Page 17 - James Caan - The Real Deal

1 · Brick Lane

After a couple years in Britain, our family started to grow. In
1964 my younger brother Ayub was born, and so my father started
working even harder to support us all. That meant that the best
way to spend any time with him was to help him out with the
business, which I was always happy to do. He did a lot of bespoke
work, and sometimes customers would come to the house to
describe exactly what they wanted. This was the 1960s, and people
had some pretty whacky ideas about leather jackets – my father
wouldn’t always understand what they wanted, so I was asked to
explain and translate. Although his English was good enough for
most situations, he still couldn’t read and write, and so I helped
him fill out cheques, invoices and forms.
Looking back, I can see that my father was grooming me to take
over the business even then. My elder brother was more obviously
and naturally academic, probably more of an introvert than me,
and I think my father saw something in me that was suited to
business. From an early age I absorbed lessons and information
that others would go to university to acquire. He was always
giving me tips and explaining how things worked, and one of the
lessons that has really stayed with me was my father’s appreciation
of a ‘win-win’ formula.
Typically, when you’re in business you’re seen as ruthless and
aggressive, and winning means that someone else loses. My father
was adamant that you could only operate successfully in the long
term if you could put yourself in the other person’s position –
whether your supplier or your customer – because to him the art of
success was making the other person feel as if he’d won. If you
could do that it meant he would come back to you time and time
again, and it’s always easier to do business with people you’ve
worked with before. He told me not to squeeze the last drop of the
lemon but always to leave something on the table for them, too.
I used to go with him to the tanneries where he bought his
leather. We didn’t have many days out or holidays in our family,

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