Page 237 - James Caan - The Real Deal

23 · The End of an Era

hassles taken care of, the CEOs of my new companies were freed
up to work hard and deliver results. Pretty much everyone I backed
was a sales expert. I had realised that the thing that drives
companies is getting new customers, and as soon as I found people
who I thought could sell their product to their customers, I would
back them.
As my reputation as an investor grew, people started coming to
me. One of them was an employee. Rosaleen Blair hadn’t been
with us long but she’d spotted an opportunity and had approached
Jonathan with it. She thought there was a business in offering
outsourced recruitment solutions to blue-chip clients. We, as an
outside agency, could take on work normally done by in-house HR
departments, but because we had such expertise we could do a
better job.
Rosaleen wasn’t one of the stars of our office and not an obvious
candidate to back, but when I met her I could see that she really
believed in the opportunity. She had previously run her own nanny
agency, so she had a bit of a track record, but on paper that wasn’t
enough to convince me she could run the kind of company she was
telling me about. But her passion and enthusiasm were so evident
that I decided to back her anyway. As I have always said, I back
people not businesses, and there was something about Rosaleen
that convinced me.
For nine months Rosaleen worked the phones and went to
meetings, trying to persuade companies to use Alexander Mann
Solutions for their HR needs. It was a hard sell because companies
were making a long-term commitment to a new venture. Nearly a
year went by before she got her first contract, because it took so
long to get through the layers of bureaucracy before she could talk
to the person who could say yes. And once she had some interest,
the negotiations were a bit of a marathon because there was so
much due diligence to cover, but she did it: her first contract was
from ICL and was worth £10 million. With that kind of client,

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