Page 111 - James Caan - The Real Deal

10 · The Beginning

out of the company what the company couldn’t afford, so I quickly
downsized my idea of paying £1000 a month for an office.
However, I wasn’t prepared to do this on a shoestring and work
from home.
I remembered everything I’d learned at Reid Trevena about how
important appearances are when you’re selling a service: it
mattered where my office was because I needed to create the right
impression. Likewise, it mattered what I called the business
because it had to feel like a brand clients and candidates wanted
to associate with.
I knew I wanted to start an upmarket business that would make
clients and candidates feel like they were dealing with one of those
established headhunters in a wood-panelled office in St James’s, so
I started doodling to come up with a brand that fitted that market.
I wanted something that everyone assumed already existed,
something that said gravitas, substance, integrity and professional-
ism.
As an exercise, I asked myself this: if my business was a person,
what characteristics would that person have? I came up with
dynamic, smart, someone with integrity, who was well educated,
had a City background. Then I asked myself, what’s this guy’s
name? And I came up with Alexander. And as that’s quite a long
name, I wanted a short one to go with it. I chose Mann because it
was masculine, which fitted my executive market, but it also had
echoes of other agencies, notably Manpower. In my mind, it
sounded as if there had been an agency called Alexander Mann
that had been established for years, and that was exactly what I
wanted.
I decided that, ideally, I wanted Mayfair offices to go with my
company’s sophisticated name. I thought paying for the location
was actually a sound investment: the more that people believed
Alexander Mann was an established company, the easier it would
be to get their business. When I talked to a couple of friends about

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