Page 246 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

never placed so many candidates so easily, and the profits of all
my companies were, frankly, spectacular. That year I bought a
home in the South of France – an apartment overlooking the
Croisette in Cannes – and paid for it in cash.
The dotcom boom was also leading to a stock market boom,
and the valuations for all companies were rising. If I was serious
about a stock market flotation, this was the time to do it.
However, I just had a bunch of companies – it was basically Jimmy
and his mates – all owned by different partners on different
percentages. For the market to take me seriously I needed to
restructure my companies into something more formal. So I hired
consultants Arthur Andersen to assess the best way of doing that.
They suggested merging all the companies into one, but when I
talked to the individual CEOs of my companies about it four of
them told me that they didn’t want to be a part of the new
organisation. They said that one of the things they most enjoyed
in their career was working outside the usual corporate constraints
and they didn’t want their company to become part of something
big. They liked owning a decent slice of their company, rather than
the 3–10 per cent of the combined group they would be likely to
end up owning. One of those CEOs was Doug Bugie, and I was
quite pleased about that. No matter what happened to Alexander
Mann in the future, I would still own half of a hugely profitable
business: Humana now had over 140 franchises in 30 countries
and its profits were doubling every year. In fact it was doing so
well that even a couple of the franchisees had become quite
wealthy in their own right.
On the advice of Arthur Andersen and the accountancy firm
BDO, which I brought in to value everyone’s stake in the business,
I also appointed a new chairman and a board in preparation for
taking the business to the market. Jonathan became the group
chief executive and I took the title executive chairman. The
combined group had profits in excess of £5 million, and after

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