Page 238 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

picking up the next one was easier, and the company took off. I
believe every organisation has a Rosaleen: the trick is being able
to spot them and then giving them the chance to prove themselves.
I reckon that I rejected about 80 per cent of the ideas that came
to me. I’ve never been much of a risk-taker and unless I was
convinced of a project’s success I gave it a miss. My success rate
meant I was getting a good reputation, and more and more
business ideas were brought to me. I realised that one of the ways
I could minimise my risk even further was if the person I was
backing invested some money, too. If they wanted a 50 per cent
stake, I asked for 50 per cent of the investment; if they wanted 20
per cent, then they had to find 20 per cent. Some people sold their
cars and remortgaged their houses to work with me, but in every
case it was worth it: my portfolio of companies grew and grew as
did the cash flow and profits from my existing companies.
As a consequence, I started to get interest in Alexander Mann
from potential buyers. A couple of private equity firms started
sniffing around, and a dotcom in America wanted to use its
inflated stock market valuation to acquire Alexander Mann the
way AOL had leveraged its market valuation to buy the much
bigger, and much more profitable, Time Warner. They offered me
£100 million in shares for my portfolio of companies, and it was
so much money that I had to take it seriously. It was more money
than I had ever imagined making in my life, so I talked to a lot of
people about the offer. Pretty much everyone told me to take it,
but I realised that it was so much money that I didn’t actually
understand how much money it was. I could only deal with such
a figure abstractly, not as a real amount. What would having £100
million mean? What would it allow me to do?
I went to speak to a contact who worked at Goldman Sachs and
was very used to those kinds of figures. He said he couldn’t tell me
if I should accept the deal or not, but he did suggest something I
should think about.

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