Ask Richard: The power of coaching and mentoring

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 what makes a good coach and mentor, blending advice with your own experience and gut instinct and much more.

How early in your career did you recognise the power of coaching and mentoring?

Not early enough. I had role models, such as Sir Richard Branson and Lord Alan Sugar. I would watch their careers, read their books and follow their story.

I would also meet people who were more experienced and successful than me and take learnings from these one-off meetings. One example of this was Sir John Peace, who was the chief executive of Great Universal Stores (GUS) and who co-founded and led CCN Systems – a credit checking and data business in Nottingham [which later became Experian and part of GUS]. Otherwise it tended to be one-off meetings and through reading.

It was 16 years into my HomeServe journey before I tracked down Nigel Morris, who co-founded Capital One Financial Services, in Washington DC and persuaded him to give me three hours of his time. Since then, I have changed mentors a few times.

When I bought Checkatrade and wanted to know about online marketplaces, I managed to get Jeff Boyd, who was the chief executive and then chairman of Booking.com, to meet with me and help me. It was the same with Stephen Kaufer, the co-founder of TripAdvisor, and Scott Forbes, an American who was chairman of Rightmove in the UK.

You need to keep changing your mentor depending on your career and what you want to do next. That’s why my mentor today is the chief executive of a highly successful European private equity house – I want to learn how to be a better investor.

I think more people should have coaches and mentors, but the message about how important they can be is not out there. That’s one of the things Business Leader is keen on doing: encouraging people to get a coach or mentor.

What makes a good coach and what makes a good mentor?

A good coach is somebody who has trained to do it. In my transition from a hands-on entrepreneurial chief executive at HomeServe to a non-exec chairman and investor, I spent 12 days going to the business school INSEAD and training as a business coach with 36 other people. That was 12 days at Fontainebleau in France in five-day, four-day and three-day sessions, with online coaching, learning, assignments and assessments in between.

Ideally, if you have a coach, you need to have somebody who is qualified, then it’s about meeting a few times and deciding if they’re the right fit. Are you comfortable having hour-long meetings with this person and feel that you could build a coaching relationship with them?

A mentor is about going and finding somebody who is ahead of you in their career and has done something you want to learn. With me, it was Morris because he was a British businessman who built a successful business in the US. I wanted to find out how he did that and what I was doing wrong in America with HomeServe in the early days.

I’d also say what makes a bad mentor is that they’re too dominant, they tell rather than suggest or they aren’t quite applying the right business experience to the situation. It can be dangerous if it’s taking an experience that doesn’t quite fit with the business or the model that the mentee is responsible for. There are some definite things to watch out for.

The magic combination is CoachMent, which involves speaking to an experienced businessperson who has taken the time to train and qualify as a business coach, so they can use both skills.

Coaching and mentoring also don’t have to be formal or one-on-one. My most enjoyable three years in business were when I was an economics graduate, arriving at Procter and Gamble in Newcastle-upon-Tyne with 12 other peers who were all given a lot of responsibility as assistants on a different brand. Mine was Fairy Liquid. We were learning on the job and then socialising in the evenings and talking about business. That made business fun and meant we could all learn from each other.

It’s quite lonely being an entrepreneur at the top of a business. I never had a peer group of other entrepreneurs and chief execs who I built long-lasting relationships with and met regularly, but the power of that is enormous. There are some good organisations offering that in America, but there isn’t a good British equivalent. It’s great to be able to learn from my eight secrets and our articles in Business Leader.

Putting those learnings into action, discussing them and hearing other entrepreneurs’ experiences, mistakes and successes: that’s the power of having a peer group and it’s the biggest part of our Business Leader membership.

As a CEO, should I pay my direct reports to get coaching or mentoring and ensure they have time to do it?

All managers should have access to support with a combination of on-the-job, in-house and external training. That could include one-to-one coaching or mentoring. I don’t think it should be forced on people, but it should be made available to anyone who would benefit from it.

We have that for senior leaders in HomeServe. A good example would be Taylor Hall, who originally worked for our private equity owner Brookfield. We were really keen that two people from Brookfield came and worked in HomeServe because that would help us understand our owner’s culture and how we get the most help and advice from them. It was also a career opportunity for people in Brookfield who were investors but hadn’t been involved in running a business.

Hall was one of those: an experienced finance guy who hadn’t run a big team before. We wanted to throw him in at the deep end and give him that responsibility, so we made him CFO at HomeServe EMEA. As part of that and to give him extra support, we found him a business coach to help him develop his team management and interpersonal skills. That series of coaching sessions has really helped.

I think every manager at every level should think about having a mentor at some stage in their lives. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be to develop business skills, it could be about their life skills, their overall career and life objectives, or finding somebody who can help them with the next steps on their journey.

How do you blend the advice received from a CoachMent with your own experience and gut instinct?

You must share your thoughts and experience with your mentor so that you’re both working together to come to the right solution. You can’t say, “Oh, well, I’m taking some experience from this person but I’m not sharing what I think and why that causes me a specific problem because of something that happened in my childhood or my early business experience.”

An example of that is an entrepreneur I know who was reluctant to think about hiring their replacement. They had tried it before, and failed, which made them nervous about trying again. But, unless you know it failed previously, it’s going to be very difficult to talk about it.

How do you set goals for a mentorship and how flexible should the mentor be with changing those goals midstream?

The mentee needs to be setting goals based on their specific problems, needs or opportunities. A good mentor will use coaching skills to ask questions, collect information and get the mentee to think more about the subjects. They can set out potential options that will help the mentee to think about and decide for themselves what the right next steps are.

Certainly, those goals should change. If there’s a series of booked-in coaching-mentoring sessions, they would develop over time, particularly in a longer-term relationship. What is really important is that mentors ask questions and gain an understanding of the problems or opportunities before they rush into thinking about the advice they offer up. Otherwise, it might be the wrong experience applied to the wrong situation.

I think you should be as much short term as long term. If you’ve got somebody who’s a trusted advisor and you’re facing an immediate difficulty, then you should ask them: “What should I be doing right now – I’ve got a crisis or a short-term problem”. If you don’t fix those first, then you might just go out of business.