How To Make A Billion In Nine Steps by Richard Harpin: Guide to making your first billion

As it happens, I do quite fancy being extraordinarily wealthy. I briefly toyed with the idea of reading Ten Steps To Making A Million but entrepreneur Richard Harpin’s book promises more money in fewer steps.

This is an interesting read. Harpin, 60, displayed entrepreneurial skills when still a Newcastle schoolboy, selling conkers to friends. Another business he started as a youngster, tying fishing flies for anglers, was so successful that when he sold it, straight after university, he made enough money to buy a car and put down the deposit on his first house.

He worked in marketing for Procter & Gamble for a few years and then he and a friend, Jeremy Middleton, set up HomeServe with £50,000 in 1992. HomeServe, which provides home emergency repair cover, was sold in 2023 for £4.1 billion.

His first lesson is that you have to ‘copy and pivot’. In business, copying is good. There’s no point in reinventing the wheel. HomeServe was a copy of a water company’s plumbing insurance offer and a pivot from his loss-making emergency plumbing business. Similarly, in his earlier days, when he realised that the feathers he used to make his flies could be used to make earrings, he pivoted, calling the business ‘Hookers’.

Is it better to enter a marketplace in which there are no competitors? Harpin argues that it’s a good thing if there is a competitor: ‘It proves my idea is already working and there is potential for growth.’ He also places great store in coaches and mentors. People think successful business people to be visionary loners but Harpin values advice.

He’s not above showing off occasionally. When he had set his mind on hiring a particular executive, he flew her from Buenos Aires to Miami ‘and put on quite a show, hiring a big motorboat, and even a helicopter so I could fly her around Miami and over Gloria Estefan’s house’. Oh, yes, he flies helicopters. Remember when Rishi Sunak was prime minister and flying around the country in a chopper? Sometimes he was using Harpin’s.

However, he doesn’t gloss over his mistakes. In the very early days he and Middleton were operating on maxed-out credit cards and had bailiffs on the doorstep.

Harpin also discusses the fact that HomeServe fell foul of the Financial Services Authority (now the Financial Conduct Authority) and was fined £30.6 million. He even quotes colleagues’ criticisms of him. ‘A lot of his ideas are good, but they’re mixed in with a good amount of garbage,’ says one.

He eats, sleeps and breathes business. He listens to books at 1.4 speed so he can get through them quicker, and spends two hours on a Sunday evening planning the week ahead and reviewing the previous one.

What this book is not is a get-rich-quick manual. The truth is – and we all know it really – that there is no magic formula. You need a great business idea and you need the sort of drive and resourcefulness that Harpin has in spades. He even suggests that half of all entrepreneurs are born rather than made. Some of us are never going to be billionaires, no matter how many books on the topic we read.