Page 136 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

couldn’t afford the best lawyers, or the best telephone engineers,
and even if I’d had the budget for the best people they would have
chosen to work for a blue-chip company anyway. So it fell to me
to understand things like the phone system so that I could be more
effective in hiring a guy to fix the phones. As the owner of a small
business, unless you understand each component of your business,
it’s virtually impossible to get it to work as a whole. These days I
do quite a bit of public speaking and meet aspiring entrepreneurs
who just assume they can buy in the expertise; they don’t realise
that any decent expert would rather be working with a bigger and
more established company. The responsibilities of an entrepreneur
to their new business are almost unending.
I was always the first to arrive in the morning, and always the
last to leave. I think it is important that bosses, and especially
owner-managers, set an example. How could I reprimand staff for
timekeeping, or long lunches, or any other kind of sloppy
behaviour if I was guilty of it, too? If you want people to work
hard for you, they have to see that you are working harder.
Right from the beginning my ethos was summed up by the word
energy. I wanted to see a lot of activity – candidates coming in for
meetings, me walking round, phones ringing, jokes being shared.
Whenever I went into that office, it was electrifying. I was very
good at creating that energy and encouraging constant activity: I
was always painting blue skies; it was my biggest cultural
contribution and it was instrumental in what the business would
go on to achieve.
When you work so hard it’s vital that you enjoy your work; if
you’re having fun you perform better and achieve more. Making
the office fun also meant the staff were incredibly loyal in an
industry where staff turnover is pretty high.
I would constantly make sure that something fun was happen-
ing. In those days, the Trocadero near Shaftesbury Avenue had a
booth where you could go and make a pop video. They projected

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