Page 208 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

Cleveland, Ohio. Maybe the next opportunity was overseas, I
thought.
One of the businesses exhibiting at the conference was MRI –
Management Recruiters International – which had 600 offices
across the US. Its techniques were similar to Alexander Mann’sin
that it headhunted mid-level staff, but its real business was in
franchising. They taught people how to headhunt, helped them set
up their own operation and then took a percentage of the
franchisee’s profits. It wasn’t just a big operation, it was a hugely
successful and profitable one: they had an entire department of
fifty-odd people just to collect the money.
I knew a bit about MRI because I had met one of its managers
– a guy called Doug Bugie – when he’d come to London in the late
eighties to check out the UK market for expansion opportunities.
He’d been told lots of stories about this maverick who was doing
recruitment-to-recruitment and organising recruitment fairs. He’d
called up and asked me for a beer and at one point suggested that
MRI should buy Alexander Mann. I was interested in his offer, but
after the initial negotiations the deal never happened.
I was really interested in MRI’s model because franchising was
a concept that didn’t exist in the UK recruitment market. I had just
one office – and a pretty tired-looking one above a hi-fi shop at
that – while they had 600 branches. I was full of admiration for
the company’s founder, Alan Schoenberg.
I spent some time with Alan at the conference – Doug had taken
a sabbatical so that he could run for Congress at this point – and
he started trying to persuade me that I should buy MRI’s master
licence for the UK and start franchising the business myself. I was
quite interested until I thought: What can they really offer me?
They wanted me to buy the brand for quite a big upfront fee, and
then pay royalties for the rest of my life. The more I drilled down
into the offer, the more obvious it became that, actually, there
wasn’t much they were offering me – after all, their brand meant

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