Sir Alan Sugar

PREFACE

T
he British business world had never known anything like it. It was April 1987, and the lecture hall at the City University Business School was full of young budding business giants, and established financial analysts from the City itself. They were about to be given an entertaining lesson in how to make it in business by a man who was already a multimillionaire, having just turned 40 a matter of weeks before. It was to be a charismatic, direct and honest performance. Most of all, though, it was to be a truly instructive evening, one that will no doubt have served all those present well in their personal quests. Indeed, it’s fair to say that the speaker was not so much going to give them a wake-up call, as chuck a bucket of ice-cold water over them.

‘The priority in life is to keep an eye on the business and not to get lured into the social high life, being
exhibited around by the groupie-type poseurs who wish to be seen with the new blue-eyed boy,’ he told the aspiring entrepreneurs. Were any of those youngsters dreaming of working for the man in front of them in the future, they were given a succinct account of what that would entail. ‘In our company we attract people who either catch on very quickly or they last two minutes. When they catch on, they understand the entrepreneurial flair of the company and see their colleagues using innovative ways and methods to achieve their tasks, not conforming to the standards that are written down in the books, but by cutting corners, taking a few risks.’ He added that ‘we don’t want any corporate wimps’. Some members of the audience shuffled somewhat uncomfortably in their seats.

Turning to his own personal image, he said, ‘For some reason, I have been called a barrow boy. I would take great exception to that if my ambition in life was to be seen daily at Annabel’s with Lord and Lady Beseenwith. However, in a way, marketing is just like a stall in Petticoat Lane. Frankly, it is no different. The owner of the stall is offering his or her wares. The sales pitch, albeit very rural and loud, is no different than some
high-cost
advertising agency may apply.’ He went on to outline more of his personal business manifesto, pouring more scorn on corporate culture, on ‘up-market yuppies’ and ‘hi-tech ramble’.

Once a company has created a winning product, he said, there is no room for complacency or patting oneself
on the back. He said he had witnessed this many times in his industry: a bit of success leaving a firm ‘feeling their boat has come in and nothing can topple them from the Cloud Cuckoo Land they are in’. Instead, ‘you knock the living daylights out of the thing, as opportunities come very seldom and you make the most of things when the opportunity allows’. By this time, it seemed he had the audience in the palm of his hand.

He even found time to attack other companies, and had no respect for big names in doing so. Once more, he told it as he saw it. ‘In the USA we sold goods to Sears,’ he snarled. ‘The mighty Sears, where the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. They obtained the marketing rights to our word processor, ordered shiploads and stored them in a warehouse in stacks nearly as high as the Sears Tower in Chicago.’ He then outlined how he felt Sears had taken its eye off the ball and let Amstrad down. ‘This is a case of big not being beautiful,’ he snapped. ‘The Sears Tower has 100-odd floors and I think they have that many layers of management.’

He concluded the speech by summing up the culture of his company. In doing so he managed both to mock the overelaborate slogans many large corporations used, and to be humorously to the point about his own company’s philosophy. ‘Pan Am takes good care of you. Marks & Spencer loves you. IBM says the customer is king. At Amstrad, we want your money!’ He stepped down from the podium to spectacular applause.
The Times
roundly
praised his performance in the following morning’s edition, under the headline ‘A Recipe for Sweet Success’. It had been a memorable performance. The following year, City University awarded him an honorary degree.

Several years later, he would once more spell out a basic business philosophy. ‘We’re interested in the
mass-merchandising
of anything,’ he said. ‘If there was a market in mass-produced nuclear weapons, we’d market them too.’

Two decades later, he would deliver his own business wisdom in a similarly forthright style to aspiring millionaires on a television show, by which time the fortunes he had made as a 40-year-old would seem small change.

INTRODUCTION

‘
I
s there a Sugar “brand”?’ Sir Alan Sugar was once asked.

‘Yes, Tate & Lyle’ was his impatient reply.

He is not a man keen on overt analysis. His most memorable lines of self-description on
The Apprentice
concerned more what he was
not,
rather than what he
was.
‘Mary Poppins I am not,’ he told contestants, before adding, ‘I don’t like liars. I don’t like cheats. I don’t like bullshitters. I don’t like schmoozers and I don’t like
arse-lickers.’
However, one thing that he told them that he definitely
was
was a one-off. ‘Don’t start telling me that you’re just like me, because no one’s like me; I’m unique,’ he declared. There was of course always plenty of theatre and bravado on both sides of the boardroom table during
The Apprentice,
but this ‘unique’ claim was not without merit. Such is the breadth of areas that Sugar has worked in that his life has proved to be something of a one-off.
But who is Sir Alan Sugar? To some, he is the man who has become synonymous with the phrase ‘You’re fired’, thanks to the smash-hit success of
The Apprentice.
To others, he is still associated with football, thanks to his eventful time in charge of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Then there is his property empire and his
private-jet
company. Of late, he has also become something of a political figure, working alongside Gordon Brown on several projects. And, of course, Alan Sugar is the man who rose from a humble beginning in the East End of London to form the electronics company Amstrad, and go on to amass a fortune that runs comfortably into the hundreds of millions of pounds.

With an almost snarling determination, Sugar has built his business empire and personal wealth in breathtaking style. His is a truly, classically inspiring tale of ambition, energy and brainpower. On occasion, he has described himself as a ‘salesman’, and it is true that Sugar has an uncanny ability to sell. Even at school, his headmaster had noted, and been bowled over by, Sugar’s powers of persuasion. If your life depended on a sale being made, you’d want Sir Alan to be the man knocking on the front doors. However, there is so much more to Sugar than a simple salesman. He has an extraordinary eye for all aspects of business, from planning to the legal side and far beyond.

He also has a refreshing honesty, and a wonderfully straightforward, yet evocative turn of phrase. When
asked to describe the person who bought his early computer models, he said, ‘He looks at this thing, with its whacking great big keyboard and a monitor, and he has visions of a girl at Gatwick airport where he checks himself in for his holidays. And he thinks, “That’s a real computer, not this pregnant calculator thing over there called a Sinclair.”’ A good description: what it lacks in romance it more than makes up for in honesty and focus. To know your market is a key business asset. Sugar knows his like the back of his hand. Further honesty was apparent when he gave another lecture in 1987, and told his audience how he first learned what P/E ratios are. To the uninitiated, P/E stands for ‘price-to-earnings’, and represents the ratio between the share’s price and its actual earnings. However, as Sugar explained, he was somewhat confused when he had been asked in 1979 what his P/E ratios were. ‘The last time I heard the expressions “PE”,’ he recalled thinking, ‘I was at secondary school and it meant physical education.’ So, when he was asked what Amstrad’s P/E was, he replied, ‘Twenty press-ups every morning.’ He would soon learn what all this jargon meant, though, and, in doing so, show the City experts just who was boss.

Just as Sir Alan has an incredible sense of business, so does he have a refined sense of timing. It was Andy Warhol who said, ‘Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art of all.’ In
21st-century
Britain, the entrepreneur has assumed a whole
new wave of glamour. Previously, young people mostly dreamed of becoming the next rock star, movie actor, supermodel or footballer. To them, the thought of becoming a millionaire through good honest business graft was not as appealing as these more glamorous routes to riches. However, thanks to a raft of new television shows in which the worlds of business and reality television are wonderfully intertwined, the entrepreneur has become a far more admirable and – whisper it quietly – sexy figure! Shows such as
Dragons’ Den
and
American Inventor
have become hugely popular and the multimillionaires who star on these shows have become almost as famous as rock stars. As one of Britain’s most brilliant businessmen, it is quite fitting that Sugar should have been at the forefront of this new trend with his acclaimed popular television series
The Apprentice.

And who else could have done it? Would Rupert Murdoch have been able to charm television audiences the way that the Amstrad man has? Does Richard Branson possess the necessary snarl-ability to be at the helm of a show such as
The Apprentice?
Meanwhile, the Dragons of the Den are all immensely enjoyable television figures, but they work only as a team. None has sufficient individual charisma to work on the screen alone, as Sugar does. When they have tried to go it alone – as Peter Jones did with the ITV show
Tycoon
– they got harsh reminders that they do not have the Sugar-factor,
and so they have had to return to the successful formula of teamwork, in
Dragons’ Den.

All the same, there was no doubt that enterprise had become sexy and Sugar has seen this trend coming a while back, saying, ‘The UK is poised for more enterprise. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, but people have a fixation that Shell or BP are the backbone of the country. They’re not. The actual backbone of the country is Fred with six employees in the garden centre, or in the garage. They’re the ones who employ the majority of people in this country. Being employed in the old-fashioned way isn’t that available any more. People have got to start thinking about doing things for themselves.’ Just as he has caught this cultural trend brilliantly, so has Sugar managed to reflect in many ways the prevailing political climate that he is operating in. As he rose to prominence in the 1970s, he was, in many people’s eyes, the ultimate Thatcherite, her vision personified. Here was a hungry young businessman who was willing to slog hard, take risks and shake up restrictive business practices in return for success and financial riches. No respecter of any bureaucratic nonsense or establishment figures, Sugar wanted to get to the top on his terms – and fast.

‘There’s a new breed of person coming up – the likely lad,’ Sugar said with a smile during the Thatcher years. ‘You see it in the City and everywhere. It’s no longer Mr Heathcote-Smythe’s son who’s getting the job.’ No
wonder, then, that, rather than becoming part of the establishment, Sugar was dubbed as part of a ‘disestablishment’. No wonder, then, that he received praise from the Thatcher administration. Lord Young, who was Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, said, ‘He’s one of a new breed of British entrepreneurs. I would like to see people like that as role models for young people coming into business. I want people to say, “Damn it, if he can do it, I can.”’

Not that Sugar was entirely reciprocal. He insists there were never any barriers to his progress, under Labour or the Conservatives. He was also keen to avoid lazy generalisations, such as making the 1980s the decade of business. He believes that people are born the way they are, and they continue to be the way they are beyond decades. However, it remains the case that Sugar’s ascent coincided neatly with that of Thatcher’s, and that many saw him as a product of her times.

However, come the 21st century and the aftermath of Tony Blair’s reign, Sugar again chimed with the political climate of the hour when he became a close confidant of Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The new PM appointed Sugar to a business leaders’ council. ‘Let me tell you, this fellow is no mug,’ said Sugar. He had long understood that the Labour Party would have to change if it was to retake power. ‘The Left cannot be as our fathers would remember it in the old days. If the Labour government comes in, their policies will have to be
virtually the same.’ These remarkably prescient words were spoken more than seven years before Tony Blair, New Labour through and through, came to power.

Sugar started in business young, and his tender years would surprise many as he took the business world by storm. When he made his first business trip to Japan at the age of 21, the Japanese businessman with whom he had been dealing by Telex asked him whether he had come with his father. He couldn’t get his head around the fact that he was dealing with a 21-year-old businessman. Once he’d made it, Sugar had no such anti-youth worries. Speaking of a female employee whom he hired at the age of 19, he said, ‘She is mustard. Unbelievable. I’d match her against any businessman in the world. Personally, I would trust her with all my money.’

Needless to say, he’s a canny operator. An early business trick of Sugar’s – and one that was to remain for some time – was to lure customers into stores by advertising low-price or ‘lead-in’ products, and then make sure that next to the cheap product was a superior and more expensive version. ‘The salesman “Dixonises” them,’ said Sugar of how this would play out at his favourite retailers. ‘He jumps on them and says, “Well, that one is the all-singing, all-dancing, more powerful, double-cassette, blah-de-blah.” Nine times out of ten the customer will pay it off on credit, which works out at
£
1 a month more for the better one. The truth is we advertise the target lead-in price products, knowing that
they will often end up being the lower sales.’ Indeed, not only did Sugar have a strong grasp of what went on in stores such as Dixons, but he also had an intensive relationship with the retailers. Someone who sat in on a meeting between Sugar and Dixons said, ‘These were not meetings where you would want to talk unless you had to because you would get ripped apart – by your own side if not the other. They were fighting over volume and percentage points for hours and hours.’ The air would turn blue, and desks would be thumped. However, the same eyewitness said that, after slagging each other off throughout the meeting, often for hours on end, Sugar and the Dixons people would then step outside the meeting room and laugh about the whole thing.

Because, contrary to how he might come across on
The Apprentice,
Sugar is not a grumpy man. For the sake of making good television, his grumpy demeanour has been a major selling point for the show. True, he would not claim to be the most smiley man in the world, but those closest to him speak of a witty, generous and
light-hearted
man who is a million miles from the grump of
Apprentice
boardroom fame. However, the demands of television producers dictate that a moody and fearsome Sir Alan will make far better viewing on a reality show, so that is the side of him that is emphasised. ‘What you see on screen is me, there’s no question of that,’ Sugar said. ‘But it is the side of me the BBC chooses to show. There is more light-hearted banter, which hits the
cutting-room
floor because it doesn’t put bums on seats. It’s a one-way portrayal, not the whole of me.’

There are wider issues at play, too, in this image that has built up around him. When it was once pointed out to him that, in publicity photographs, he was traditionally pictured with a somewhat unhappy expression on his face, Sugar explained the thinking behind this tactic. He said that he’d been advised that, if there are photographs of him smiling in circulation, then should any of his business ventures go bust, leaving people out of work, you could guarantee that the newspapers would run the story with a photograph of him smiling or laughing.

Returning to those fuming Dixons meetings, and their humorous, peaceful aftermath, this shows that, despite his grumpy image, there is something special about Sugar’s personality that means there is a far warmer undercurrent beneath the gruff front. Many Amstrad staff at one point were perceived to be imitating the direct-talking style of their leader. But, according to one retail contact, they got only half of the impersonation right. ‘They imitated his aggressiveness, the most obvious side of his character, without having the intelligence to know that beneath it was a very perceptive, humorous, intelligent guy.’ As an Amstrad insider put it, when Sugar told customers to ‘bugger off’, he did so with a twinkle in his eye. It was all part of the theatre.

Sugar, when asked for further reason for his sour
reputation, pointed to the unpleasant experiences he had in the football world during his time at Tottenham Hotspur. ‘I think the poor reputation I had, sometimes deservedly, of “needing a charisma bypass”, as someone once put it, was brought about by the horrible people that I had to deal with in that industry,’ he said. ‘It made me a very tight and protective person, not wanting to speak to anybody, thinking everybody’s got an angle, everybody’s out to try to get me. So I think coming out of that environment has released in me a much better person. I used to be quite a good joker and enjoy having a laugh but a lot of my friends said to me, “Since you’ve been involved in bloody Tottenham you’ve changed.” I did. It was a wasted ten years of my life. It was a problem given to my family. No one deserved it really.’