Ask Richard: Bricks, clicks and paper

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 Business Leader. Here, he covers the importance of bricks, clicks and paper and much more.

When thinking about physical shops, which retailers do you admire and why?

I would pick out three. First, Next, because it has evolved its model over many years. The Next Directory was a development from just having stores, but it is under the current CEO Lord Wolfson that the business really started to take off. It has developed to have other company brands in its stores and a great online offer, while also offering a total platform, which provides fulfilment for other retailers’ products. It’s a fantastic model.

Second, B&M. It is a very successful discounter that has gone from a half-a-million-pound acquisition back in 2004 to a business worth £5bn today. It has done that by sticking to a very simple model: selling well-known grocery brands at a discount alongside impulse purchases imported from China, such as pet and gardening products at low prices.

Finally, Games Workshop, a business that engages with hobbyists. It has micro-stores in secondary locations in major town centres. That is a model that is really working.

What do you think is important to make sure that bricks, clicks and paper can all work together? Does every business need all three of them?

It’s important that they’re all joined up, a good example is click and collect. Second, is making sure that the pricing online is the same as the pricing in-store and, third but most importantly, that there’s a smooth customer journey. The way to test that is through mystery shopping, making sure people are looking at those different customer journeys.

Those journeys need to work for all types of consumers, whether they start online or in-store. In terms of do they need all three, yes, they do. Businesses that have all three will do much better. Does that mean they have to have their own stores? Absolutely not.

There’s a model called strategic retail partners, which is about having wholesale relationships. That could involve an online business that sells its products via another retailer – for example John Lewis.

That’s a way of showcasing the products. Often, that retailer might not have the full range of products or the right sizes, so that means that many of those customers go online and go to the business’s own website, rather than to the John Lewis website.

It’s a win-win and it means that it’s showcasing those products to a new audience. A good example of this is Passenger Clothing. That business can track where it has its products distributed in other people’s stores. In those postcodes, it is generating more business direct to its website than those where it doesn’t.

Do you think direct physical marketing, for example, door-to-door leafleting, is still as important given the ability to reach people through social media and the cost of printing?

I’m a big believer in direct mail. Because there are fewer businesses doing direct mail in this digital age, it means you can get a bigger share of the doormat. That’s important because then the consumer is more likely to read the materials, act on it, and purchase that product or service.

The best example of that is Checkatrade, a business that I invested in and which I chair. In that business, we distribute individual versions of an A4 folded leaflet that has around 150 tradespeople listed in it with tracked telephone numbers. That generates a lot of business for those trades, but it also brings a lot of business to the Checkatrade website. That’s paper-generating clicks.

Did you ever consider opening HomeServe shops or a physical location for consumers?

Yes, we did. We have acquired a couple of heating installation businesses in our Spanish operation, and they have heating, ventilation and air conditioning stores where people can go and look at boilers and heat pumps – and increasingly, that will include battery storage and solar. That is a model that works well for Endesa, a major energy company in Spain, where its service-point stores are run by some of its heating installers.

We could very well open one or two stores in the UK under either the HomeServe or the Boxt brand, which is our online boiler, heat pump and solar installation business. That’s an exciting opportunity.

Is it sustainable for retailers to have no online offering?

I don’t think it’s sustainable either for physical retailers to not have an online offering or for online-only businesses to not have a retail offering. There are probably more examples of online businesses that don’t have a store or sell their goods or services in somebody else’s store.

But we don’t just need to look at individual stores, this could be concessions or even vending machines. There are several different ways to showcase products in physical locations. I find it quite difficult to think of many examples that don’t have a full online offering.

B&M is one example where you can have products from the store delivered to your home, but it does not encourage that – it’s all about the in-store experience. Primark is the other example where they don’t have a full online offer – it’s only click-and-collect.

This is not just about product sales either, but also service sales. Going back to my Checkatrade example, maybe one day we could have mini home improvement fairs in local village halls so that we could showcase tradespeople operating in communities around the country.

Another example would be Peloton. It is an in-home exercise business but why wouldn’t it have its own gyms? If I’ve been working at home, then I probably don’t want to go and get on my Peloton exercise bike at home, I want to go to the gym.

But if I’ve been in the office all day, then I’m happy to go on my Peloton at home. Peloton used to have a lot of expensive retail stores, what it should have had was its own branded gyms, so it had an omnichannel offering.