James Caan, serial entrepreneur and BBC "dragon", typically values his time at £15,000 per hour. So when four Oxford MBA students carried out their strategic consulting project with Caan’s boutique private equity firm, Hamilton Bradshaw, in London’s exclusive Mayfair district, they were pleasantly surprised to find they had daily access to the self-made multi-millionaire.

Recognising that Hamilton Bradshaw needs a more robust structure to enable it to scale up, Caan invited the team of Oxford MBAs to carry out a two-month consultancy project with the company and to make recommendations for standardising its business processes and controls in line with the momentum of its growth.

"As the firm expands their investment team, they need to formalise how they conduct business," said  Faisal Butt, a Skoll Scholar and social entrepreneur from Pakistan, who participated in the project. "As they grow the number of clients they deal with, they need to ensure they maintain the same levels of client contact and keep creating value." 

Faisal and his teammates Ville Lehtonen from Finland, Terry Beech from Canada and Kent Killough from the US, started by conducting in-depth interviews with everyone at Hamilton Bradshaw. Then, using the information they had gathered, they created an investment operations manual focused on creating a consistent and repeatable flow from sourcing the deal to investment to exit. Other recommendations the team implemented concerned increasing transparency, clarifying roles within the organisation, creating an induction process and improving document management.

As learning experiences go, the project was the “real deal”. From working together, the team learned to balance their alpha male tendencies with the need to listen and compromise. From working among Caan’s hand-picked private equity professionals, they learnt about the deal cycle, as well as how to pitch and negotiate, and the importance of getting buy-in before making changes.

"Working with James Caan was really like CEO mentorship," enthused  Terry Beech. "The experience gave us tools we can use to run companies and to prepare us for our future. Both parties have taken something out of the relationship- which is as it should be."

Caan was delighted with the team’s contribution. "When a business is growing at the rate that Hamilton Bradshaw is, simple but effective internal systems are essential in order to make that business scalable in the future," he commented."

"The Oxford MBA team came in at exactly the right stage of our growth to be able to implement precisely those systems in a very effective manner. Their attention to detail and commercial common sense were first class and they have clearly benefitted our business by defining and articulating the recipe for future success within Hamilton Bradshaw."