Lord Alan Sugar

We chart the career of the UK’s most belligerent boss; from his humble beginnings in East London he has built up a business empire and an estimated fortune of £770m, making him a regular fixture on The Sunday Times Rich List. From Amstrad to The Apprentice, we take a look at the business behemoth that is Lord Alan Sugar…

Born in East London on 24 March 1947, Alan Sugar began his life in an inauspicious council flat; a far cry from the world of private jets and chauffeur driven cars he inhabits these days. So how did he get here? Well, it is an oft-cited cliché, but even Lord Sugar himself attributes his success to hard work and determination. For his first foray into the world of business, having left school at sixteen, Sugar worked briefly for the Civil Service before striking out on his own. He has previously commented that he dislikes the idea of working for somebody else, “Once you decide to work for yourself, you never go back to work for anybody else.” So, at the age of 16 what was his first solo venture? Selling car aerials out of the back of a van that he
had bought for just £100!

Of course, Alan Sugar didn’t sell car aerials for long and in 1968 (aged only 21) he founded the business that he is perhaps best known for: Amstrad - the name is an acronym of his initials ‘Alan Michael Sugar Trading’. The company proved a success, and in 1980 Sugar took the company public, floating it on the London Stock Exchange. The key to Amstrad’s success sounds relatively simple now, but at the time it was groundbreaking. Amstrad worked on the basis that computers could be delivered much more cheaply than anyone else on the market was offering them. So Sugar forged his success in the industry by cutting production costs and passing on these savings to the customer, thus undermining his rivals by undercutting them on pricing. As such, Amstrad brought the idea of the home computer to the masses and throughout the 1980s Amstrad was the byword for affordable electronics. In fact, at the peak of its success the company achieved a market value of £1.2 bn.

However, it was not all plain sailing for Amstrad and the 1990s were a difficult period for the company as it struggled with a number of issues with its business PCs. The tide of negative publicity and customer dissatisfaction was a thorn in the company’s side that the company never fully removed. The company later diversified into the gaming computer market, but the venture was largely unsuccessful due to a market already dominated by Nintendo and Sega which were far more established players in the gaming industry. Despite the disappointing latter years of Sugar’s time at Amstrad it nonetheless achieved a sale price of around £125m when BSkyB bought the company in 2007. By 2008 Sugar had stepped down from his position as Chairman at Amstrad in order to focus on his other business projects such as Amsair, an aviation company offering charters of jets to executives. These days, Lord Sugar is more heavily involved in property investments than with traditional businesses.

In June 1991 Sugar joined forces with Terry Venables and bought football club Tottenham Hotspur. The beautiful game proved to have an ugly side though, and in spite of the much needed cash injection that Sugar had administered to the team, fans were largely wary of the new corporate owner, viewing him as a businessman motivated by money and not a football fanatic. Unfortunately, a series of poor performances by the team meant that during Sugar’s tenure was Chairman of the team, Tottenham failed to finish in the top five of the League. In fact, it is fair to say that things got messy both on and off the pitch, when Sugar’s decision to sack Terry Venables in 1993 led Venables to drag Sugar to Court, demanding a legal ‘red card’ for the entrepreneur. The landmark case of Re Tottenham Hotspur Plc [1994] saw Sugar eventually emerge victorious, and is a noted legal precedent demonstrating the reluctance of the courts to award specific performance in personal contracts. In 2001, Sugar eventually sold his majority stake in the team to ENIC for £22m and in 2007 he cut the remainder of his ties with the club, selling all the rest of his shares to the same company in 2007 for £25m.

No biography of Alan Sugar would be complete without devoting some time to his hugelypopular role on The Apprentice, the BBC’s enormously popular reality TV show which first aired on BBC 2 back in February 2005. As the imposing bars of Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights begin to play, viewers get a feel for the intimidating and adversarial structure of the show. So just how does the show work? Before the series begins, open auditions are held across the country and of the thousands who apply they are eventually whittled down to between 14 and 16 hopefuls who will take part in the show. In the first episode the candidates are split into two groups and the games commence! Each week the teams are set a business focused task, with a different project manager selected every week to lead the team towards the glory of victory or the despair of failure and the threat of being fired in the boardroom. Previous seasons of the show have seen prospective apprentices placed in two teams and each week they battle against each other in a series of entrepreneurial challenges, ultimately vying to be crowned Lord Sugar’s Apprentice. However, for the current series (seven) Lord Sugar is offering contestants the chance to win £250,000 cash investment in a business venture but while the prize may have changed the rules of engagement have not. Backstabbing, bitchiness and mind bogglingly bizarre behaviour from the contestants are a regular feature in each episode. This sounds like a tried and tested reality format but it actually makes for compelling viewing. Not least due to the fact that Lord Sugar frequently looks as though he might combust from the exertion of having to explain the blindingly obvious to another hapless wannabe business mogul. Of course, the show isn’t just about the inter-personal dynamics of the group (although what a tangled web they do weave!) and many of the challenges really do test the limits of the candidates’ business acumen (or lack thereof). In fact, the PR blurb for the show is bang on the money; it really is ‘the job interview from hell’ – but that just means telly heaven for viewers!

Of course, there is much more to Alan Sugar than the celebrity world of fast cars (he has a Rolls Royce Phantom) and famous friends (he counts Philip Green and Richard Branson among his celebrity chums) and if one was to ask, “what’s in a name?” then the prefix of “Lord” to Alan Sugar’s moniker suggests that the answer is: quite a lot! In fact, after being knighted in 2000 for his services to industry (hence the nickname ‘Suralan’) Sugar was later awarded a peerage in 2009 by then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown as part of a new enterprise role in the Government. So these days, it’s Lord Sugar to you! Part of the role has been to advise civil servants with little practical business experience on how best to help small businesses. At the time, Lord Sugar remarked that, “All I can do is advise those in charge of making policy what’s right and wrong. They need someone who has been there and worn the Tshirt several times. With all due respect… they [the civil service] are what they are, they are civil servants and they have never actually been in business. You have got to have someone there to guide them in the right direction.” With the wealth of experience (and wealth literally) that Lord Sugar has accumulated over the years, he was an obvious choice for the position – particularly due to the fact that he has been a committed Labour supporter and Party donor over the years.

Sugar is not without his share of political controversy, and in 2007 he came under fire for alleged sexism when he gave a female candidate on The Apprentice the third degree over how she intended to organise her childcare arrangements if she was hired; as a result the TUC and the Equal Opportunities Commission both filed complaints against Lord Sugar. However, he weathered the media storm and emerged the other side for the next (hugely popular) series of the show.

Love him or loathe him (and frankly, it’s doubtful that he would care if it was the latter) Lord Sugar is a force to be reckoned with. It remains to be seen how this year’s crop of hopeful contestants on The Apprentice will perform under his steely gaze, but one thing we can be sure of is that as much as each contestant is praying to go the distance the viewing public will be awaiting that famous catchphrase with bated breath – You’re Fired!