Sir Alan Sugar (3 page)

After speaking to the reporters, Sugar also granted a then rare interview to BBC Radio 4's flagship
Today
programme. The sentiments he outlined there give an insight into how he sees the making of all entrepreneurs, including, of course, himself. ‘You cannot make someone into an entrepreneur, just like you can't make someone a pop singer or an artist,' he said. ‘It has to be in-built in you; it's a kind of a nose for things, a smell for things, and then an instinct to do it and a focus.' Interestingly, within years of his making these statements, reality television was indeed trying to ‘make' pop stars and entrepreneurs right in front of our very eyes. However, Sugar's own slice of the reality television cake was about polishing, rather than making, businesspeople.

Let us return once more to his own childhood. Sugar insists that his love of business started at a very early age. ‘I've been in business since I was a 12-year-old schoolkid, really,' he said. ‘If there was an opportunity and a demand, I'd be there.' And, in common with all those who rise to the heights of entrepreneurial brilliance, Sugar found opportunities and demands wherever he looked, even back then. At the tender age of 11, he photographed other children and sold the resulting prints to their grandparents. As we've seen, he also made his own ginger
beer and sold it to thirsty kids. Sugar went on to clean cars, a more traditional childhood enterprise but one that he went about with the trademark Sugar zeal. Later in life, rather than clean cars, he would be driven round in them, including an exclusive Rolls-Royce Phantom. Returning to the photographic sphere, he flogged repackaged
black-and
-white film and became something of a professional photographer. He would approach grandparents and offer to photograph their grandchildren for them. He would proudly present them with the finished black-
and-white
snaps, with ‘Alan Sugar, photographer' neatly typed on the back. He had found a fertile ground for sales; offering to photograph grandchildren for half a crown, he found the grandparents' answer was always ‘Yes, yes, yes.' They could never have enough pictures of their grandchildren.'

He was also a paperboy for a while, a job that allowed him to buy himself that copy of the
Beano
every week if that was what he wanted. By the time he reached the age of 12, the budding businessman would rise at the early hour of 6am to boil beetroot for the local greengrocer. ‘It wasn't a case of deciding to do that: it was quite common for people who lived in my council block to have a Saturday job, a holiday job, a paper round or whatever,' he said, keen to play down the significance of the beetroot days. ‘It was necessary – if you wanted your own pocket money you had to go and get it yourself.' Another job he took was at a local department store.
There, his natural brilliance as a salesman came to the fore. He was so good at selling footwear to the customers that he was offered the chance to promote himself from a Saturday job to a full-time job. It wasn't just his employers who noted his salesman's tack. Sugar also was described by his headmaster as someone who could sell anything to anyone. He himself had fallen for the charms of the Sugar sales pitch when his pupil asked him if he'd lend him the money to buy a printing machine, so he could produce a school magazine. ‘With your cheek, I will,' replied his headmaster.

He also had a good grasp of mathematics, as many of those who go on to thrive in business are wont to have. He puts this down to a teacher called Mr Grant, whom he still remembers many decades on. ‘I remember Mr Grant, the maths master, because, even though he gave up on me, I managed to pass my [GCE] O-level,' said the generous Sugar. ‘He was a real eccentric. We used to call him Theta Grant because he made us laugh when he wrote the Greek letter theta on the blackboard. He was accident-prone. He'd come into school with his face smashed in or a broken arm. There were all sorts of rumours going round, but we never found out the cause of his injuries. When I discovered that the maths O-level syllabus involved something called calculus, which was supposed to be really difficult, I was fascinated. I've always enjoyed a challenge. I'm a quick learner and have a photographic memory. Within three or four weeks, I
became the whiz kid of calculus, which got me through the exam. Grant couldn't believe it.'

His shoe-selling days would be among the final times that Sugar ever worked for someone else. As he said, proudly, ‘I haven't applied for a job since I was a teenager.' Although his success and riches have since brought him all manner of luxuries and pleasures, he insists that his original motivation to getting into business was far more down to earth and simple. ‘When I first started out, I wasn't interested in making a million, I wasn't thinking about getting a knighthood,' he said. ‘It was about getting some wheels. I wanted a car – and I wanted to be independent. I was also angry, and probably a bit arrogant. I was sick of putting money in other people's pockets when I knew I could earn more on my own.' This anger speaks of an internal frustration with life. Specifically, he feels that it came from seeing how his father had gone about his own working life. ‘I had seen [him] work hard all his life, putting the family first and playing the safe game in order to take care of us.' Sugar felt that, in a highly important respect, he differed from his father, both in circumstances and makeup. ‘I was at the point when I had no responsibilities – and I knew I didn't have his temperament – I would never be able to stay the course working for someone else.'

Therefore, his business ambition has been burning inside Sugar for as long as he can remember. He says he
always felt he'd have his own business, and that at heart he has always been a salesman. ‘I never wanted to be a rocket scientist or a football player,' he adds. He then turns again to the lessons he learned, and the conclusions he drew, from watching his father from a young age. Once more, we can see how he tried to differ from his father, though not to the extent of having anything less than total respect for the man. ‘One of the things that drove me to be self-sufficient was looking at the way my father, a tailor, struggled to keep the family going. I thought, “I don't want that.” He did a very good job of bringing up a family of four children in very tough times.'

There were tender moments among the tough times. For Sugar, his
bar mitzvah
would have been one of them. The words bar mitzvah translate as ‘son on the commandment' and is the process Jewish boys go through at the age of 13. This is a great event in the life of a Jewish male, where he is called up to read from the Torah scroll. Often, the ceremony will be followed by an elaborate and at times wild celebration. For Sugar it was a more modest affair, which took place at a small synagogue in Upper Clapton Road. Nonetheless, this marked his coming of age. A few years later, he left school. ‘It's generally said of me that I left school at 16,' he said. ‘The precise truth is that I left school at 16 and three-quarters, having started A-levels at my London school.' He was the youngest in the family and the first to consider going on to higher education. ‘My father was
a tailor and the older children had left school and gone straight into the garment trade. So I suppose I was one of those council-house kids who had the makings of a great opportunity there, but the problem was that it just didn't suit me. I was simply the sort of person who wanted to get on with the rest of my life.'

However, Sugar did not move straight from school to becoming an energetic businessman. First he was to have a taste of office life working for someone else, but it was not to his liking and his experience of it was to ultimately make him even more determined to be the master of his own destiny.

CHAPTER TWO

YES MINISTER

A
fter leaving school and taking his first steps into the big world, Sugar took a job as a civil service clerk statistician at the Ministry of Education and Science. This was a somewhat surprising choice for a man with Sugar’s drive and imagination. It is perhaps not a surprise, then, that this is not an area of his life that Sugar is particularly fond of reliving. When one journalist asked him about it, he simply replied, ‘It bores me talking about it again and again.’ It is not surprising that Sugar is not full of enthusiasm for this part of his career. The civil service can be an oppressively procedure-driven industry, full of red tape. This has been excellently sent up in the BBC comedy
Yes Minister,
but it is unlikely that someone with Sugar’s vision and entrepreneurial spirit would have seen the funny side of the civil service as he sat in dull and uninspiring surroundings.

So why did he end up there? Having been allowed to stay on at school longer than his father would have liked him to, and longer than some of his siblings had been kept in education, meant that Sugar felt he had to try to take on a more scholarly career. In any case, as he told David Thomas, ‘Science – this was something I had always been interested in. Statistics, maths – I wasn’t too bad at that. So I thought I’d go for it.’ However, the work was almost cripplingly tedious, ‘the most unbelievable bore going’, he recalled. His tasks were so dull that one of the least objectionable parts of his job was calculating what percentage of children drank milk in the morning at school, which is hardly the sort of work that would appeal to Sugar. No wonder he shudders at the memory of the ‘total agony’ of waiting for the clock to run down each day, so he could get home!

Looking back on this time of his life, Sugar recalls how crestfallen he was when he realised quite how inappropriate his new job was to be. ‘I was quite interested in science and engineering and naïvely took a job with the Ministry of Education and Science, expecting to be involved in interesting scientific projects,’ he said. ‘Imagine my disappointment when I was plonked into a boring office, pushing a load of paper around. This was not for me – though it was far from easy to tell my dad that I wanted out. The old man’s priorities were security and a job for life. Yet here I was, a few months into the job and on my bike.’

It is almost extraordinary to think of Sugar in such surroundings. True, he has a fine mathematical mind and a great analytical ability. But Whitehall’s civil service is for men who are the polar opposite of Sugar. To make his businesses work, he would relish the freedom, the creativity, the spark that secures that next avalanche of cash. Instead, here he was tied to a desk in a sterile atmosphere, with the nine-to-five mentality writ large in the very essence of the job description (although, to be fair, Sugar has always been a nine-to-five man who rarely takes his work home). His unsuitability for the role – or rather the role’s unsuitability for him – can hardly be overstressed. His mother said that he didn’t like it because it was ‘a sitting-down job’. A nice succinct statement – one can see where he got his rough-and-ready wit of the
Apprentice
boardroom scenes.

Nonetheless, something really had to change before this young man was entirely broken by boredom. Many a man has taken an unsatisfying job, and somewhere along the line lost his spark and with it his ambition to leave, but Sugar was not about to get stuck in such a rut. To earn extra money, he took on a string of Saturday jobs, including one at a chemist’s in Walthamstow. Another came at a clothes shop in London’s West End. Here, he could perform tasks far more suited to his energetic, salesman nature. Soon, he was to leave his weekday job in the civil service to take a similar role at a British steel firm. Here, at least, his colleagues were more
his type. There were banter and humour, two qualities that Sugar adored but that he had found entirely lacking in Whitehall. However, with their encouragement, he was soon to quit this job, too. He was ready to take his next step on the ladder to multimillionaire fortune. And, given his business success and the worldwide fame he found as the star of a television show, it proved to be an entirely prescient step.

Malcolm Cross was an East End television engineer. Sugar had known him for several years, after the pair originally met in the youth clubs of Stamford Hill. During his lunch breaks from his Saturday shift at the chemist’s, Sugar would meet up with Cross and, as they ate their snacks, the pair discussed how they could break into business together. These were days of dreams and ambition. Soon, they had a plan to make a nice little earner together. They would buy cheap television sets that had seen better days; Cross would repair them and generally give them a spruce-up, then Sugar would use his skills and charms as a salesman to sell them on at a tidy profit.

The pair called their fledgling business venture ‘Maurann’, which was a combination of ‘Maureen’, the name of Cross’s wife, and ‘Ann’, Sugar’s girlfriend. Sugar even printed headed notepaper for Maurann, and they hired a room to store the televisions. It soon became something of a legend in the family. His brother Derek
noticed an advertisement that said ‘TV for sale’ stuck to a local hot-drinks stall, and quickly realised where he recognised the phone number from: it was his mother’s. As for Fay herself, she dubbed the repaired televisions ‘old monstrosities’, but that did not stop her from doing her part to help her beloved son in his venture. She would show customers up the stairs of the home to where the television was on display, and, if people came back to complain that the set they had bought was not working, she would simply hand over a refund.

However, there was a clever salesman’s trick to this arrangement. As part of his sales pitch, Sugar would pretend that he had only one television set for sale, and that it was an unwanted gift to the Sugar family. He would lead punters into his bedroom, where only one set was on show, and then, as soon as that set was sold, he would replace it with a new one, to sell to the next visiting customers. It was a typically shrewd and effective sales tactic. The Maurann venture lasted no more than 12 months, but it was enough to fill the young Sugar with renewed confidence and energy.

Some of that confidence and energy enabled him to resign from the steel firm where he had been working. He remembers that his father was less than impressed by this latest career move. In less than a year, Sugar had gone through three different jobs, while his father had been in the same workplace for a decade and a half. Asked why he quit at that point, Sugar is typically honest and concise:
‘What I was really after was wheels.’ This was no small aim in those days, and, when asked what his earliest ever ambition was, he replied that it was to own his own car. ‘A car was considered to be an absolute luxury,’ he said. ‘Rich people had cars – that’s how you viewed it.’ He couldn’t afford one, but thanks to his spirited, entrepreneurial nature, he wasn’t about to let that hold him back.

So it was that the man who would later own a
Rolls-Royce
Phantom got his hands on his first set of wheels – a company car as part of the package for his next job. He saw an advertisement from a London electrical firm for a salesman. The firm – Robuk Electrical – was looking to add to its army of salesmen across the country, and it seems that, on applying for the job, Sugar so impressed them that they gave him the task of selling across the capital. Sugar was on the sell and, thanks to the van that came as part of the job package, on the move. It was in this job that Sugar acquired an amazing knowledge of the capital city’s many stores that sold electrical goods, a sector in which he would later make an absolute fortune. ‘They gave me a minivan and, at the ripe old age of 17, I was flogging recorders to radio and TV dealers in north London,’ he said, looking back. ‘Within three months I was the top salesman. I quickly realised it paid to think big. I would talk my heart out to sell one tape recorder to a small shopkeeper. But, using the same energy talking to the chief buyer of Currys, I could get an order for 100
units. So I looked for bigger deals – and landed some great orders.’

Here, though, the arrangement didn’t continue as expected for Sugar. He was initially delighted to be dealing with Currys. Up to then, he had been unable to do so because that store’s managers had needed to contact head office before taking orders for tape recorders. Sugar saw this new arrangement as ‘a licence to print money’. So, when he managed to persuade every Currys store in the capital to put orders in for Robuk tape recorders, he thought he was home and dry and that his commission rate would rocket. ‘Instead of being rewarded, my commission rate was slashed,’ he said. He had been told that, because the Currys deal was a bulk one, his commission was smaller than it would have been for a corresponding deal for the same number of independent stores. After a disagreement, Sugar resigned. Naturally, this latest parting of the ways didn’t go down well at home. ‘Third job over in nine months – the old man was tearing his hair out.’

Not that Sugar remains bitter about this episode – quite the opposite in fact. Like many of those who rise from mediocrity to become accomplished people, Sugar is not only able to shrug off past setbacks, but is also well versed at turning negatives into positives, at seeing how seemingly bad things in his past were actually wonderful things that set him on his way in life. ‘Here’s the payback,’ he said, smiling. ‘Had my ex-boss not been so ungrateful,
I might still be working for him today. I can’t thank him enough. He made me determined to work for myself.’ This is the sort of positive thinking and philosophical outlook that got Sir Alan Sugar where he is today. Modern self-help books preach just this sort of positive thinking, although, when he was starting out in business, such books scarcely existed. But then he didn’t need them, because he naturally had most of what was contained within them, and what he didn’t know he could pick up along the way. As he said himself, ‘You can’t learn to be an entrepreneur by reading a book. You can only find out by giving it a try. Don’t worry if you make mistakes because that’s how most people learn.’

He was soon in new employment. ‘My next job was selling electrical goods to dealers,’ said Sugar. His employers were R Henson Ltd, a wholesaler based in north London. Among the products he sold were
walkie-talkies,
car aerials, clock radios and car radios. He would show these products to retail customers and close the deal. ‘I would talk my heart out to sell one tape recorder to a small shopkeeper,’ said Sugar. Also, as part of his job he had to deliver the completed order and take the payment. Sugar says this job really opened his eyes to the world of business. Soon, frustration he felt with his new employers was to bubble over into another confrontation that led to his walking out.

‘One day I pulled off a great deal on my own initiative,’ remembered Sugar. ‘Instead of congratulating me, my
boss told me off for not earning enough money on the deal. That Friday I quit. Fourth job in a year.’ The great deal he was referring to was a pile of records he sold on behalf of Henson’s and returned with several hundreds pounds’ profit. ‘If Henson’s had been clever at that stage, they would have made me a partner of the firm, and it might have been Henson’s -cum-Amstrad by now,’ he said, looking back. But, after his boss told him off for not earning more money on the deal, Sugar felt ‘naffed’. So, off he went again in search of new work. However, although he felt naffed and walked out, he remained in contact with Henson’s and even did business with them after he set up his own firm. The life lesson is clear: look at the bigger picture, don’t be petty.

However, it was a nervous journey home for Sugar. ‘I left the car and went home by bus, worrying what I was going to tell my dad,’ he wrote. ‘At that time he’d been in his job 23 years and was taking home £16 a week. I announced that I had walked out again and was going to start working for myself from Monday. My dad came out with this classic question: “Who’s going to pay you on Friday?” “I’m going to pay myself,” I replied.’ As it turned out, he would make his first batch of money even more quickly than he had dreamed.

Gulu Lalvani was the founder and chairman of Binatone, the world’s second-largest manufacturer of digital cordless phones. A tall, suave and attractive man, he was born in Karachi and raised in Bombay, and he
came to Britain as a student. He founded Binatone – named after his sister Bina – in 1958 with his brothers Katar and Partap to import radios from Hong Kong. He has since gone on to become a businessman of some repute, and one of Britain’s richest Asians. Today, Binatone International Limited is one of the largest privately owned consumer-electronics companies in Britain. It enjoys nearly 15 per cent market share in the domestic-telephone sector here. Gulu also plays a major role in Phuket’s high-end property market, having developed the Royal Phuket Marina on the east coast, which features luxury apartments and villas. In 2008, he invested a cool
£
1 billion in a Thai exhibition and conference centre. But, back then, he was to become a major player in the tale of Sugar’s rise from Hackney to the riches of Monaco.