Page 213 - James Caan - The Real Deal

20 · Investing in People

‘Trust me. I’m not naive, I know exactly what I’m doing.’
I don’t know why, but I believed him. In a way I had no reason
to, but something in the way he was talking made me believe he
was going to make it happen. The guy was and is brilliant, so I did
as he asked and trusted him. His pitch was this: we find people
who want to open their own headhunting business but don’t know
how to do it. They pay us for the training, and we supply them
with manuals and video coaching and branded materials, from
invoices to business cards. We tell them the best kind of office to
lease, the best way to find clients, the best way to get referrals:
everything so that they can replicate the success of MRI or
Alexander Mann. The fact that we were selling a new brand was
something I was just going to have to trust Doug about.
After he’d been in London for about six weeks, Doug came and
asked if I’d mind if he took a desk on the main floor.
‘Why would you want to do that?’
On the one hand I was gutted – I’d spent over £10k on his office
– but on the other I realised that it took a very strong person
who’d been given that status to say he’d rather sit at a desk next
to one of the consultants. As soon as he moved on to our floor, it
was clear he really enjoyed the atmosphere, and it was great for
me to be able to overhear some of his conversations. He was such
an experienced operator and it was a real education for us all.
Doug needed to get the training manuals together, but, unlike at
MRI where there had been an entire department to create, edit and
update the training literature, at Humana there was just Doug.
Writing a manual isn’t easy – where do you start? What’s the
second chapter? What’s the third? Writing the manual would have
taken up all of Doug’s time, so I asked Sam Collins to write the
Humana manual with me.
‘How am I supposed to do that?’ she asked, quite reasonably.
I wasn’t sure, so I said to Sam, ‘Let’s just go right to the
beginning of Alexander Mann’s recruitment process and start from

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