Page 174 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

company came in, I was well placed to assess its strengths and
weaknesses. I had learned that everything I wanted to know was
in someone else’s head and I just had to keep asking questions until
I uncovered the information I was after. My strategy was – and
still is – just to say ‘How does that work?’ until I found the nugget
I needed to make a decision.
I meet a lot of senior executives in business who are uncomfort-
able asking questions because they perceive that someone of their
status and position should already know the answers. I’m the
complete opposite: I am very comfortable asking questions and I
don’t have the kind of ego that worries about whether people think
I’m smart or not. So with every situation, my routine is the same:
What do you do? How do you do it? What do you charge? How
does it work? How will I know if your work has been successful
or not? What would I measure you with? I’m very comfortable
being direct or inquisitive, so I just ask.
After I’d asked my questions, I would have enough information
to call the companies I liked back in or would have gathered
leads to find better companies. By the end of the process I’dbe
pretty well informed about what I was really looking for: I’d
know what the going rate was, I’d know what the broad options
were, I’d know how I would be able to tell if it’d been successful,
I’d know how long it would take a team of x to do the job well.
There’s no situation in which that strategy doesn’t work, whether
it’s seeking investment advice or finding someone to fixmy
guttering.
Sometimes, of course, I drilled down into the external agency’s
business and realised they weren’t offering anything we couldn’t
do in-house. Did we really need external accountants? Or PR? Or
car leasing? When I knew what people really did for their fee, I
could make an informed decision about what was best for
Alexander Mann.
This technique also subtly allowed me to work out what

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