Page 322 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

employees, sixty-five prime retail sites, as well as 150 franchised
units plus a factory. It was a big business and there was a lot to
get our heads round. Thursday was spent with the lawyers and, on
the Friday, Hamilton Bradshaw acquired the business, and 600
employees were spared the anxiety of losing their jobs.
We’d made enough investments by this point to know that it
wouldn’t be quite as straightforward as I’d made out: I knew there
would be problems, but I didn’t anticipate too many difficulties
changing the range of sandwiches. I was wrong.
First of all, you have to source the ingredients and get out of
supply agreements for the ingredients you no longer need. Differ-
ent sandwiches need different machinery in the factory, and then
there was the labelling that listed the ingredients: there were so
many things that I hadn’t anticipated and it took ten weeks to
change a single sandwich! Meanwhile, the company was losing
£100k a week. That was an additional million quid gone before
we’d even started to turn things around on the retail side of things.
Once we’d looked at the business more closely, we reluctantly
decided that we had to close some of the poorest performing
branches. Making people redundant is never nice, but we hoped
that by sacrificing a handful of branches we could save the rest.
However, some of the branches we wanted to close still had
several years left on their leases, and there were clauses that meant
the landlord could force you to stay until new tenants were found.
And if our rent was £100k a year and the landlord could only get
£80k a year from the new tenant, then we would have to make up
the difference – even though we were no longer trading there!
And it wasn’t just the leases that cost us. We were making staff
redundant, so we had redundancy packages to fund, often running
to several months’ salary in one hit. Within two months of buying
the company, I was really tearing my hair out. We then had a rent
review for the branch in Oxford Street, one of the best locations
we operated. The landlord was putting the rent up from £200k to

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