Sir Richard Harpin

Don't try and become too big.

Just focus on finding the right model.

Don't worry about scaling and size.

You're in the founder phase and you just need to get a model that works.

Only when you've got the model that works do you press the accelerate button.

And it's in that professionalizing phase that you then say, right, we should set some goals.

We should develop a three-year plan.

We should know where we're heading.

We need to know whether we need to go out and get an investor in order to fund that growth or not.

We need to start bringing in an experienced team to help run the business.

When you've proved your model that you're then getting some growth and you're then saying, so where are we going to take this business now?

And at some point within that professionalizing stage, it would be saying, I wonder whether there's an opportunity to take this business into a foreign country.

Many American businesses, it's such a big country that...

Americans never need to expand outside of America, whereas in a small country like the UK, being able to globalize a business model is really, really important.

Yeah, my dream as an aspiring entrepreneur in my teens was to go to that big country called America and copy a business idea and bring it back to little UK.

And so when I went out to the US for the first time, and that was on a business trip in 2002,

And utility branded home assistance cover, AAA for the home, didn't exist.

And I thought, wow, fantastic opportunity.

It's the, we speak the same language.

It's going to be really straightforward to take the business model and put it across every state in America.