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
And I joke and say, because if we make it work in France, it will work anywhere in the world.
The reality was that South Staff's Water was 30% owned by, at the time, General Dezeau.
They were the big water company in France.
Still took a year to persuade them that we should do a deal with them.
And it was a joint venture.
And they said, oh, it won't work like you made it work in the UK.
We don't need to use the General Dezo brand.
Come up with a new name, Domio.
That sounds more like a pizza delivery business than a plumbing insurance business.
And we want poster advertising and newspaper advertising, which of course didn't work.
A year in, just when we're about to say we failed internationally, we'd better go back to being a UK business, we said, let's just go back to that original model that we did in the UK several years earlier, direct mail, branded as the water company, as General Dezo Service, and guess what?
It worked.
Was it the same ratio, 3.8% or something like that?
About a 2% take up, but anything over 1% is really, really good.
For direct mail, you know that's going to work.
And so you just scale up when you get that information.
So how did you solve the problem of the Newcastle plumbers on Friday night?
I mean, how did you make sure you had the workforce available to deliver the service?
Combination of, in the early days, it was really good subcontractors, checked and vetted, fixed prices for doing different types of work.
And then more latterly, in the UK to start with, we then employed the plumbers and the heating engineers.
Showing 101–120 of 914 · page 6 of 46
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