Richard Harpin
speaker
914 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 12 Jan
Richard Harpin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
In business, I would say it's essential.
Find somebody that's got a model that works, copy it, do it a bit better, and then think big.
And I'm an optimist.
And when we nearly run out of money, somebody called me and said, there's this little water company in Surrey and they've developed like a plumbing insurance scheme.
I got in my car and drove down from Birmingham down to Sutton in Surrey and interviewed some of their customers on the high street, got them into a focus group, said, what do you like about the product?
What do you not like about it?
And designed our own plumbing insurance cover.
Right.
And literally with the last £10,000 before the business was due to go bust, we sent out 1,000 mail shots, branded as South Staff's Water.
38 customers sent in their cheque for £50, a 3.8% take-up from direct mail.
I remember getting on my office desk in front of those 23 people that all thought they were about to be made redundant and said, yes!
With practice.
So you knew that 3.8% was going to work.
That was great for direct mail.
Exactly, yeah.
And almost the rest is history.
We went back to all of the water companies that said no to investment, the bigger ones, and said, how about signing up on what we call today an affinity-branded model?
We'll use your customer base.
We'll use your brand.
We'll run the plumbing service.
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