Greg Jackson on how to build a billion-pound business

Greg Jackson is clearly still stung by an incident that took place in the early days of Octopus Energy. He recalls on the lastest episode of the Business Leader Podcast that when he spoke before a group of MPs and told them of his plans to build “the Amazon of energy”, they “sniggered”.

Arguably he has gone on to do just that, creating the UK’s biggest home energy supplier along the way. Sir Richard Harpin also faced many doubters after he quit a promising corporate job at Procter & Gamble to embrace entrepreneurship. After a few false starts, he hit on the idea of plumbing insurance business HomeServe. Harpin scaled it for three decades before selling it for £4.1bn.

Both Jackson and Harpin are featured in our UK Billion-Pound Businesses list. In this special episode, the pair join James Whittaker, who heads Deutsche Bank’s Wealth Management business in the UK and Nordics, to discuss the list and what it says about the UK's entrepreneurial landscape today. Plus:

• Why UK founders should think global from day one
• How to keep your culture intact as you expand into new countries
• Why making every employee a shareholder pays off
• Why the UK needs its pension funds to back homegrown scale-ups

Bigger than British Gas

Something that Jackson and Harpin’s business stories have in common is a friendly rivalry with British Gas. Jackson was determined to build an energy supplier to rival British Gas from the outset, because he believed a tech start-up could challenge the complacent status quo in energy markets.

“I remember one of the investors in the early days said, ‘How are you going to beat British Gas?’” Jackson recalls. “And with great respect to British Gas, I said, ‘Look, have Americans even heard of them?’ Our job is to be bigger than that. And I think having that ambition from the beginning meant that we got the right foundations.”

Jackson always knew he had to go global right from the start, but for Harpin it was more of a slow realisation. “People starting a business on the West Coast of the US don’t consider themselves confined to California, or [even] to the US,” considers Jackson.

“They naturally imagine it will be global, and we should be the same [in the UK] from day one.” The UK’s domestic market is a quarter of the size of the US or the European Single Market, so it’s imperative to think beyond the UK’s borders if you want to reach anything approaching a billion-pound valuation, he argues. Octopus Energy has mainly grown abroad through acquisition, which is also true of HomeServe.

The 10 per cent rule

It was a long, hard battle for HomeServe to prove its subscription model for plumbing insurance in the UK was scalable, and it nearly went bankrupt along the way.

However, once Harpin had found the winning formula, it was global expansion through joint ventures and acquisitions in places like France (a notoriously tough market to crack, so a good test case) and the United States, which turned HomeServe into a multi-billion-pound global company.

“I’m a great believer in keeping it simple,” says Harpin, of expansion. He believes in ‘the 10 per cent rule’, ie. “only changing 10 per cent for the local environment” in each new country. Anything more becomes “a recipe for disaster and complexity”, he found. He also believes it works much better to “hire locals”.

No HR, no org chart

Maintaining culture as you scale is vital to success and hiring strategy is part of the answer. Jackson prides himself on having an unconventional organisational structure for such a large company. He has always been disdainful of human resources and refuses to have a separate HR department.

Instead, he trains his managers to deal with HR issues and employs a few individual experts in the business. He prefers a ‘flat hierarchy’ and admits that some new arrivals find this uncomfortable. Informally, he has a WhatsApp group called ‘The group of ten’ who have been at the business from the outset and can share knowledge and guidance.

He says he doesn’t socialise with his co-founders (they are not close that way), but they all have their own expertise in the business, which complements each other very effectively.

Harpin follows a more conservative approach to company culture and organisation. He sticks to a hiring mantra that he learned at Procter & Gamble: ‘Has done, can do, will do’.

However, one thing that both entrepreneurs agree on is that it is a good idea to give employees shares in the business, as it helps to inspire everyone in the mission. “It’s kind of ethical as well as rational that everybody will do well if the business does well,” says Jackson.

The UK's missing billions

In 2025, 74 per cent of UK venture capital investment by value came from abroad, rising to around three-quarters for rounds of $100m or more, according to the Treasury. The irony of this situation isn’t lost on successful founders like Jackson and Harpin, whose achievements end up enriching people abroad.

For example, Octopus Energy is valued at £4.9bn as a private company. It has raised $3bn of investment to date, but as Jackson points out, $2.9bn of that investment comes from outside the UK. Much of that is institutional capital from places like Canada, Japan, the US and Australia.

“The tragedy is when we do well, Australian and Canadian pensioners will do well. I’m delighted for them, but I wouldn’t mind British ones doing well as well.” Entrepreneurs like Jackson, Harpin and Treasury adviser Alex Depledge have been calling for more UK pension funds to back UK scale-ups.

To list or not to list

HomeServe went public and Harpin thinks this is a great aspiration for any scaling company. He wishes that half of the companies on the UK Billion-Pound Businesses list were public, rather than around a quarter. Getting rid of the 0.5 per cent stamp duty on share purchases would help, he thinks. Octopus has not gone down the IPO route, though Jackson says that he would not rule it out.

But, he argues, there are advantages to staying private when you are backed by investors who are also industry experts. They see the bigger picture and can be patient with the investment capital.

Keep your entrepreneurial instinct

As your company scales, it’s easy for the founder to become a more corporate creature. But if there’s one thing that Jackson says he learned from observing Harpin, it’s to preserve your entrepreneur instinct.

Jackson recalls that he was taken aback when he observed Harpin being told that an Indian copycat company had sprung up, potentially taking market share in a country they were interested in. Rather than clamp down on it, Harpin’s response was to let them go for it. If it was successful, he argued, then they could acquire it! This was an eye-opener for Jackson, who applied the same logic at Octopus.

Greg Jackson’s four lessons for leaders

Size your ambition for the world, not the UK. Jackson set out to build something bigger than British Gas from day one. With the UK a fraction of the size of the US and European markets, a brand, model and technology built to travel lays the foundations for a billion-pound business.

Keep the model simple as you expand. Harpin’s 10 per cent rule limits local tweaks so the business can be replicated country after country, with proven local leaders given the autonomy to run it.

Give everyone a stake. Both founders made every employee a shareholder. When everyone only does well if the business does well, functions stop competing with each other and pull together for the customer.

Embrace what others fight. Whether it was a copycat in India or customers running Google ads off a referral scheme, both founders chose to learn from the threat rather than shut it down and often found an opportunity in it.

Watch the full conversation with Greg Jackson on YouTube.