Page 98 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

ahhing about the price, I’d be willing to negotiate, but for Aisha
what it said on the ticket was what the customer ought to pay.
There were a couple of times when we just couldn’t agree, so I
took her out for dinner and said: ‘Look, every time I say black you
say white. This is never going to work. We need to have some
parameters, so let’s agree what we’re both good at.’
We took out a piece of paper and made two columns – A and J.
In Aisha’s column were all the things she was good at, like design,
knowledge of trends, merchandising, dressing the shop; and in my
column was all the stuff I was going to deal with, like rent,
overheads, cash flow, banking. We agreed that she could have an
opinion about how I ran the finances but nothing would be her
decision, and I could have an opinion on whether she bought a
certain range or not, but those things would ultimately be her
decision. We had quite a formal, serious debate about what each
of us would do, and after that the business started to find its feet.
I had wanted to start a business all my life, and, although this
was Aisha’s boutique, it was our business. We learned so much in
those early days; whether it was hiring an accountant or handling
cash flow, I was building on the skills I had picked up at my dad’s
side. We hadn’t written a business plan for the House of Aisha,
and if we had it would have been utterly useless because there were
so many things that we just couldn’t have anticipated. I never
would have imagined that there would be days when we took no
money at all, or that there would be weeks when the takings didn’t
cover the rent. I was learning what a responsibility running a
business is and that ultimately the buck stopped with me.
We were married on New Year’s Day 1983 in Regent’s Park
mosque, just four days after my twenty-second birthday. It was a
fairly traditional wedding, and a lot of the rituals were unfamiliar
to me, so I basically did what my mum told me to do! For instance,
I was told it’s traditional for the groom to buy the bride’s sisters’
outfits for the wedding, so that’s what I did. It was oddly daunting

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