Ask Richard: Productivity playbook

Richard Harpin has had a hugely successful career in business. Having founded HomeServe in 1993, he helped build it into one of the UK's largest home emergency businesses. He served as CEO until its acquisition in 2022 by Brookfield Asset Management, in a deal that valued the business at £4.1bn.

He has since founded the investment fund Growth Partner and purchased Business Leader to help leaders grow their businesses. Here, he covers the topic of productivity.

At what stage in your business did you take on a personal assistant?

My objective is to achieve more – 20 per cent more every year – by focusing on how I can become more efficient. I was a year into HomeServe and we had just got the £500,000 investment from South Staffordshire Water and I thought: “The next person I’m going to hire into the business will be a PA.”

That was a really important hire to take away all the admin – sorting out travel, diaries, replying to emails – and to help give support to some of the rest of the team.

My current PA, Jayne Neal, has worked for me for 23 years and is a key part of my team today. It is called Team Harpin and consists of two PAs, a chief of staff and a strategy director – five of us who are helping me to be more productive in the oversight of the businesses that I’m involved in, and then doing my speaking, events and building my social media profile in order to get my message and my book on How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps out there.

When do you say no to things that might end up impacting your productivity?

I’ve always had difficulty saying no because I want to take on more and more, so I’ve had to be really disciplined. I think it is important to say no and focus on your own priorities rather than people trying to get stuff out of you, which might not fit those priorities.

There are probably meetings that I have in the week that I shouldn’t have. I should be more disciplined and either delegate them or say no. I think it’s nice to say no in a good way and to say, “Actually, there’s somebody else that can help you with this,” or give them a bit of information so it’s not just a point-blank no or just ignoring an email request.

What should a CEO stop doing, keep doing and start doing to make the best of their time? And how do you structure your day and week?

The key advice is that everybody needs to delegate more. That’s about giving extra responsibilities to the best people within your team, deciding as entrepreneurs what we’re good at and want to focus on, and which are the bits we feel happy to delegate.

Your time can get filled with meetings and decisions and being reactive rather than stepping back to think long-term and high impact. I want to remain healthy and fit, and the best way to protect some fitness time is first thing in the morning. When I’m in London, which is most of the week, I’m in the gym at 6.30am and then I’m disciplined in saying that between 7.40am when I’m having breakfast and, ideally, 10am, I aim not to have any meetings so I can prepare for the meetings I’m going to have that day.

I don’t have an email inbox. My team separate my emails into “Action” – the stuff that’s important that requires my thoughts or a decision – and “Information”, which I need to read. Then I have a “Day” file that has all the relevant information for the meetings I’m having that day, and a “Next day” file and a “Future day” file.

Did you need to work more as you grew your company in the early stages? And how did you decide what to delegate and prioritise?

In the founder stage, in the early days of setting up my business, I was working really hard and long hours. It was only when I hired my replacement after eight years to run HomeServe UK – when we were only a UK business – that I could delegate that day-to-day operation of the business, enabling me to step up and think more strategically about how we develop HomeServe internationally. It’s important to do that.

What I try to do is find some time in my busy week for the stuff that is important but not urgent – the thinking time. An example would be: “I want to think about our pricing strategy. Have we got it right? How could we change to respond to the increasing cost environment in the UK?”

There could be a few problems or opportunities you’ve written down and never get to, because you’re focused on the day-to-day. The urgent and important must get done, but then we get dragged into the not important and not urgent.

In your experience, what’s the most common time-wasting trap leaders fall into – and how do you use technology to stay effective?

It’s doing stuff that other people want you to do that doesn’t fit with your own strict list of priorities. It’s easy to get dragged into other people’s priorities. Then it’s about having that conversation with some of your team and saying, “I’d like to give you more responsibility; these are the extra bits that you can do.” So you’re delegating more without dropping any balls.

Embracing technology in time management and personal effectiveness is key. Everybody has a system that works for them. Mine is a mix of clicks and paper, so both technology and hard copy. I have three iPads, one that I do video calls on, one to look at notes and materials, and a third I use as a daily electronic notebook.

I then have various notebooks, including a daily notebook that I keep for a month and where I write out my meetings prep and agendas. Where there’s an action, I write a little T, which is to talk with somebody. Those Ts get put on a Microsoft Tasks list so I’m keeping track of the stuff I need to talk to people about.

My team can see, in real time, my electronic daily notebook and they take action on the notes that I’ve made before a meeting and after a meeting to do those action follow-ups in real time. I then have a black Moleskine notebook where I note down a problem or opportunity that I’m thinking about and some of my strategy thoughts.

Annually, I set out the 10 or 12 things that I want to achieve in a year, and I go back and look at that document once or twice a month. If there are priorities I want to change, I cross things out and then I tick them off when I’ve done a big thing that I set out to achieve in the year.

Just before Christmas, I review what I achieved, my disappointments and what I’ve learnt for the year – and then I use that document to set my priorities for the coming year.