Page 249 - James Caan - The Real Deal

24 · ANew Beginning

money in the bank and the Alexander Mann money surely not that
far behind, they recommended that the best thing to do was lock
it away. When you’ve never had cash before – and you’ve already
got everything you want in terms of houses and cars – you could
end up squandering it remarkably easily: couple of mill on a
helicopter, another mill on a racehorse. I took their advice and tied
the money from Humana up in a bond for twelve months. My
YPO colleagues were also able to introduce me to advisers who
arranged for my shares in Alexander Mann to be held in a trust.
Not only was this a tax-efficient way of managing my stake in the
business, but it was structured so that I wouldn’t be able to touch
any income from those shares for at least a year, just in case I
decided to get seriously flash and buy myself a plane or a
million-pound watch. You only have to look at Mike Tyson, or
Michael Jackson is perhaps a better example, to see how a vast
fortune can simply be spent. I wasn’t about to let that happen.
With the Humana deal done, the flotation of Alexander Mann
was proceeding nicely. A top City PR firm was hired to market us
to investors, and a firm of brokers was appointed that sent me on
an endless round of presentations. The company was valued at £60
million, and it was clear that the City loved what we were offering;
in fact, in many ways we were the perfect company because we
ticked every box. They wanted diverse sources of income. Tick.
They wanted exposure in several markets. Tick. They wanted to
make sure the founder and CEOs wouldn’t leave as soon as the ink
was dry: all my CEOs had equity stakes and were in it for the long
term. Tick. They liked freeholds in central London. Tick. We all
felt very confident about the flotation.
About three weeks before our shares were due to be released for
the first time, I got a phone call from a guy called John Singer at
a private equity house called Advent International. He had been
sent the share prospectus by our brokers, and he liked what he had
read so much that he wanted to invest.

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