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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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James Reed: all about business · 61. The email that saved HomeServe and sparked a £4bn business | Sir Richard Harpin · 12 Jan 2026 podcast

Yeah, that's very interesting.

So you built this business and then it arrived in the FTSE 100, top 100 company in the UK, and then eventually you decided to, well, it was sold.

Yeah, I mean, a key part of it was we were sitting under a bushel of South Staffs Water, who were a listed company themselves.

And I was struggling to hire really good people in the early days.

Why do we want to come and work for a subsidiary of a sleepy water company?

So I was determined that we needed to separate out from the parent water company.

We'd outgrown their profits by about 2002, 2003.

So you were bigger than the parent at this point?

And so thought, how do we do that?

And in the end persuaded the board that we should de-merge.

So that was effectively doing an IPO in 2004 as HomeServe.

The water company separated, so it's two listed companies.

And I think with a market cap at the time, capitalization of about 300 million.

That was then, and then it went to 4.1 billion.

So from South Staffordshire Waters' point of view, this was an incredibly good investment.

So other companies should be thinking about this sort of thing.

I think anybody that had bought shares at the time of the IPO, the flotation, would have got, by the time we sold, a 14 times return on the money, excluding the dividends that we paid out each year as well.

So taking your sort of mantra of copying,

I mean, people listening with businesses should be thinking about how to repeat this type of model by their business having a few children, shouldn't they, in the sense of spawning other businesses?

Yeah, I remember early days of HomeServe, somebody came frantically running into my office, James, and said, this is outrageous.

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