![]() ![]() ![]() Then got on and did them.Īfter leaving school and doing a short stint of statistical work with the Government, he moved into retail. Whether he was making and selling ginger beer, becoming a photographer at bar mitzvahs, or printing and selling his own school magazine, Sugar just seemed to see ways to do things that would make money. His was an extraordinary set of skills that he built upon when young. “Many times I’d have to play down the success of my business activities because my father could not believe that someone so young could make so much money.” His dad’s caution highlights something else in Sugar. “It was a strange attitude,” he confides. Again, he learned the lesson – always be aware that the competition is close behind.Īll the while, Alan’s dad would shake his head at his money-making schemes. When older boys in the flats found out what he was doing, they took over and pushed him out. Seeing builders resurfacing the roads, digging up and disposing of the tar-soaked wooden blocks the road was laid on, he organised a group of friends to chop them up so he could sell them as firelighters. Sugar gives numerous accounts of identifying opportunities. Such a story reveals something else: he had a strong sense of right and wrong and was willing to fight his corner even then. “The rag and bone man slung two more shillings at me and told me to clear off,” he says. He went back, confronted him and demanded the proper price. When he discovered he had been “legged over” by the rag and bone man another side of the 11-year-old’s personality came. He took them to a rag and bone man who told him it was rubbish and paid him half a crown (12 and a half pence in modern money). Seeing someone throwing away sacks of material, he asked if he could have them. She only relaxed after their assurances that they were amused by him. When his mum came home and he showed her the cake, she immediately felt embarrassed at his asking neighbours for the ingredients. One tells us that he had a sense of practicality, confidence and unabashedness.Īt age 11, the story goes, he decided to make his mother a cake and asked his neighbours for the ingredients. ![]() He tells a series of stories which highlight how he thought. The young Alan had already found a passion for making money. It’s not true that he hid away at home, however. In his teens he went into his shell, virtually living the life of a recluse, lacking in confidence with others. It was an innocent time that was to change when he went to Brook House Comprehensive and encountered racism for the first time. With rose-tinted joy he recalls his early days at his first school, Northwold Primary. Life was hard: “My parents did their best, but not being able to have what I wanted made me determined to do something for myself – to be self-sufficient.” His father, a clothes factory tailor, would occasionally alter clothes to earn a few extra pennies. Nothing of this is suggested by his early life in a Clapton council flat during the late 1940s and ‘50s. Lord Sugar’s success comes from an extraordinary combination of inspiration about what the market wants, flexibility to the customer’s needs, inventiveness (it was Sugar who came up with the idea of that great 1980s icon, the tower stereo system, and he was an early entrant into the home PC market), gut instinct, insight into people and an ability to learn from mistakes. “At the numerous talks I give around the country these days… there’ll be a Q and A session and it never fails to annoy me when somebody stands up and says ‘Hello, I’m an entrepreneur…’ I refer to my entrepreneurial spirit as I have been branded an entrepreneur so many times by so many people that I feel I’ve earned the right,” he say. Renowned for his irascibility, he even has trouble with the word entrepreneur. In the same way, you’ve either got entrepreneurial spirit, or you haven’t,” Lord Sugar says, unequivocally. Stick me in a room with a piano teacher for a year and maybe I’ll end up being able to give you a rendition of ‘Roll Out The Barrel’, but would I ever be a concert pianist playing at The Royal Albert Hall? Not in a million years. “Entrepreneurial spirit is something you are born with, just like a concert pianist’s talent. Alan Sugar is convinced that entrepreneurs are born and not made. ![]()
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