8 Secrets to Building a Billion Pound Business with Richard Harpin

Richard. So I understand you sold your company recently for quite a large amount of money.

Yeah, Brookfield came along and made an offer of £4.1 billion for HomeServe and an offer that was we're a FTSE 100 listed company and an offer that we couldn't turn down. And so it's a really exciting next chapter for HomeServe under Brookfield's ownership.

And did you start the company yourself?

Yeah, the business was started with a business partner and I, we'd met at Procter and Gamble in marketing and I always wanted to run my own business from very early age. And so we set it up with a £50,000 of our life savings at the time and then turned it into HomeServe.

So you, you backed yourself and put all your savings in? Well, I mean, obviously now it doesn't look like a risk, but is that a risk to do for entrepreneurs?

I think it was really high risk putting everything into a single business. And it very nearly didn't work. We got to Christmas 1992, we set up an emergency plumbing business that came out of the difficulty in getting a plumber in Newcastle on a Friday night, which is where we were both working at Procter and Gamble. And we'd invested in buying properties, letting them out, buy the room to young professionals. And so that was the, the big gap in the market that we spotted, put the money in and literally we saw our life savings go down the drain over five months. We ran out of money and thought we really believe in this business but we need to find an investor and we need to try and find a business model that really works.

So when you sold, how much shares did you have in the company?

Yeah, I was a minority shareholder at that stage. Got about myself and my family got about 12% of the business.

That's still 12% of over 4 billion. Do you not like pinch yourself and go, wow?

Actually having sold the business back in January 2023, then spent a bit of time looking back at all the mistakes I'd made and there were many of those. And I came up with the eight things that I know now that I wish I'd known at the start of my home served journey. And if I had, maybe we could have got there in 15 years rather than 30. So I thought, I wish somebody had told me which were the, the right things to do. There are so many books out there, so many theories which is why I turned those into the eight Secrets to build a Billion Pound Business.

Right. So if it's okay with you, I'LL pull some of those out of you in a bit. But I'm fascinated that you've gone from nothing to selling your company for over 4 billion, retaining 12%, growing it to a huge organization, and yet you still feel like, ah, well, you should have done it in half the time and it should have been better and bigger.

Yeah, I. I'm not one for really sort of looking back and congratulating myself. And this was really a big bit of learning, was hire great people and they're the ones that made it happen. And I've got a passion for business, hopefully, as you can sort of see and feel. And I'd be bored if I went on holiday for more than about a month. So I want to keep working until the, the day that I die.

So when you took your hundreds of millions, did you go on holiday? Did you do anything nice to celebrate? Did you buy anything nice like a Bugatti or something?

Not really. It was about sort of saying, what am I going to do in the final 30 years of my business career? My ex chairman laughs and says, how many people have sold the business? They're in the late 50s and are writing a career plan for the next 30 years. And that's literally what I did. And I wanted to, first of all, stay and chair homeserve, but as a non exec chairman rather than chief exec and enable my team to step up. And that's what's happened. So in Home Serve Emir, which is the business outside of America, I got a great chief exec, Ross Clemo, that is now taking the business forward with a little bit of help and advice from me, but very much as the non exec chairman. The Chequer trade and those digital businesses continue to chair those and I've freed up two days a week of my time and that's about inspiring the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Right. So I'm told that selling a business is quite a painful process. Obviously, all the due diligence, it can go on for months or years. I've got some friends who've sold their companies for similar figures to you and they said running the business through the whole time was an absolute nightmare. And all the things you have to declare and show, it's rigorous. What was your experience of selling a company for 4 billion? Was it similar or was it easier?

I think it was easier because we'd got a great team. We'd been used to selling one or two bits of the business historically, doing our own acquisitions. So the process does take quite a long time. So it was in May 2022 when Brookfield first made an approach and the deal didn't actually complete. All the shareholders paid out until January 2023.

Right, yeah. Which actually sounds like a normal amount of time. I know, yeah, sounds normal, yeah.

And I think the key bit is making sure that you can make the sale happen while continuing to run the business and keeping it growing because sales.

Don'T drop like that.

No, what's really important is that Homeserve goes on to grow and prosper under its new owner, Brookfield. And it absolutely is.

Right, great. So I've got to ask this question, Richard, because it's very topical and important, but do you think right now in the uk, with everything going on with all the millionaires leaving and labor putting up all the taxes, do you think it is still okay to be an entrepreneur? Do you still think there's opportunities in the uk?

Yeah, absolutely. I think the UK is the best place to run a global business. But I think it's a great place for entrepreneurs to start a business. And the evidence is there were 900,000 startups last year, 2023. The only issue is as a country we're not that good at scale ups.

Right.

So there are 5.6 billion. Sorry, say that again. There are 5.6 million businesses in the UK. There are only 7,500 large companies like HomeServe and there are 168,000 mid sized businesses, ones that employ between 15 and 250 people and turn over more than £3 million. So nobody is really helping scale ups. And I see my purpose in my finances vinyl career to inspire breakthrough in those medium sized companies.

Well, that's funny, Richard, because I have a company with a hundred staff and I'm in that middle bracket. So we should talk after this. I'd love your help because I'd probably be a bit bit more excited than you if I sold for 4.1 billion.

Yeah, absolutely, Rob. And you should be a member of Business Leader because I thought so. I've got these eight secrets to how you build a billion pound business and put them into a booklet and that's available on the Business Leader website free of charge. You can download a copy. But more importantly, how can I engage with mid size entrepreneurs like you and say number one, if I look back on my career, probably the best four years I had was at Procter and Gamble in marketing and I had a ready made peer group of 12 other people. We're all new to Procter and Gamble, new to working life and we learned on the job and we socialized and we had a ready made peer group and I think, I don't know about you, but I found it pretty lonely as an entrepreneur. And even though I had a board of directors, I had a number of other colleagues that were running the individual businesses. I never had that sort of peer group of other entrepreneurs and chief execs that I could share issues and opportunities with.

Yeah. Did you have to pay a big load of tax when you sold your company?

I did and I was happy to pay it because while capital gains tax is at a reasonable sort of level.

It'S just gone up. So you got in well, didn't you?

It's gone up a little bit. It's still at a reasonable level at 24% then. I don't believe in all these entrepreneurs that sell up and move to Jersey or Monaco. I was happy to pay my tax and say this is a great country. I want to be close to mid sized entrepreneurs and encourage them to join business leader and get a ready made peer group, get masterclasses, go out and see fantastic businesses. A program that we call under the Bonnet. So we want to have seven and a half thousand entrepreneurs as members and see them go from mid size to big size.

Right. Well you sold me right at the start for that, so let's definitely talk about that afterwards. Can you share some of these eight tips then if someone wants to start a business? Well, no, let's go if you want to scale to go to like the billion pound level. What are some of your eight tips?

First of all, look at some of the entrepreneurs that have done it. There are 10 of us in the UK today that are still actively involved in their businesses that have built something worth £4 billion or more from scratch. There are then another 46 who have built a business of more than a billion and up to that 4 billion level. And so first of all, I think that's the inspiration for other entrepreneurs to say they've done it so I can too. And then it is about some of those secrets. So the first one is copy and pivot and we're taught at school that copying homework is bad.

You might get expelled for it.

In business, I think copying is good. Right. Two of the businesses that I've backed with my own money, money from selling homeserve. One is Synergy. That's a, a pure copy and improvement on the Pure Gym model. Pure Gym itself was a copy by Peter Roberts of a German low cost gym chain.

Right.

I had a Homeserve alumni ex Homeserve Director and met him at the annual event that we run every year. And he said, we've copied Pure Jim hadn't been done in Spain. We've called it Synergy. We've been going five years and we got 12 gyms opened. We're looking for an investor that could put in 6 million euros for 20% of the business. And I said, len, I'll back you. You were great at HomeServe and I think you're going to do a even better job in growing Synergy in Spain. I went to Malaga two weeks ago to celebrate opening the hundredth Gym and their 10th anniversary.

Wow.

In fact, they're opening so many gyms so quickly that by the time we did the celebration, they're actually up to gym number 107. We've just raised enough money to go from 107 to 200 in Spain and then looking at a joint venture model where we could take it beyond Spain and into somewhere like the Middle east and Africa.

Right, so is that what you're doing now with some of your money and time, investing some of your home serve profits into other businesses, becoming like a dragon? I guess.

I'd already started doing it about eight years ago, but I was a full time Chief Exec of HomeServe, so had to have others that were doing it and I was helping these entrepreneurs scale a business and investing in them by doing it sort of in the evening and at weekends. What it's meant now is that firstly, I've hired a fantastic team. This is my investment business called Growth Partner. There are now a team of 11 led by Jason Mahendran. It's all of my own money. I've so far committed 100 million and just said that I will put another 100 million into the next 10 or 12 investments.

You are a disruptive entrepreneur. Does it not make you nervous putting in hundreds of millions into other companies?

No, because I think there are the three things that I look for. Number one is can I find great founder entrepreneurs? And even if they have to sort of copy and pivot their business model to get it fully right, I know that they've got the right characteristics to be able to do that. But equally, it's about I'm investing at a stage of the businesses making between 1 and 5 million pounds of profit and saying, can we create the next home serve but in a completely different sector. So it's sort of consumer retail, leisure businesses. They've got to be in an attractive market, having proven the model and profitable and then it's about, can they scale it. Right. If it's a retail business and they've got 40 bathroom stores opened, like Easy Bathrooms, which is another of my investments. Great entrepreneur called Craig Waddington from Huddersfield, the town where I was born in West Yorkshire. Right. So it's great backing a. I went to university there. A fellow from Huddersfield, and he'd copied the. The Howden's model, which was putting kitchen showrooms on the industrial park. So the rent is low. Craig did the same with bathrooms. He'd opened 40 outlets and was looking for a investor to help him to grow.

Yeah.

And we're now at 140 outlets and the business has still got significant potential to keep growing.

Wow. Do you think doing marketing for Procter and Gamble gave you a good foundation? Because I personally think I mentor thousands of startup entrepreneurs and pretty much the thing they're all not yet good at, which I think is the thing they all need to master, is marketing. So did that give you a bit of an edge?

It did and I think it was a grounding in how you run a whole business with a focus on marketing. So I was a brand manager, started working on marketing assistant on Fairy Liquid. That's why my hands are still so soft. Then it was Vortex Bleach, where I was brand manager, which was a competitor to Domestos. So when people describe my career, it's from the. The toilet bowl to down the drain with homeserve.

Yeah. But you sold it for 4.1 billion.

So you had the last one. I did learn about marketing.

Yeah.

And I think that's a real important driver of the business.

Yeah.

I don't think you need to come from a marketing background. It's. You could come from a. There are some good entrepreneurs that come from a finance background. I would say today with most of the online marketplaces, SaaS, software, tech businesses, a lot of those guys come from a computer science and then product background.

Okay, so what would you say some traits of disruptive entrepreneurs are? Entrepreneurs. You'd back some of the traits.

Yeah. And if you said of those eight secrets, the one that I, I forgot about, that we've now added in is secret zero. And that is about the personal characteristics that you need as a entrepreneurial founder. And I would say it's three of them are the. The behaviors that I believe in courage, persistence and integrity. Courage would be going and spending £74 million on acquiring checker trade back in 2017. And that was a lot of money for a business that was only making a million pounds profit. It's an Attractive part of homeserve today. And that bet that courage is definitely going to go to pay off. The business is growing really, really fast. Second one is persistence. And that is about if you're really determined, you can make most things happen, but you do have to persist. And the third one, integrity. And I don't really mean honesty because hopefully we take that for granted in business. But it would be confronting the brutal facts. What are the things that your management team are reluctant to talk about? What are the things that they should be telling you about as the chief exec in the business? And they don't really want to tell you. They absolutely must. If you're not confronting the brutal facts, then you're heading for a crisis. So those are three then. One of the guys that I really admire, he's never run a business but he's researched them is Jim Collins. Wrote a book that I would recommend called Good to Great. We followed that in HomeServe. And he would talk about Level 5 leadership. And what does Level 5 leadership mean? It means things like low ego. It means no politics in the business, rolling up your sleeves and being really hands on, being able to admit your mistakes, having curiosity. Every day you want to learn about new stuff. And those are the sort of traits that I'm looking for in the entrepreneurs that I'm backing either with my own money or through business leader and writing to them and saying, I'd really like you to become a business leader member because I think you've got the characteristics to make it from mid size to big size.

Right. So you're actually outbound, targeting the kind of entrepreneurs that you want to back as opposed to just waiting for them to come to you. Are you?

Yes. Yeah. And why? Because I believe in direct marketing.

Yeah.

And one of my eight secrets is bricks and clicks and paper. So you'd think, hold on a minute, paper. Does that still work in a digital age? Absolutely it does. Direct mail shots get a greater share of the doormat today than they did 10 years ago when digital marketing was still in its infancy.

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What do you think about university? Do you think someone who wants to be an entrepreneur should go to university? Bearing in mind it's 45 grand average debt now, and bearing in mind it's 26 grand average salary when you start and you know, some of the university degrees don't seem very tangible and many people, six months a year, 18 months, they still haven't got a job. Compare that to you can use AI, you can listen to podcasts like this, you can read books like, you know, from Jim Collins and you can almost self educate. So if you were starting again, would you go down the university route or the self education route?

Yeah, I think that we have too many young people that think, oh, I must go to university and not enough apprentices. And actually if you look at what's going to happen to the world, then we need more people out there learning a really skilled trade. If I look at the 51,000 members that we have on our checker trade platform and say all of those guys started on the tools, a lot of them did a formal apprenticeship, they learned how to be a plumber, electrician, heating engineer, and half of them went on to employ many other people. There are lots of millionaires that are on the chequer trade platform that started on the tools and now they're business people, they're entrepreneurs, some of them are doing really, really well. And yeah, I would say let's get more apprenticeships, let's get fewer university degrees and let's train our young people in the areas where we most need them, in construction, in hospitality, in those sorts of areas.

Do you think the government are doing enough to help people become apprentices and teaching maybe some of the homeless people because they could start learning a trade?

No, I don't think they are. I think particularly, I don't think the employer's apprenticeship levy is working. So that should change. That's money. That is large employers, when actually the big thing is we have loads of small businesses in this country, over 1.6 million of those. If they all just took on a single apprentice, that would be a lot of new apprentices. And I think we only have around 200,000 apprentice starts a year. We need to have a million plus a year. That's what's going to transform this economy.

Yeah, I agree. Why are the government not helping people get off welfare and getting in and learning these trades?

That's what needs to happen. But equally, I'm a big believer that it is up to us business people to make it happen and not just relying upon whichever government is in office. Yeah.

I'll tell you a little thing that I kind of inadvertently did this and I didn't know this because I've been teaching people to start their businesses for 17 years and I'm fighting against the fact that most businesses fail. I had one of the former Dragons in here earlier this morning and he said it's more than nine out of ten businesses that fail. That's what you're told, because he knows, because he's a Dragon is maybe a little bit of a, a bridge or a hack. To become a successful business owner and entrepreneur is step one, go and get a job with a successful entrepreneur, do an apprenticeship with someone like you, or go and work for that, that medium sized company where you might get a bit of mentorship from the owner, founder. Because if you work for me, you're going to be able to get a bit of time with me. Because, you know, we're at the hundred staff level and not the thousand staff level. Is that maybe an area where not enough people are talking, where you could go from, you could just get a bit more mentorship, learn and earn at the same time?

Yeah, I think that's a great idea. I have done it in the past where there was a program a number of years ago where that's exactly what happened. And I would get a, I would actually get a, a graduate. But their first job was to go and be my apprentice and effectively a management assistant. That was learning how I operate. I have a team today of a management assistant, chief of staff and a pa and they're an important Part of helping me to get my workload done every week.

How do you stay grounded and humble and the ability to, you know, make good, level, balanced decisions when you've been so successful and made so much money?

I think it's about staying in touch. If you said, what's one of the things that I enjoy in my working week? I run a growth seminar in my, in my front room, in my dining room, in my house in marylebone. I have 14 entrepreneurs running mid sized companies around the table and we have a two hour growth workshop. I share my eight secrets as we're doing now, but it's face to face and I love it. I'm learning from them as much as they're learning from me and more importantly the power of that peer group of the learning from each other. So they would say and what do you think? And I would say, well actually I, I haven't got all the answers but what does anybody else around the table think?

Do you think right now in Internet AI, but also social media and distraction, do you think it's easier than ever and better than ever time to start a business or do you think it's harder than when you started decades ago?

I think it's a lot easier today because you can. A shop window is a Shopify website. You can get a business up and running for a few thousand pounds and then it's test and learn. And what I learned was don't go at it too big, start really small and then test and prove the model before you go too big. So it is a lot easier to do it today. But equally I would say there are more distractions so you need to be really, really disciplined. And there's the four quadrant time management model and one of those quadrants is important but not urgent and we all get to Friday and think, oh, those things that I really wanted to think about and work on I haven't managed to get to them. And that is about being disciplined and finding some quiet time and doing that. If you're a retailer that's going out and visiting some of your stores, talking to your customers, the stuff that you don't have to do and it gets neglected but it is about turning off your mobile phone, turning off your emails, turning off your social media and doing that important but not urgent stuff, that's the crown jewels, right?

So as someone who built and sold a 4 odd billion company, what's the best business model for 2025 that someone can start?

It's masses of opportunity. I think we all think about it must be A tech business business, it must be an online marketplace. But I truly believe that there are opportunities in good old British manufacturing businesses, online businesses that can have a retail presence as well, online businesses that don't necessarily need to have their own stores, but get their products distributed in the likes of Harvey Nichols or John Lewis. And that's how to build a brand and then generate some of those sales. Direct business to consumer. So don't be restricted. But I think in that sort of first phase of business, the startup and proving the model, which I would call the entrepreneurial phase, then you've got to come up with something that is radical, different, revolutionary, but it could be a copy of what somebody else has done, but you just make it better.

So as someone who has built companies that turn over billions and sold them for billions, be honest. Does money make you happy?

Yeah, definitely.

Hallelujah.

It gives you choices in life. It means that I can put my money where my mouth is and not just help entrepreneurs to grow the business, but invest in some of those businesses. Is it about the money now? No. What gives me the greatest delight is being able to look back in five or 10 years time with some of those entrepreneurs that have made it really big and say, look what you've achieved, Rob. And all I did was help you avoid the mistakes that I've made. I gave you a little, a few tips and advice, but it was show rather than tell and you've made it big. And to me, it's that feeling in my heart that says, I help those people, they did it. But look at what's been achieved that is more powerful than any amount of money.

So we do a quick fire round on disruptors. What's a secret you've never shared or a story you've never told?

I think I've shared all of my secrets, really, but I guess the ones that are less well known are back to my belief that age 5, I needed to start running my own businesses. So I left Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. My father had been promoted in the civil service to a job in Newcastle upon Tyne. So we left all of our family, friends and relatives and moved to the northeast of England. My grandfather bought me a white rabbit that I called Snowy. And so that was my first business. I thought, I want to start making money. So I bought a second rabbit and started breeding them and then selling those rabbits to my school friends at primary school with an advertisement on the school notice board and then cross selling and obviously I didn't know what that was at the time, but I worked out that all the people I'd sold rabbits to used to go on the summer holidays. So I would say bring the rabbit back to me and I'll look after it. So that was cross selling. I ran a rabbit kennels and that was a way of making more money out of the one off rabbit sale. And then from White Rabbits to Ricardo, the famous magician of the North, I trained, joined the Northern Magic Circle and trained to be a magician and would do a couple of kids parties a week. This was when I was getting 25p a week as pocket money and I was earning a pound from every magic show I was running at children's parties for four to six year olds when I was aged nine.

So you've pretty much been an entrepreneur every decade of your life?

Absolutely. I think probably by the time I got to setting up the original A1 fast fix plumbing business, which then got transformed into HomeServe, that was probably about my fifth or sixth business.

How old were you then?

And that was sort of age 20.

Wow. So you're age 20, you're on your sixth business. So you've got some few little failures behind you as some lessons.

I think in this country we regard business failure as really bad and actually fail fast, fail small, learn from it and then you can go on and make it really big.

Yeah, I think we can learn a lot from the Americans about failure, can't we? I think I still have this British culture in me that I don't want to fail, I don't want to let people down. I'd hate to lose, you know, shareholders and investors, money, creditors, all of this thing. And if I think about that, that's probably held me back from really pushing it.

Yeah. I mean, America, I, as a teenager I actually dreamed of going to America, finding a business idea that was big over there and bringing it back to the UK. When I first went to America in 2003 and found that HomeServe annual home assistance cover hadn't been done branded as utilities. So we took my British business model and made it eventually made it really big in America. Yeah. But I do think we can still learn a lot from the Americans. A lot of businesses do start over there. Americans will share their learning. They do have peer groups. There's an entrepreneur's organization that is really big over there called ypo, but they're really small over here. And back to copying, we've copied that with Business Leader. We've taken all the best bits of YPO added in.

You're so shameless.

You don't Care, we make it British and that's going to be really, really big. So it's unashamedly copying and improving. And one day we will look back and say, British entrepreneurs are achieving even more than their American counterparts. But we're five or six years away from that.

Yeah. What's the biggest disruption that's ever happened in your life?

Great question. I think I've been very lucky that I've never had a personal crisis. And they do say that if you've experienced a crisis in your life, you can go on achieve even more. I think for me it's just been about sort of always trying to create the next disruption. But that's mainly about, I believe in evolution rather than revolution. And you do need revolution at the start of a business. Once you've got that, then revolution is dangerous. But you do need constant evolution. We can both think, Rob, about some of those businesses that didn't keep evolving. Blockbuster Video, Yellow Pages, Nokia Kodak, and think of some great businesses that did keep evolving. Apple would be one, if we take one US example. But think back to 2011, when Steve Jobs unfortunately died. What were all the shareholders thinking when Apple was worth $100 billion? They were saying, well, oh, we're really worried there isn't going to be a revolutionary new product. And the answer is there hasn't been no AirPods, Apple watches, goggles. But it's mainly been about Apple Pay, Apple Music, app store, cloud services. And yet Apple today is worth $3.6 trillion. And that's through evolution, not revolution. If you just say, where's the best example of constant evolution in the uk? I would say it would be Next. Originally, the clothing retailer that came out of Hepworth and Next Directory was the precursor for Online, then Click and Collect, opening more stores, moving from clothing into homewares, and then moving from Next only as the brand to buying brands, then total platform, fulfilling other people's brands and international growth. So that business this year is going to make a billion pounds annual profit for the first time. And that's come through Simon Wolfson's constant evolution.

Wow. What's the biggest risk you've ever taken?

Setting up homeserve in the first place and nearly going bust not once but twice. Running out of money. In December 92, the bailiffs arrived from customs necks to take away our office furniture and we rushed around trying to find an investor. We found a little water company north of Birmingham that said, yeah, we'll invest in the business, but we want half of the shares. But that was our Lifeline gave us a 500,000 pound investment. But a year later I'd grown the business and used up all of that half million pounds and I hadn't found the magic model of plumbing insurance cover. I copied another little water company in Surrey improved on their model, sent out a thousand mail shots and the business was about to be closed down and 38 people sent in a cheque for 50 pounds, a 3.8% take up from direct mail. I remember getting on my office desk in front of the 23 people who are about to be made redundant and saying, yes, we've made it. And we had almost. The rest is history. We rolled out the business. Eight and a half million members, 10,000 staff within HomeServe and then to the ultimate sale. But actually I feel that HomeServe the next chapter will be the most exciting. But that was the near death experience. That happened not once, but twice.

Just bring your mic back. What's your most brutal life lesson, Richard?

That you need to keep going. And back to that behavior that I try and instill in every entrepreneur, everybody in home service, persistence, pace, just keep going. Hard work, determination, drive and you can make whatever you want happen.

What about what's the best and worst advice you've ever received?

The best advice came from Nigel Morris, the co founder of Capital One. He was a Brit that made it big in America and he said, you shouldn't be running your American business of HomeServe from Miami. You need to be based between Boston, New York, Washington D.C. on the east coast. And you need to hire a great American to be your chief exec. And he became my mentor and I listened to him and we moved to an hour north of New York, hired a great American to run the business, a guy called Tom Rusin. When HomeSurf America was making $10 million profit last year, it made over $250 million in a single year. So that was the best bit, the worst bit of advice. I'm not sure I think, yeah, I do. I sort of, I filter them out, I meet lots of people and I'm still learning.

Do you have any biggest regret or failure?

I don't think you can have regrets in life. You need to make the changes and learn from them. But I guess it would be. I just wish somebody had told me the eight secrets because if they had, I could have got there in 15 years and still have 45 years of my business career remaining rather than only 30.

And this show is called Disruptors. So what does the word disruptive mean to you?

Disruption is what you do at the start of your business when you're inventing the model, coming up with revolution and disrupting a marketplace, by definition, there'll be some mature businesses, they'll be big, they'll have slowed down. And your job is to move fast, be agile, achieve lots, come up with something which is radically different that consumers will absolutely love. Or businesses. If your, if Your model is B2B rather than B2C but once you've done it, don't disrupt twice, that is dangerous. Just keep evolving that model.

And you've been talking about your eight Secrets and also business leaders. I'm really interested by the way, so maybe we could stay in touch about that. I really believe in getting mentors. I think it's really important and being around other like minded entrepreneurs. So yeah, where can we find out more about you and some of the content you're putting out?

Yeah, go online to businessleader.co.uk and download the Eight Secrets. Follow me, Richard Harpin on LinkedIn and hopefully I can help you. But I love anybody that's running a business that is mid size to join up anybody that's running a consumer retail leisure business in that sort of 1 to 5 million profit range. Then talk to the team at Growth Partner about whether we could be your right investor.

Richard, this has been a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Thanks Rob. Really enjoyed it.

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