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Staff post about: Alan Sugar Become an Author

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The term entrepreneur is being usedby almost everyone these days to describe themselves, but it really should be used to describe someone else. An entrepreneur, by definition, is a person that starts a business from the ground up and takes responsibility for its failure or its success. Sugar is definitely an entrepreneur and has been since his youth. However, he would never describe himself as this.

Sugar's views on businesses are controversial, because of his belief that entrepreneurs are born and not made. However, he does say, "I didn't leap out of bed one day and suddenly decide 'right I'm going to start my business,' I worked for several years first and gained expertise in a trade."

This belief that every great business people have to learn the in and outs of the business they wanted to create is held strongly by Sugar. During a speaking engagement, Sugar told his audience, “I can tell you where every screw, nut and bolt is in my company. I know everything [in my business].”

Even though his tough, tell it like it is attitude has given Sugar a bad name for his management style, it has worked for him. Through all the lessons he learned as a teenage business person, he did create unique ways of doing things. For example, during the rise of Amstrad, many other businesses would make large orders from suppliers for one month and then negotiate a lower price for the next month, as well as each month after that.

Sugar thought this was a bad way to get a reduced price from suppliers. Instead, he would make one large order, for like 600,000 units to be delivered at 50,000 units per month for twelve months, guaranteeing a large order each month to the supplier. Before he would actually order the components, he would negotiate a lower price from the beginning. This saved him money from the start, instead of at the end.

Where other companies continued to getting lower prices each month until they reached the best price, Sugar got the best price from the beginning and over the course of each month.

These creative ideas seemed to come naturally to Sugar. His advice to others would come from the way he approached business, like saying, “you've either got a good idea or you haven't, “don't expect handouts” or “start small and with your own money.”

The one highlight that every aspiring entrepreneur can take from the lessons Sir Alan Sugar has learned throughout is business life can be summed up in what he said when speaking to a group of business people at British Business Library and IP Center, “Learn from your mistakes, only work with people who share your vision and culture and most importantly, focus on your customer.”

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