Richard Harpin amassed one of Britain’s biggest fortunes by building up the household-repair business HomeServe. Now he’s eyeing a new kind of expansion: a ramp-up in dealmaking through his personal investment firm.
Growth Partner, Harpin’s family office, this week finalized a £10.5 million ($13.8 million) deal to buy a minority stake in the UK holiday-let business Host & Stay, according to a statement. It’s fueled by the roughly £490 million windfall that Harpin and his family pocketed when Brookfield Asset Management bought HomeServe last year for £4.1 billion.
Growth Partner has announced investments in five companies since Brookfield closed the HomeServe take-private in early 2023. Those deals have almost doubled Harpin’s portfolio of stakes in small-to-midsize businesses weighted toward the UK consumer sector. More are on the way.
“We’ve got access to a big pool of money, hundreds of millions of pounds,” Harpin, 59, said in an interview at Growth Partner’s London offices. The entrepreneur has a net worth of about $920 million, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, though he declined to comment on the figure.
Harpin set up HomeServe in the 1990s after feeling frustrated by his own search for home-repair services. He drove the company into the FTSE 100, and the stock soared during his decadeslong tenure atop the enterprise.
Growth Partner’s ambitions are setting it up to become one of Britain’s most active family offices. Set up in 2015, Growth Partner is led by Jason Mahendran, 38, a former JPMorgan Chase & Co. investment banking analyst. He joined last year from the London-based venture capital firm Active Partners, which has a consumer-focused investment strategy similar to Harpin’s firm.
This year, Growth Partner brought on Kate Voller Browning, a former executive at UK retailer Mountain Warehouse, to help drive growth for its portfolio companies. It now has a team of roughly a dozen employees across offices in London and the north of England, where Harpin is from. It also recently sought extra staff to help find new opportunities, which span the direct purchase of stakes in companies, co-investments with other entrepreneur-backed firms and fund allocations.
“We’re comfortably in the position where we’re investing in four-plus businesses a year,” said Mahendran, CEO of Growth Partner, citing allocations of at least £10 million per transaction.
Side business
Harpin founded HomeServe in 1993 with Jeremy Middleton after the pair met working at consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble Co. They set up a side business leasing properties to students in Newcastle, where they struggled to find reliable tradespeople to deal with issues like broken boilers and radiators.
That resulted in the creation of HomeServe, a provider of repair, maintenance and installation services for household plumbing, heating and electrical systems. Its global expansion included countries like the U.S., Spain and France. The Walsall, UK-based company fueled some of its growth through acquisitions like that of the UK’s Checkatrade and Utility Service Partners in North America, which delivered most of HomeServe’s profits in recent years.
Harpin, a Conservative Party donor who sold rabbits and refashioned fish hooks as earrings earlier in his entrepreneurial career, reinvested in Checkatrade as part of the HomeServe sale. The £20 million purchase of a minority stake is now part of Growth Partner’s portfolio.
Growth Partner has longer investing time frames than most institutions and avoids taking majority stakes, preferring to let founders retain control.
“We don’t have the same pressure as a traditional PE firm,” Harpin said.
While Harpin has property investments and some business interests outside the UK, he’s intentionally making a concentrated private equity bet on small-to-midsize UK businesses. It’s part of his ambition to help build another major UK company with global operations.
The married father of three is bullish on his home country’s outlook — despite a decade of sluggish growth for the nation — calling it a great place to build a global enterprise.
“We’re investing in global-growth UK businesses that have the opportunity to make it big in America in the way that HomeServe did,” he said.