Sir Alan Sugar by Charlie Burden

Murdoch – and again he was right.
    However, ultimately the various parts all came together and Sky was ready for launch. With Murdoch’s newspapers regularly promoting the new service, demand began to pick up. ‘People are driving us barmy wanting the dishes,’ said Sugar. Here, his son Daniel gave an early indication that he had inherited his father’s eye for a deal when he booked a hall in Essex on the night that Sky televised the Mike Tyson versus Frank Bruno fight and charged people £ 30 apiece to watch the fight and eat a meal. It turned out to be a nice little earner for Daniel, who was then just 18.
    Meanwhile, Sky’s rivals BSB struggled from embarrassment to disaster and back again. Sugar watchedthis as a particularly interested party because he had nearly got involved with them a few years previously. He could afford a smile when he realised that he had once again been proved right. He noted, though, with disdain that, despite BSB’s woes, the City did not treat them with the same paranoia they had sometimes exhibited towards Amstrad. He joked that he was going to commission a sculptor to build a huge cement hand giving the famous two-finger salute. He would then, he quipped, get it placed right in the middle of the City. No Christmas card for the City analysts that year, then.
    But what was the legacy of his involvement with Murdoch for Sugar himself? He said he suspected that, within two years of Sky’s launch, Murdoch would have forgotten all about him. But Murdoch was more impressed with Sugar than that. ‘I call him once or twice a month to see how things are going – to keep in touch and get his opinion on the marketplace,’ he said after the launch of Sky had been and gone. Murdoch was very impressed with Sugar, and there was no evidence he considered him a bighead. Instead, he was gushing with praise. ‘He’s very entrepreneurial, a tremendous worker. In negotiations, he’s a master of detail. I found he came to the point, to the bottom line very quickly. He’s been very straight with me – totally. He’s kept his word on everything.’
    Might they work together again? ‘I’d be surprised if there aren’t other things we do with him,’ Murdoch saidwith a smile. It would prove to be a very big deal when Murdoch’s words eventually came true. Before then, there was much water to pass under the bridge – and not all of it was to be happy.
    Every business and every businessperson goes through a rough patch. From the world’s richest men to the modest small-business owner, everybody has ups and downs. However, it is at times such as these that the men get separated from the boys. There are those who respond defensively and there are those who react well, and Sugar belongs firmly in the second camp. The late 1980s became, in many ways, a bad time indeed for Amstrad, which lost £ 114 million in sales because it did not have the products to meet the demand. Its foreign subsidiaries began to perform less than ideally, and its share value collapsed. Dark times for his company, but Sugar did what every successful person does at such times: he analysed what had gone wrong and worked out what could be done about it. This may sound an obvious response to make, but the business world is full of people who were too busy stroking their own egos to have found their way out of trouble.
    So you can imagine the surprise of the City analysts when they turned up at Amstrad’s headquarters in Brentwood in February 1999 to find Sugar neither defensive nor in denial about his company’s plight. Amstrad and the City had never enjoyed a close relationship, so, when the chips were down for the former,many of the latter would have been overjoyed at the chance to rub it in. Their defiance will not have been dampened by the fact that rail delays meant their journey out to Essex had been less than straightforward.
    Sugar showed them in and went about explaining why pretax profits for the six months to the end of