Page 135 - James Caan - The Real Deal

12 · Growing the Business

was performing. And when a candidate accepted a position, there
was, of course, a bell to ring, which was something no one had
ever seen in recruitment before.
By the start of 1987 the business was turning over around
£40–50,000 a month: a third of that was paid in commissions. I
had overheads of around £5000 for the rent, rates and utilities;
allowing for another few grand a month in expenses and profes-
sional fees, the profit was over £20k a month. That was effectively
my salary, and that meant that Aisha and I had a very nice life and
we decided it was time to start a family. When Aisha told me she
was pregnant it was one of the happiest moments of my life, and
I wanted to ring the sales bell off the wall! I just couldn’t wait to
be a dad.
Running Alexander Mann was a lot of fun, but it was also
incredibly hard work. I was still the biggest biller in the office, and
on top of that I was hiring staff, training them, chasing late payers
and planning our way forward. I would often have breakfast
meetings with candidates as this was the only time they could
meet, and in the evenings I would regularly spend two or three
hours on the phone after dinner talking to candidates who were
too busy to talk during the day. When I talked to them while they
were in their office it was so difficult for them to be honest. I was
only really able to understand their aspirations and reservations if
I talked to them out of hours. A fifteen-hour working day was
standard, and there were several days a month when I worked for
eighteen hours. We also opened on Saturday mornings (before
mobile phones allowed candidates to slip out for a private chat a
Saturday service was essential), so I was always busy.
When you run a small company, especially when it’s your first,
it’s vital that you understand every aspect of it, whether that’s IT,
or the admin, or the sales or the logistics, so I was also spending
time on management issues. I was learning that as a small
company it was hard to get the best advice because we simply

125