Page 151 - James Caan - The Real Deal

14 · Having Fun

housekeeper, a guy to come and do the pool and a nanny for each
daughter. I’d also had the idea that I wanted a butler ever since I’d
seen John Gielgud in Arthur – he played a real old-fashioned gent
who called Dudley Moore ‘sir’ and was as discreet as he was
indispensable – but I was told that you just couldn’t get them any
more.
By the end of 1988 Alexander Mann had grown to about twelve
people, and it was giving me an income in excess of £250k a year.
With the house and the cars I had everything I could ever want
materially, and, if nothing were to change, the business could have
given Aisha and my daughters a fantastic lifestyle for ever.
I felt like I had a choice: either I could keep Alexander Mann as
a lucrative boutique, or I could try to grow the business. My dream
had been to have a big open-plan office like Reid Trevena with
hundreds of employees ringing the sales bell all day long, and I
realised that I still wanted that.
When I meet entrepreneurs at my public-speaking engagements
these days, the one area of my career that gets the most attention
is how I turned Alexander Mann from a boutique into a corporate
organisation. History is littered with companies that tried and
failed to expand, as there are so many pitfalls: if you move too fast
your overheads can gobble you up, and if you move too slowly
your competitors can steal your thunder.
Most entrepreneurs are control freaks and they want to be
involved with everything from ordering the stationery to hiring
staff to negotiating the lease, as well as actually doing the deals
and winning the contracts. If you try to manage every little piece
of your company, it can never get any bigger than you are. I
realised that if I wanted to grow the business I couldn’tdo
everything: there were going to be some areas of the business that
I would have to let go of.
Although I was able to delegate to Sam Collins when I was out
of the office, it wasn’t fair to ask her – or anyone else for that

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