Page 234 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

could also open doors for them and mentor them. The cash I
invested was only one component of what was becoming an
increasingly lucrative investment strategy, and in many cases my
experience was more valuable to these new ventures than my
capital.
I was getting a good reputation as an investor and my next
investment came to me. I got a call from guy called Mike O’Flynn
who ran a small IT recruitment firm called Franklin Human
Resources. He felt it had reached capacity and wanted to chat.
There was no doubt that the technology sector was booming.
Companies I hadn’t heard of two months before – like Freeserve,
AOL and Vista – were swallowing up new employees and I could
see that Mike was operating in a potentially lucrative area. We
became equity partners in a joint venture that we called Humana
Consulting. By this stage, Humana had more than thirty offices
and was advertising every week in the quality papers, so giving the
joint venture the Humana brand was very valuable.
Talk about being in the right place at the right time. With
Mike’s contacts and my strategic help, Humana Consulting went
from nothing to a £50 million turnover within four years and
made the Virgin Fast Track 100 list as one of the fastest-growing
companies in the UK.
Humana Consulting’s average billing was higher than Alexander
Mann’s because wages in the technology sector were skyrocketing.
We were hiring people out at £1000 a day, of which we’d pay
about £700 to the worker. Imagine we placed 100 people in the
past month, and do the maths. But what made it such a
ridiculously profitable business was that no one could successfully
predict how long their IT projects would last. So people would
start a two-week contract and end up staying for two years. The
commission was phenomenal, and even people with the most basic
IT knowledge and qualifications were in demand. At the dotcom
height, Humana Consulting had 600 people placed in jobs with an

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