Yorkshire's Richard Harpin: 'I sold my business for £4.1bn - now I'm teaching others how to do the same'

Mr Harpin, who had a 12.5 per cent stake in HomeServe at the time of its sale and whose net worth has been estimated by the Sunday Times Rich List at £700m, has embarked on a series of interconnected projects with an ambitious overarching aim – to help the country’s next generation of entrepreneurs double the amount of large companies operating in this country.

“I’m not the sort of the person that pats myself on the back,” Mr Harpin tells The Yorkshire Post of his continuing drive to work. "I’d be bored if I went to the beach for more than a month, I’m not a very good golfer and I’ve got a real passion for business. I want to learn all the time and I really want to help the next generation of entrepreneurs.”

Mr Harpin is publishing a new book next week called How to Make A Billion in 9 Steps which as well as telling the story of the lessons he has learnt from his business career and the ups and downs along the way, provides a template for how to scale a business with advice from himself and other successful entrepreneurs.

He has also launched a Growth 500 list, celebrating the country’s fastest-growing companies including 20 from Yorkshire, and gathers 15 entrepreneurs around his dining room table for weekly workshops. They are members of his Business Leader organisation, a peer-to-peer community focused solely on medium-sized businesses with between 15 and 250 employees.

His investment business Growth Partner has seen him back 13 entrepreneurs with £100m and he has committed to invest the same amount on another 13 businesspeople over the next three years.

His charity The Enterprise Trust also funds programmes to inspire young people to start their own businesses. Mr Harpin is also working on a project to get entrepreneurship included in careers advice at schools.

The overarching aim is to help double the number of large business in the UK with more than 250 employees from the current 7,500 to 15,000.

Mr Harpin says he is particularly passionate about medium-sized businesses, which he believes are often overlooked by the media and politicians. "I want to focus on the forgotten medium,” he says. “There are 75,000 of those businesses in the UK and only 7,500 large companies.

"Large companies look after themselves, they can quite often be listed and therefore higher profile. If you look at the media, there are six times more mentions of start-ups and small businesses compared to scale-ups. We focus on those. If we really want to tackle the UK economy, we can’t leave it up to Government to sort it out.

"My mission is to double the number of large companies in the UK from 7,500 to 15,000 through signing up 10 per cent of those mid-sized companies and helping them to grow in return for them committing 10 days of their time to step back from their business, learning from others, going out and attending some of our masterclasses and events like the Growth 500.

"It has got to be the responsibility of successful entrepreneurs who can do their bit, feed back their learning and be case studies for helping aspiring mid-sized businesses.

"Germany is very good at that – the German Mittelstand is the heart of the German economy. But a lot of these are unglamourous businesses – we talk a lot about tech and fintech but not about medium-sized retailers or manufacturers. These are the businesses that could go from employing 15 people to 250 people and have a big economic impact.”

The practical advice in his new book covers everything from having the right strategic approach to securing investment to how to make the right decisions on hiring and firing.

It also reflects honestly on some of the crises he faced over his career with multiple businesses, including a £34m fine HomeServe received for misselling issues.

Mr Harpin hopes the book can provide a roadmap for up-and-coming entrepreneurs. “The book reflects on HomeServe and my 30-year journey. I’ve focused on the mistakes I made and the things I now know I wished I’d known at the start.

"If I had, maybe as a team we could have got there in 15 years rather than 30.”

Pride in Yorkshire roots

Richard Harpin says he was pleased to see 20 Yorkshire businesses make the inaugural Growth 500 list but hopes the region can be even better represented next year.

He said his own decision to become an entrepreneur was inspired by Huddersfield industrialist James Hanson, whose helicopter would land in the garden of his parents’ bungalow in the same street in Birkby where Harpin’s family lived in his early years.

Mr Harpin says he hopes “30 or 40” Yorkshire businesses could make next year’s list.

An event to celebrate those who made the list took place in London earlier this week, which Mr Harpin said was “fantastic” for him and the businesses involved.

"It makes my mission worthwhile,” he says.

The highest-ranked Yorkshire company on the list was Sheffield manufacturer Texmo Blank, which was placed in 75th nationally after recording 560 per cent sales growth in two years.