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Staff post about: Alan Sugar Become an Author

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In 2000, Sugar was knighted by the Queen for his service to the business community. In June 2009, he was given a peerage by Gordon Brown, Britain's Prime Minister. Sugar was then given the title, Baron Sugar of Clapton and a seat in the House of Lords.

Many critics, including the anti-bullying charity Kidscape, have said Sugar has popularized bullying by the way he treats the contestants on the British version of The Apprentice. He has been called a bad management model, a bully, narrow-minded and out of touch. However, he has made millions and became a billionaire along the way. Many wonder how he did it.

Salesmanship: Selling has been a part of Sugar's life since before he was a teenager. Working hard to get what you want or need, made him create ways to make money. Sugar said he never understood where his entrepreneurial spirit came from, but that is what made him the person he is today. He would recognize a market, find a better way of selling to that market and then find a way to make money from that market.

Negotiate: Negotiate everything was Sugar's motto. Whether it is a $30 million dollar property or a Big Mac at a local McDonalds, he thought that everything was negotiable. He negotiated the best price for the parts required to build his products to the real estate he sold to others. “There is only room for one big mouth in my organization, and that is me,” Sugar once said. He prided himself on being able to negotiate the best price for anything.

Innovation: One thing Sugar always said, throughout his interviews and his autobiography, was that people steal ideas from each other and that it was even worse in business. You always have to be innovating and improving your products and ideas. You can take a large part of the market share at first, but if you don't improve your products after the newness wears off, there will be someone else that does.

Instinct: Recognize what will become popular and then run with it. This philosophy of Sugar's did not always work. Like the time he predicted that the iPad was only a fad and would be “dead, finished, gone and kaput.” Not every idea Sugar had would succeed, but he the instincts he did have, made him a billionaire.

High-Market: Sugar realized that selling high-ticket items was just as easy as selling cheaper products. Once he realized this, he would use price points to generate a buzz about his new products. This meant that he would announce a cheaper product, but when it came time to release the product, he had an upgrade that would make him a bigger profit.

Sugar would always be selling something. From the early years where he boiled beetroot to sell from a stand at the local greengrocer to the electronics he would sell out of his van and finally the building of a multimillion dollar electronics manufacturing company, Sugar knew that selling was what he was born to do.

Today, Sugar hosts a popular reality television show, has sold his electronics company for more than $250 million, owned a professional sports team and oversees the operation of several other corporations. He has summed up his success with a statement he made in 2009 on The Apprentice, “If you take care of your character, your reputation will take care of itself.”

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