Ask Richard: Managing the conversations founders avoid

Sir Richard Harpin built HomeServe from scratch into one of the UK's largest home emergency businesses, before leading its £4.1bn sale to Brookfield Asset Management in 2022. He has since founded the investment fund Growth Partner and bought Business Leader, using both to help founders and CEOs scale.

In this instalment of Ask Richard, Business Leader magazine readers put their toughest leadership questions to him: from regretting a growth bet that overreached to deciding what to keep centralised when you take a business abroad.

Reflecting across your career, what decisions created the most value over time, but probably felt uncomfortable or difficult at the point you made them?

Jordon Trent, CEO of Charles Trent Ltd

It was getting out of activities we tried that were not successful. We'd over-diversified and had to get out of furniture warranties for retailers, damage repairs for home insurers and smart home devices. I would call it de-evolution and refocusing.

Looking back, I expanded into areas that were two steps removed from the core and should have focused on evolving our product range only. We should have transitioned into offering heating installations earlier. This was only one step away from our core and proved to be a successful growth lever.

How do you structure your leadership cadence with your senior team? You've implemented a weekly “5-15” approach. How do you use it to drive accountability, coaching and performance?

Chirag Kaneria, director of Cards Direct Retail

For the CEOs who report into me for Growth Partner and Business Leader, we have 45-minute weekly one-to-ones. They prepare an agenda and reading materials and send them to me the day before. This includes their “5-15” one-page weekly summary table of KPIs, key issues and opportunities. For anyone who's never tried this approach before, it's called a “5-15” because I can read it in five minutes and they can write it in 15 minutes. I will normally send a few discussion points ahead of time, as well.

For the immediate team around me (“Team Harpin”, as they're known), we meet daily either on video call or face-to-face. Normally, this is a meeting of around 15 to 20 minutes, covering the day-to-day of diary management, meeting prep, handling emails and agreeing priorities.

How do you handle difficult situations while still maintaining respect and authority?

Imran Makki, CEO of FST Systems

Great leaders can both confront the brutal facts and be kind. A great example is the need to exit a long-outstanding member of your management team when the business has outgrown them. This situation needs to be confronted straight away but done with kindness. That means offering them a good reference and a settlement agreement, too.

You may need to explain that there is a great opportunity for them elsewhere because they're no longer a right fit here. No bridges are burned, but crucially, you're not avoiding a tough decision for the sake of being supportive and likeable to somebody who's no longer the right fit for what your business needs.

You've a better chance of earning their respect, and that of your colleagues more widely, by confronting these difficult moments, though still in a professional and human manner.

When you're still in the messy middle – before the extraordinary win – how do you talk about mistakes and setbacks to your team and investors without losing their belief? How do you stop failings looking like failure before great success is achieved?

Richard Clouston, founder and CEO of Clouston Group

It's important when something hasn't worked to talk about it, take the learnings and commit to the reforms you'll do as a result. Hiding the mistakes away as if they're a secret never to be discussed is corrosive: a failed initiative could fall into a negative place of internal gossip and hearsay, rather than become constructive learning you can build from.

The other controllable is to keep tests small and agile so you're not causing a big problem to the business when something doesn't work. That way, failures on the way can be healthy opportunities for iterations as part of a scalable plan of innovation, rather than “one big bet” that may not pay off.

Looking back at your international expansion journey, what were the most important functions you kept centralised at group level and which functions needed strong local leadership early on in each country?

Mark Pattison, founder and CEO of Care ADHD

I am a great believer in building fully local businesses in international countries with local CEOs and management teams, while operating to a common model with the minimum of local changes. When we expanded, we had common systems, process and software, but we kept headcount at the group as low as possible.

This was the same approach that Belron (Autoglass) and Rentokil adopted for running their multi-country operations. I ran a case study on the Belron model at the recent Business Leader Summit, as I was so impressed by how it allowed CEO Gary Lubner to scale the business.