“My very first business began when I met a very attractive girl, who was a fashion designer with an ambition to set up her own business,” he reveals. “I was 20 at the time and my chat up line was, ‘That’s fantastic, I’d love to back you in building your own fashion business,’ even though I didn’t have any money or experience of running a business – it was completely off the cuff! If truth be known, I wasn’t even sure whether she’d set up her own business because lots of people have ideas but not many turn that into a reality. But in her particular case, she went ahead, found a boutique and started her own business and I invested in her fashion business by borrowing money from my credit cards.
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She’d always had the ambition of having her own brand. As her name is Isha, she had this vision that she wanted it to be called The House of Isha. That was my first real investment and she ended up being my wife,” he says explaining that it was one of those rare situations that actually materialised. They set up the business together, although he insists that it was her creativity and ideas that launched the first shop into a chain of boutiques. They ran the business for ten years before deciding to sell it to start a family. Caan comes from an entrepreneurial background. His father had his own business and was a manufacturer of leather garments.
“I think the concept of having your independence and being your own boss and being in control of your whole destiny was always an appeal. As a character, I don’t think I would necessarily fit into a corporate environment, I have to extend my creativity and my own ideas,” says James. From the age of 12, he already had visions of running his own business. “I didn’t have any aspirations of becoming a doctor, a fireman or a policeman. I knew from a very young age that I would be running my own business of some description,” says James. “When Dragons’ Den came out, people who I was in primary school with found me on the website and sent me an email saying, ‘We always knew that you’d end up doing your own thing, running your own businesses.’” A graduate of Harvard Business School’s prestigious Advanced Management Programme, Caan has since been creating, building and selling businesses for over 20 years. In 1985, he set up the Alexander Mann Group, one of the UK’s leading HR outsourcing companies, and achieved a turnover of £130 million before selling it to a private equity firm in 2002. Until today, he still attributes Alexander Mann as his most successful investment namely because he pioneered the company with nothing. Since then he’s had a number of investments that have done spectacularly well. He is the founder and CEO of Hamilton Bradshaw Human Capital (HBHC) an investment fund specialising in the staffing sector which is hugely successful for its ‘buy and build’ strategy.
“I plan to continue building Hamilton Bradshaw, it’s a mainstream investment business, which continues to identify people with passion, who want to build their businesses. I think it’s the thrill of building and growing something and being able to make a difference,” says James, who within six months of acquiring Eden Brown, a business in the recruitment sector, grew the profits of that company by 100 per cent and is currently turning over £180 million. “It’s the biggest thrill to take somebody with an idea and turn that into a success or taking an existing business and doubling its success. It’s tangible – you can see the impact of your involvement.” Indeed, it is not surprising that Caan’s success as a serial entrepreneur was instantly recognised by the BBC’s producers of Dragons’ Den and in October 2007, James signed up to its fifth series, which has become a massive hit, attracting 5.2 million viewers. On joining the other dragons James says, I’m thrilled to be invited to be in one of the highly coveted ‘dragon positions’.” Since appearing on Dragons’ Den he has been bombarded with emails from people wanting advice on a daily basis. “It’s crazy, I get about 200,000 hits on my website a month,” he says in disbelief. So what role does Dragons’ Den play in helping aspiring entrepreneurs to achieve their goals? “It encourages and inspires entrepreneurship and there have been some real success stories out of the den, which makes people realise that you can turn dreams into a reality.”
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