My first meeting with James Caan typified his dynamic approach to business. A mutual friend had introduced us to see if I could assist James with raising funds to acquire a northern-based recruitment business. I was working in venture capital at the time while James owned and ran Alexander Mann. The meeting lasted 5 hours, I had my car clamped and we decided not to do the deal. It wasn’t a complete waste of time, though, as I came away with an offer from James to be the group managing director of Alexander Mann. Listening to James describe his vision for the company, it became clear that he had great ambition, faith in his own abilities as a leader and motivator as well as, most importantly, passion. Whether to join him or not wasn’t a difficult choice to make.
To be a truly successful entrepreneur takes much more than a good head for numbers. James possesses a special quality that makes the difference between being just good and the best. It’s not easy to quantify but, as the circumstances under which I was hired demonstrate, James combines being a disciplined, highly organised businessman with instinctual decision-making and a willingness to take risks on individuals he feels have untapped potential that anyone else could quite easily miss. Even if his intuition seems rather unconventional at times, he has learned to trust it implicitly. After all, it hasn’t served him too badly so far.
That meeting was in October 1993. After that Alexander Mann grew from around 25 employees turning over about £1.5m into a 300 man multi-service recruitment business turning over £120m and making profits in the region of £5m in just 7 years. James’s bold strategy for growth was the key to our success; we focussed on attracting young, talented professionals in different areas of the recruitment market and creating businesses around them where they shared the equity with Alexander Mann. Above all else, James is a firm believer that people are at the heart of any successful enterprise. The success of James’s formula was abundantly evident in the terms of a private equity transaction in 1999 where we sold 44% of the business to Advent International valuing the company at around £60m.
James sold up in 2002 and I left at the end of 2003. I started up Hexagon Human Capital using the same shared equity scheme that James had implemented to such startling effect at Alexander Mann. James and I remain friends to this day. He is a shareholder in Hexagon and his mentorship has played a major part in my own development.
