How to make a billion in nine steps

This is an extract from How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps by Richard Harpin

Jim Collins, the business guru, has a brilliant analogy about hedgehogs and foxes. If you’re a fox, you’re insatiable: you go around snapping up all the ideas you can find and trying them on for size.

At the very start of your journey to £1bn, you want to be the fox. But soon – much sooner than you think – you’ve got to become the hedgehog that minds its own business, knows its own mind and defends itself fiercely against all comers by putting its prickles up.

As your business expands and the quality of your leadership team rises, you will find yourself sitting in a chair listening, day after day, to lots of good ideas – and you will be saying “no” to virtually all of them.

Be they external consultants, a focus group, someone running a customer survey online or even just someone in the organisation who’s had a brainwave, you end up saying no to so many people. It’s exhausting because they almost never come up with bad ideas and you need to maintain the bandwidth to spot the one that might actually work in the business.

Eventually, you may discover that the main source of distracting ideas is you. That’s the moment you wish you had your replacement lined up, so you could hand over the reins and focus on the part of the business you are best at – or even go and find your satisfaction elsewhere.

We start out as buccaneering risk-takers but in the end we realise that, to succeed, we either need to buckle down or get out of the way. The frustration of being the leader of a mature business is that you can’t stray too far from the core without damaging it.

I can think of lots of occasions where I let slip the core of the business to go chasing after shiny things – with predictable results. At such moments, I say to myself: “Clearly, I’m too much of a fox.”

But then I’ll read something like this, from Anna Maughan, who is company secretary at HomeServe, the company I founded: “One thing that does annoy me about Richard sometimes is that he won’t let anything go.

He’ll say, ‘Please, find me that paper that we wrote in 2003 about such-and-such.’ The fact that the world’s moved on and the paper’s completely irrelevant doesn’t faze him in the least.

“He’s constantly thinking, ‘Oh, we did that once, and maybe if we did this to it, it’ll work,’ and so no idea ever dies a decent death. It’s like Groundhog Day. Who knows what twist Richard is planning, but for us foot soldiers, we’re thinking, ‘Oh God, we’re trotting this out again?’ But he has to go through the process.”

When you come down to it, we’re all foxes and hedgehogs at the same time. The fox finds the opportunity, tells the better stories and gets the bigger headlines. The hedgehog generates the wealth.

Former HomeServe chairman Barry Gibson tells a story about Richard Branson – a hero of my younger years and a notorious fox. His board nicknamed him “Doctor Yes”. This story neatly reveals both the appeal of foxy behaviour and how, in the long run, it can weaken your position.

“I had the pleasure of working alongside Richard Branson when Virgin Airlines was moving into Heathrow,” says Gibson. “At the time, I was managing director of Heathrow airport and I couldn’t help but admire Branson’s ability to ignore rules.

“If he decided that he wanted his plane to arrive at eight o’clock in the morning and he couldn’t get a slot through the scheduling system until 11 am, his airline would fly the plane over anyway, from New York or Boston. It would arrive with next-to-no fuel – as is usual for airliners – and of course we had to let it land.

“What Branson hadn’t factored in was the sheer size of Heathrow airport. It was no trouble at all for us to send his plane trundling down to the other end of the airport to park in a cul-de-sac for a couple of hours until the next free slot opened up. That straightened him out.”

How, as leaders, do we balance fox and hedgehog?

We can’t go through life telling ourselves not to go chasing after the fun stuff. We’d only make ourselves miserable, and then we’d rebel and do something stupid. We need instead to find positive value in staying disciplined and sticking to our guns.

One of the best ways to do this, I’ve found, is to prepare a not-to-do list. I mean this literally: get paper and pen and work out all the things that you want to do, and might even be quite good at, but which will take you away from your core business.

Make the list long – much longer than your to-do list. Invite contributions. Then pin the list up above your desk or in your boardroom. Laminate it. Better still, frame it. This is the document that will save you from disaster.

Imagine your business is a vehicle: your purpose is the engine – it propels you. The not-to-do list is the steering wheel. It keeps you on your chosen track. It stops you from sliding into the weeds.

One of my greatest strengths is also a weakness – I’m always looking to grab a fresh opportunity, sometimes to the detriment of what I already have. But by resolving to do less, I’ve become better at the things that matter most. Sometimes the hardest thing in business is to say “no”.

Our natural instinct is always to want to do more. We’re too often seduced by the prospect of spending money on acquiring something, which often fails to get the promised shareholder return, instead of disposing of an asset that underperforms or no longer fits.

We need to realise that the less we choose to do, the more we will achieve. A well-lived life demands that we focus our time and energy on what truly matters. Saying “no” to non-essential requests and opportunities frees us up to make our highest contributions.

And, once we’ve determined our priorities, safeguarding our time and energy ensures that those things get done with excellence. Far better to do one or two things really well.

How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps by Richard Harpin is published by Piatkus