Richard Harpin was born in Huddersfield and raised in Northumberland. In 1992, with a £50,000 investment, he founded HomeServe, a home repairs and improvements company that quickly rose to become a FTSE 250 listed business serving millions of customers worldwide. Having acquired Checkatrade in 2017, HomeServe was valued at £4.1 billion at the time of its 2023 sale to Brookfield Asset Management, a Canadian investment firm.
Harpin is the Chairman of HomeServe EMEA, and devotes half his time to the business and the other half to fostering and supporting entrepreneurship. Harpin is now the founder and chair of Growth Partner, an investment company through which he backs entrepreneurs with £150m of his own money. He is also the owner of Business Leader magazine and is a Sunday Times business columnist.
How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps: Simple Lessons for Making Extraordinary Wealth
A master entrepreneur reveals the nine essential lessons for building an ultra-successful business.
Richard Harpin became an entrepreneur at the age of just seven when he started selling conkers to his school friends. Fifty years later he sold a company he founded, HomeServe, for over £4 billion.
In How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps, Harpin shares the lessons he learned along the way, and the things he wishes he had known that could have got him to a billion-pound valuation faster.
He reveals his uncomplicated, grounded and honest approach to business, showing that start-up success is not rocket science. And he shares his practical wisdom for building a company from the ground up, identifying opportunities, creating effective marketing, planning for future growth, hiring brilliant people and developing the key qualities of a great leader.
It will inspire a new generation of CEOs, fitting them for a world of ever-evolving challenges, and revealing the path to extraordinary success.