Page 77 - James Caan - The Real Deal

7 · The Job That Changed My Life

‘Well, there’s Kate . . .’
‘Tell me about Kate, how would she do here?’
‘I think she’d love it . . .’
‘Can you do me a favour, Jo?’
‘Sure.’
At this point I’d hand Jo the phone.
‘Would you call Kate for me?’
What was she going to say in front of me? She was going to say:
‘Kate, I’m sitting with this guy James Caan who’s just offered me
an amazing job at this fantastic company and I’ve been telling him
how great you are. I’m going to hand you over to him.’
‘Kate, hi, Jo’s told me you’d fit in brilliantly here. What are you
doing on Tuesday morning? Can you make 10 a.m.?’
If this seems incredible, let me break it down into its basic
component: all I ever did was ask questions. That’s the only secret.
I’d learned that whatever it was in the world that I wanted to
know, it was already in someone else’s head. I just had to ask
them. Try it. You’ll be surprised how readily people will give you
the answer you’re after. People like to help; they don’t naturally
lie, so when you say, ‘What’s the average pay in your office?’ or
‘Can you give me three names of someone who can start work
tomorrow?’, it is surprisingly easy to get surprisingly good results.
Seriously, all you have to do is ask.
It got to the stage where the vast majority of people I hired came
through referrals, which meant my income soared. I would usually
take home £3–4k a month, and often that would be closer to £7k.
My best ever month netted me £13k when I poached an entire
sales team from another company.
Like any nineteen-year-old earning that kind of money – and
with inflation I guess I was averaging £15k a month in today’s
money – I wasn’t putting it into a pension. Despite the fact that I
was selling the wisdom of savings plans to every new recruit, I was
never tempted to take one out myself. I had long believed that my

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