Page 193 - James Caan - The Real Deal

18 · Fightback

and the work she was doing freed me up to spend more time with
clients, to train the staff and to keep the motivation levels high.
As Alexander Mann got back on its feet and we built back up
to a team of about twenty, my ambitions for the company grew.
I’ve found that entrepreneurs break down into categories: the guy
who’s great at getting a business from nought to £1 million isn’t
always the guy who can get the business to £10 million, and the
skills needed to get a business from £10 million to £100 million
are completely different again. I’d been good at the start-up stage,
and I’d also been good at the next stage, but I knew if the company
was to become a major brand I would need to hire someone to
drive it. My attempts so far to make the business more corporate
had always hit a ceiling I realised I wasn’t able to break through.
One of the reasons why I knew I would personally have
difficulty expanding was my experience of trying to expand
Alexander Mann on to a second floor. When the floor above our
office in Tottenham Court Road had become available, I’d thought
it was a chance to give everyone a bit more space. The office had
never been plush – in fact it was so grubby that we would
sometimes hear candidates come up the stairs saying ‘This can’tbe
right,’ and turn back; sometimes we had to chase them out on to
the street and bring them in! – but the location was right and we’d
needed the space. As soon as I put some of the team on another
floor, it was immediately apparent that the atmosphere on the
main floor was different from the one upstairs. The productivity
on the main floor was better, the morale was better and we had
more fun. The other floor felt like another business and I just
hadn’t known how to spread the culture that was so crucial to our
company. Despite having had a bad experience bringing someone
in previously, I knew I needed someone who could develop systems
and procedures that could be replicated whether I was part of the
set-up or not. I’d become very conscious of the fact that the
business shouldn’t be about me, because if I wasn’t around, if I got

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