Page 181 - James Caan - The Real Deal

16 · Life in the Office

claims started to add up they just assumed I would pay for things
like parking tickets accrued while they were on company business.
I was so busy myself that I didn’t have the time to go carefully
through every expense claim, and so they were just paid.
Of course, the expenses were processed by an accounts execu-
tive, but it was only his job to pay them, not to question them. I
decided that what I needed was a general manager, someone who
could take care of the day-to-day stuff. And as an expert in
executive recruitment, I was pretty sure I had found the right guy.
I hired someone completely different from me, someone who
was organised and efficient, but this meant there was a culture
clash between the new general manager and the team. Whereas I
had always tried to help out staff in difficulty, he took a hard line.
‘We’re not giving them loans to buy a flat,’ he’d say. ‘If they’ve
got a problem it’s up to them to deal with it, not you.’
I knew he was right, and even though his officious presence
seemed to affect morale I decided that I’d hired the guy and I had
to back him. After a few months, key team members handed in
their resignation and, when I asked them why, a few of them told
me it was the GM.
I still thought I had found the right man for the job and it was
only natural that there would be a transition period, so I accepted
the downturn as temporary. But after nine months I realised I
couldn’t let things slide any longer.
We agreed that it wasn’t working out and he left the company.
But when I stepped back into the operational side of things I was
stunned to see how badly we were doing. Billing was down, clients
we had relied on hadn’t given us any business for months, and my
team of thirty-six motivated people had become twenty-four
demoralised individuals. I knew that this couldn’t just be down to
the GM, though: to my horror, I realised that Alexander Mann
had just walked slap bang into a recession.

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