Page 160 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

much more than paying in advance for my advertising for the first
year. The only question I had to ask myself was whether I believed
he could sell the advertising, and I only had to look at how many
pages he sold at The Interviewer to know that he could. It would
never be a huge business, but it was a solid one and I thought it
would be fun.
Recruitment International launched in 1989 and it was different
from other trade publications because it had a photographic cover.
In time I realised that appearing on the cover was so good for
people’s profiles that we could charge them for the privilege. A
year on, I found myself looking at our back issues and was pretty
impressed by the calibre of people we’d featured. Then I started to
think how great it would be if we could get some of them to speak
at a conference. I thought recruitment professionals would pay
good money to see them all on the same bill. So I gave David a call.
‘If we set up a conference called something like ‘‘World Leaders
in Recruitment’’, do you think you could get some of our cover
stars to speak?’
‘I think with that title they couldn’t refuse. Their egos mean we
probably wouldn’t have to pay them either.’
‘How much do you think we could charge?’
‘I’ll ask around, but my hunch is around £300.’
‘Could you set it up fairly easily?’
All David had to do was book the venue and advertise tickets in
the magazine which, of course, cost him nothing. I got my PR
person from Alexander Mann to work on it and we got one of our
biggest clients, Arthur Andersen, to sponsor it. We sold 420 tickets
for the first one, and David has run ‘World Leaders in Recruit-
ment’ ever since.
David still runs Recruitment International out of a leased office
with a PA. The business has hardly changed apart from the fact
that I no longer own a piece of it. Five or six years after launch,
David offered to buy me out. We agreed an amount that he

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