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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So that works out very well indeed.
So are there any other last finished tips that you would want to share?
Is there anything else that I haven't asked you that you feel would be helpful for people to know?
I think we sort of touched on them, but maybe just summarize them and say...
There is a role for international development, but many businesses in the UK do it too early.
They're seduced by an opportunity or several opportunities, and it can be quite dangerous if you take your eye off the ball of growing the UK business.
So don't wait too long, but don't do it too early, and make sure when you do do international that you've got somebody that is running the UK really well.
Right.
Second one would be mergers and acquisitions is a great way to develop the business.
I heard you say, James, that you did one and no more than that.
Well, we weren't very good at it, Richard.
We were terrible at it where it was not related to the core business.
But where we bought home assistance policy businesses, probably 40 of them, every one worked well.
And then when we evolved the business model from doing the emergency repairs and the boiler services to replacing the boilers,
We went out and we bought about 200 small heating, ventilating and air conditioning installer businesses across five different countries.
And they all work really well.
But that was a very tight model, really well run.
So there is a role for mergers and acquisitions.
And then that other point about vertical integration, see whether there's a way that you can evolve the model to cover more of that value chain.
And you did all three of those things effectively.
Showing 841–860 of 914 · page 43 of 46
← Previous
Next →