your US business,” he notes. Nevertheless, the expansion ultimately led to exponential growth. 

A defining demerger: How Harpin navigated the challenges of the public market

The next turning point came with the decision to demerge from South Staffordshire Water in 2004, when A1 FastFix officially rebranded as HomeServe. “We'd outgrown the profits of the parent water company group by then,” Harpin recalls. “South Staffordshire Water was a listed company on the main market. And the deal that worked for everybody was to split the two into separate listed companies.”

Now Harpin was beholden to the public market. His previous work experience at P&G and Deloitte proved handy. “Entrepreneurs who don’t like running public companies are generally the ones who haven’t actually worked in big companies before,” he says.

“I saw it as the next sort of learning point and challenge on the journey. I went out and picked the brains of a few chief execs that were running public companies to say, how do you do it? And the answer was: always under-promise and over-deliver.” 

Harpin embraced the challenge, running HomeServe as a public company for 18 years. During this period, he navigated shareholder meetings, results presentations, and the pressures of the market. “I enjoyed most of that period,” he says. The experience was intellectually stimulating, but eventually Harpin found it lonely at the top. 

Business Leader and Growth Partner: Championing future founders

A sleepless night in 2015 prompted Harpin to reflect on his enduring impact. Not wanting to go “from working flat out to doing nothing,” he founded Growth Partner, an investment firm aimed at supporting founder-led businesses. 

The focus was on consumer, retail, and leisure businesses – areas where his experience could make a tangible difference. “This was about backing entrepreneurs, putting in a bit of my money and helping them avoid all the mistakes that I'd made over the years,” he highlights. 

In 2023, Harpin acquired Business Leader, a platform designed to build peer groups and support networks for UK scale-ups, aiming to inspire breakthrough and help mid-sized companies become the next giants.

The same year, when HomeServe was acquired by Brookfield Asset Management for £4.1 billion, Harpin transitioned from CEO to chairman where he remained until 2025 while continuing to reinvest in related ventures and focus on his legacy. 

Beyond HomeServe: Harpin’s desire to make a lasting impact

Harpin remains passionate about helping the next generation of entrepreneurs. He believes mid-sized companies are often the most overlooked and underestimated segment in the UK market and often grow in isolation. 

His vision is clear: “I’d like to see both Business Leader and Growth Partner around for the next 50 or 100 years, helping UK businesses to grow either through investing in them or through our nine steps framework.”

He now splits his time between Growth Partner, Business Leader and Checkatrade. Having grown HomeServe from a £50,000 start-up into a £4.1 billion sale, Harpin is now dedicated to helping others achieve similar success.

He believes Britain’s three million plus mid-sized businesses are the backbone of the country – fast-moving, full of potential, and led by ambitious founders and CEOs. Yet too often, they grow in isolation, caught between start-up support and institutional focus.

Through his work with Business Leader, Harpin aims to change that. By providing peer-to-peer forums, expert coaching and free Growth Workshops, he’s helping business leaders scale with clarity, purpose and confidence.

In 2024, he released his Sunday Times bestselling book How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps, sharing nine practical steps for building and scaling a successful business.

His ambition is to help thousands of entrepreneurs apply those lessons and make business growth more widespread across the country.

Richard Harpin's nine steps: