Sir Richard Harpin

I sent him out six years ago.

He's a Brit.

Shook his head.

Absolutely not.

Americans buy from Americans.

You need an American chief exec.

Otherwise, you won't be taken seriously.

And we were struggling to sign up all the big American utility companies where we wanted to use their brand name and the customer base to sell our AAA cover.

So I brought my Brit home.

We left Miami.

We moved to Norwalk, Connecticut, an hour north of New York.

Hired a guy called Tom Roosen in 2010.

16 years later, Tom is still with HomeServe as the chief exec in North America.

And the business made $300 million of EBITDA last year.

So, the learning is, I call it step number six, go global with locals.

If you want to build a big business in a foreign country, have people on the ground, establish a presence, doesn't need to be all a team, you've got to hire a local chief exec, and then I call it my 15% rule.

Don't change your business model by more than 15% because if one day you're in 20 different countries around the world, and if you imagine that every country was 25% different in the way that you'd change your model, recipe for complexity and disaster.

So change the bare minimum.

One of the guys that I really admire built Belron, which in the US is called Safelite.

And he turned the business from worth 200 million euros to 24 billion euros in only 23 years.