← Travis Makes Money
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- [00:02]
A
And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
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B
Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?
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A
Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
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B
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
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A
Anyways, get a'@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
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C
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.
- [00:30]
B
You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast, presented by GoHighLevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis. What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast, where it's our mission to help all of you beautiful people out there make a little bit more money. Today on the show, I have a new friend, Richard Harpin. Richard. Richard's the former founder and CEO of HomeServe, which sold for over 4.1 billion. That's billion with a B sold for over 4.1billion. He's the founder and owner of Growth Partner, and he's a business leader as well. He also wrote a book called how to Make a Billion in Nine Steps. Simple Lessons for Making Extraordinary Wealth. It's almost like it's the exact thing that we talk about here on the show. So I couldn't think of a better person to have on. Richard, what's up, man? Welcome.
- [01:21]
C
Thank you. Great to be on the show, Travis.
- [01:24]
B
So let's go back in time. First off, before we dive into some more tactical things here, tell me the first time, Richard, that you ever made a dollar that you were thrilled about. Like, the first time you were shocked that somebody was willing to pay you money for this thing.
- [01:37]
C
I think half of entrepreneurs fall into it in later life and half are born entrepreneurs, and I was definitely the latter. So I was breeding white rabbits at the age of five, selling them to my friends at school for. For about. And then selling them a rabbit kennel service when they went on their summer holiday.
- [02:00]
B
Nice. Yeah, like a little recurring revenue in it too, huh?
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C
I think I had about five businesses before I found the one that eventually really worked, which was home surf. But I got into selling fishing flies. The wives and girlfriends and sisters of all those fishermen said, do you know what? Those fishing flies would make really nice earrings. So that was my market research done. Off with the end of the hook on with kidney wires. And I ended up calling those feathery earrings hookers. So with my hundred pounds marketing budget, enough to put out a press release to every radio station, TV station, every newspaper with a headline, hookers set to hit UK high streets. And teenagers rushed out to buy these feather earrings for about six months. And then the craze died. So my advice would be, any budding entrepreneurs, start early and at least you'll be learning and start small.
- [03:09]
B
At least you'll be learning. Yeah, that's right. That's right. You. You was this entrepreneurial itch that you had just innate in you. Were your parents entrepreneurs? What did your parents do?
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C
No, my dad was a chartered surveyor in the civil service. My great grandparents lost all of the money in the Great Depression of 1929, so they were mill owners in the north of England. But it was drummed into him that being an entrepreneur was too risky.
- [03:43]
B
Sure.
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C
So he was always a bit worried when I got into business.
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B
Did you go to business school or what was like the path for you toward entrepreneurship?
- [03:53]
C
Yeah, I did a degree in economics. Still hadn't worked out what was gonna be the big business that would make my fortune. So I ended up joining Procter and Gamble, the soap company in the north of England. And I wanted to keep my entrepreneurial hand in. So, not content with just learning about marketing as a brand assistant, the big opportunity was a shortage of shared professional accommodation at the time. So with a business partner, we bought 10 houses, refurbished them, let them out by the individual room. And you know what the biggest problem was?
- [04:34]
B
What's that?
- [04:35]
C
Always on a Friday evening, the phone would ring and it'd be one of the tenants saying, there's water pouring out of a radiator. Or we've got a block drain in the backyard, or the boiler or furnace has broken down. And you could not get a plumber in Newcastle on a Friday night, they're all out drinking. So we thought, that's our big opportunity. And this was in the days of the Yellow Pages. So we called the business a one fast fix to get to the front of the section for plumbing and for heating. We put our life savings into the business. £50,000. And the model didn't work.
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B
No way.
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C
The cost of the other pages was too high. People only have a plumbing emergency every five years, so there was no repeat customers. But we were determined to find the way through, find a model that would work. And I'm a great believer in luck. I'm an optimist. And when everybody was telling me as we ran out of money for the second time, you better go back and work for Proctor and Gas.
- [05:44]
D
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- [06:14]
C
Campbell, Richard, your lifetime dream of becoming a successful entrepreneur are over. And that was what my co founding business partner was telling me.
- [06:24]
B
Oh, no.
- [06:25]
C
And you know what? When you've got a Lifestream, you've got to find a way to make it happen. Somebody called me and said, there's a little water company and they've developed like the AAA but for the home, and it covers the underground pipe in the garden, the water service line. And so I went and investigated, talked to some of their customers that had signed up. I copied the model. And step number one in my book is copy and pivot. And we're taught at school that copying homework is bad. I want to let everybody know that. Let's not be afraid to copy in business. I did it. I copied that plumbing insurance model. It worked. Then we rolled it out across the UK, branded to each individual water company. And then in 2003, we took the model to America.
- [07:29]
B
So it was already working pretty well in the UK then, I'm assuming.
- [07:32]
C
Yeah. I think you've got to make sure that your business model is working, it's profitable in your home country before you try and internationalize the business.
- [07:44]
B
Yeah. So essentially, if I understand it correctly, this is insurance on the main water line that hooks up to the street because your homeowner's insurance doesn't cover any sort of plumbing that's not in the home.
- [07:58]
C
Exactly. But it also covered emergencies indoors for plumbing. Then we latterly added on cover for the electrical wiring and cover for the furnace or the boiler.
- [08:13]
B
And this is, I think we literally just got like a letter in the mail about this. It was like, I want to say, I want to say it was like 90 bucks a year or something like that crate. It was something very, very affordable. Right?
- [08:28]
C
Yeah. And that will have come from HomeServe. The biggest part of our operation today is in America. We've got over 5 million customers there and we market both under the HomeServe name and under the utility brand. Names.
- [08:48]
B
Yeah, yeah, that was the letter that we got. The utility. It was like co branded with the utility company.
- [08:55]
C
Yeah, yeah. And you would think today in a digital marketing world that direct mail shots, paper through the letterbox delivered by US mail wouldn't work. But actually if you cast your mind back 10 years to how much mail you got on your doormat, it was a lot more then compared to today. Today's junk mail is emails and people who are still doing direct mail. It works because you get a bigger percentage share of the doormat. So I would urge anybody, any business out there to test doing mail shots. They still work. They work better today than they did 10 years ago, even in a digital marketing world.
- [09:43]
B
This is why I love hearing the journey man. Because like you can't get a full picture of what you've accomplished with this company without zooming out a little bit and understanding that you at your very first thing was basically you were, you were doing a real estate side hustle project in addition to your full time job working gamble. And then that side hustle project highlighted a potential problem in the market which you tried to serve. It did not work at all and people were telling you to quit. And then in that pursuit you found another problem that was sort of adjacent to the core problem that you were trying to solve, that was adjacent to the core problem that you were trying to solve first and then ran with that one and ended up in the insurance business, which is not at all what your intention was.
- [10:30]
C
Copy pivot, wait until you've got the right model. The other bit of advice is I didn't follow this, I know it now, but I didn't at the start of my entrepreneurial journey is don't be too ambitious and grow the business too quickly. Wait till you've proved out the model, bootstrap the business, ideally hold back on getting an investor until you've proved your model and then you want to press the accelerate button and that's maybe the time that you seek an investor, but not like I did, give away over half of the business. We had to give up 52% of the equity in return for half a million pounds to keep the business going. So keep it small, prove the model, get to profitability and then if you need money to scale, that's when you should bring in an investor. But find an investor that can help you and only sell them a minority shareholding.
- [11:34]
B
So here's the question. Would the business have survived had you not taken on that half million pound investment?
- [11:40]
C
No. So I don't regret it and that half a million pounds over the next 29 years became a £4.1 billion sale.
- [11:53]
B
Yeah, I think your investor was probably pretty happy with that.
- [11:57]
C
Yes.
- [12:01]
B
At what point did or did you ever reach a point where you felt imposter syndrome or some version of under qualification to continue scaling the business? Like when you start getting, when you start seeing some of these revenue numbers pouring in, Was there ever a time where you're like, I, I gotta find somebody else to run this thing. I, I don't know what I'm doing here.
- [12:26]
C
Yeah, there was, it was eight years in.
- [12:29]
B
Okay.
- [12:30]
C
And I was good at finding the right model eventually, but I didn't much like running the day to day business. I like the international expansion, the business development, not running the day to day customer service. So I brought in a guy that ran business development in the UK for a year, did a great job, called him into my office one day and said, jonathan, congratulations, you're promoted. I'm giving you my job. Managing director of HomeServe UK when we were only a UK business and that meant I could work on the business rather than in the business. And he kept growing the uk, delivering great service. And I started thinking about, I wonder whether HomeServe would work in a foreign country.
- [13:27]
B
What's your first step when you're moving into a new market like that? Is it, is it, does it look almost identical to when you started the business in the uk? Are you starting from a different position because you've already proven that successful in a different market or is it like back to grassroots because you're not sure how it's going to work or perform in this other market?
- [13:44]
C
My learning was it's really important that the founder is out prospecting different countries to find the one that they think will work best for. In fact, we went into France as the first international country and France is really difficult. There's a high cost of employing people. If those people are not the right ones, it's very difficult to get rid of them. But we were owned. The group that invested in HomeServ were themselves 30% owned by General de Zeau, the big French water company. So we got a deal with them to go into France. They persuaded us to change the business model and we did. And we persevered for a year and the new model didn't work. So out of desperation, just when we were about to give up, we went back to the original direct mail model. We used the water company brand of General des Eaux service and guess what? It worked. So the Learning is stay true to your original business model. I call it the 15% rule. If you need to change your model by more than 15%, think again about going into that country.
- [15:08]
B
It's better to find another market than it is to find another model.
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C
Yes. And don't go to a country too far away and don't get seduced by going to a really big country. Go to an easier one that's close by and prove that you can become an international business.
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B
When it came to your acquisition of customers, I assume you know these, or at least at the time knew these metrics like the back of your hand. What were you looking for in terms like what were you happy with for a customer acquisition cost versus the lifetime value of your customer?
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C
Yeah, we were looking for ideally a two year payback on the marketing. So because we were getting a over 80% retention rate that this is a recurring income membership model, then a two year payback was really, really attractive. And when we proved out the model in the US we were getting a less than a one year payback. And that was a function of really high take up rates on the direct marketing branded as the local water utility or electric company or gas company.
- [16:29]
B
A one year payback on that. So even then is still a full year of cash cycle. Right. So you're putting money out, you're not seeing that back for 12 months. Did you have to go raise more money at some point to continue acquiring customers? Do you have enough of a war chest? What was the finance, what were the finances of the company looking like for that time period?
- [16:50]
C
Yeah, we only ever as a public company did about 125 million pound equity raise, but actually a year or two later we gave 100 million back to shareholders. So as a public company we didn't actually need money to grow because most of our members were paying upfront for the whole year's membership then? It was a extremely cash generative business.
- [17:19]
B
Were there any upsells along the way or was it just this one core product and it was good enough for you just to focus on expanding that one core product?
- [17:27]
C
No, it was the most attractive part of the business model was the cross selling and the upselling. So when people had bought water service line cover alone, then we would go to them and sell them plumbing emergency cover and then electrics cover and then furnace breakdown cover.
- [17:49]
B
Got it. So increased coverage across other things. But the initial offer being attractive enough, like I said, where it's, I mean, I mean, hey, if the main water line does go out, that is going to be annoying. It's whatever it was, 50, 60 bucks a year, like may as well go ahead and get that. The uptake on that was so, the conversion rate on that was so high that it was basically like, let's keep this front end offer as this one core service. Then once we get in, you hitting them with emails, you hitting them with phone team.
- [18:18]
C
Yeah, there was a, some outbound calling to existing members and there would be suggestions when they might be calling us to change their address or with a query. And we'd also be sending direct mail because that worked in the first place. So typically the cost of acquiring an extra product sale from an existing customer is five times more cost effective than acquiring that customer in the first place.
- [18:50]
B
Yeah, I just love the idea of that low ticket model where it's just like there's not a ton of barrier, there's not a lot of friction in the buying process when it's something like that, where it's, it's not 50 bucks a month, it's 50 bucks a year or whatever the price point is. And it just makes it easy just to say, yeah, let's go ahead and do this. Is it, is it when somebody gets that, are they calling in like, do you have an inbound call center or you tried to do all of this online?
- [19:14]
C
No. A big part of the model is having a 1-800-free phone call. A lot of our customers are older, retired, they worry about things going wrong in the home and therefore they want the reassurance of a number they can call that's answered quickly and to let them know that the plumber will be on their way.
- [19:40]
B
So the operational complexity there, would that, did that introduce any complications in terms like, so you have a year of, you know, one to two years, let's call it, before you make your money back on acquiring the customer. But then you have operational costs that also eat into that margin as well. Right. So there any concerns from your perspective as you scaled the company as quickly as you ended up scaling it, that you were not going to be able to keep up with the demand that you were creating?
- [20:06]
C
No. One of the things that we did was we brought in insurance underwriters to make sure that if there was ever an ice age and therefore a very high level of claims, that we were insured and that therefore the customer was always going to get the, get the benefit.
- [20:28]
B
Got it, Got it. And then now, Richard, obviously you're doing a lot of other things right. You're on this podcast, you've written a book, a Lot more speaking, I'm assuming things like that. What do, what do you really enjoy about what you do these days?
- [20:42]
C
Inspiring breakthrough. And I learned that that was my key skill, that I now want to help other entrepreneurs on their journey, particularly scale ups rather than startups. Because in the UK and in America there are lots of startups. But it's really about how do we help those entrepreneurs to scale a business. The nine things I know now that I wish I'd known at the start of my journey and I want to get those messages out there through the book that I've written that will come out in the US in May next year. And anybody can order a copy, pre order a copy on Barnes and Noble or can get the book today on Spotify or on Audible and following my lessons on Instagram and on LinkedIn. But I really want to help entrepreneurs to scale their businesses. In the UK we have a growth program called Business Leader and that is a membership program for entrepreneurs that want to scale. It recommends that they get a mentor. We help them to find that mentor, we provide a coach, we provide peer groups. So they learn from nine other founders and CEOs running similar sized businesses.
- [22:08]
B
As somebody who built this company, I mean mostly, mostly on your own from the beginning and now getting more engaged in sort of the, the social media side, the media aspect, writing books, speaking, doing social things like that, how do you view the, the marriage of the business brand with the personal brand of the person running the business?
- [22:32]
C
Yeah, what I've learned is that people buy from people and therefore you need to be out there getting your messages out. And I know, but in Business Leader and also in my investment business, where I'm putting my own money backing other entrepreneurs and taking minority shareholdings in those businesses, that if I get my brand out there, that will be the most cost effective way to engage with those scale up entrepreneurs.
- [23:06]
B
Yeah, no kidding.
- [23:07]
C
So for every entrepreneur out there, you need to be the face of your brand. That's the cheapest and most cost effective way to generate business. You've gotta be very clear about what your monetization model is, how much time and effort you're prepared to spend on social media in order to generate those inquiries.
- [23:32]
B
So last question for you, Richard. When's your podcast coming out?
- [23:37]
C
I do one, it is the Business Leader podcast, Business Leader podcast. It comes out every Tuesday. And I've gone from doing a lot of podcasts as the interviewee to like you, Travis being the interviewer, but I'm a lot less experienced on that. But I really enjoy it. And every week that I'm interviewing a mainly British entrepreneurs, British chief execs that have built very large businesses, then I'm learning as well as the audience. And I think one of the most important traits for any business leader or entrepreneur is curiosity. Learn. Try and learn something new every day. But equally, if I look back and said what's my biggest mistake in business in building that business from a 50,000 pound startup to a 4 billion pound sale, it was trying to do too much and not being focused enough. So when you found your great business model, by all means, take it international. But don't try and do things that are revolutionary that are two steps removed from your business. Have a not to do list. Stay focused. Evolution, not revolution.
- [25:06]
B
Sir Richard Harpin is his name. The book how to Make a Billion in nine Steps coming out in the US next year. But you can get it on Audible or on Spotify Audio as well right now. So go pick up a copy of this book, give it a quick listen. Also the business leader podcast with Richard. Go check out some of the stuff, the conversations that he's been able to have over there. This is the beautiful, beautiful thing about being in our our time right now is that you can go directly to the source and like you used to have to be a student at Harvard to get the type of education that you can gain from listening to a podcast with somebody who's had a 4.1 billion pound exit. So go check out some of the stuff that Richard's working on and then his Instagram at Richard underscore Harpin H A R P I N at Richard Harpin over on Instagram. Go check him out over there. Give him a follow. Richard, I appreciate you taking the time. I know you're a really busy guy. I do not take that for granted in the least. Everybody else tuning in, remember, money only solves your money problems. But it's a little bit easier to solve the rest of your problems when you got some money in the bank. So let's start there here on the Travis Makes Money podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you guys next time. Peace.