Sir Alan Sugar Read Online Free PDF

determination’. Naturally, the visit prompted headlines and Sugar’s comments give an insight into how he looks back on his own childhood, and how he wants the best for the children of Hackney, where he took his first steps. He told reporters afterwards, ‘I started out in business in Hackney as a kid and earned a living there as a kid, doing things that the youngsters of Hackney can do here today. I want to burn the spirit ofentrepreneurship into them not to lecture them, but actually show them that business can be fun and that the rewards of hard work and common sense can be even more fun.’
    After speaking to the reporters, Sugar also granted a then rare interview to BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme. The sentiments he outlined there give an insight into how he sees the making of all entrepreneurs, including, of course, himself. ‘You cannot make someone into an entrepreneur, just like you can’t make someone a pop singer or an artist,’ he said. ‘It has to be in-built in you; it’s a kind of a nose for things, a smell for things, and then an instinct to do it and a focus.’ Interestingly, within years of his making these statements, reality television was indeed trying to ‘make’ pop stars and entrepreneurs right in front of our very eyes. However, Sugar’s own slice of the reality television cake was about polishing, rather than making, businesspeople.
    Let us return once more to his own childhood. Sugar insists that his love of business started at a very early age. ‘I’ve been in business since I was a 12-year-old schoolkid, really,’ he said. ‘If there was an opportunity and a demand, I’d be there.’ And, in common with all those who rise to the heights of entrepreneurial brilliance, Sugar found opportunities and demands wherever he looked, even back then. At the tender age of 11, he photographed other children and sold the resulting prints to their grandparents. As we’ve seen, he also made his own gingerbeer and sold it to thirsty kids. Sugar went on to clean cars, a more traditional childhood enterprise but one that he went about with the trademark Sugar zeal. Later in life, rather than clean cars, he would be driven round in them, including an exclusive Rolls-Royce Phantom. Returning to the photographic sphere, he flogged repackaged black-and -white film and became something of a professional photographer. He would approach grandparents and offer to photograph their grandchildren for them. He would proudly present them with the finished black- and-white snaps, with ‘Alan Sugar, photographer’ neatly typed on the back. He had found a fertile ground for sales; offering to photograph grandchildren for half a crown, he found the grandparents’ answer was always ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ They could never have enough pictures of their grandchildren.’
    He was also a paperboy for a while, a job that allowed him to buy himself that copy of the Beano every week if that was what he wanted. By the time he reached the age of 12, the budding businessman would rise at the early hour of 6am to boil beetroot for the local greengrocer. ‘It wasn’t a case of deciding to do that: it was quite common for people who lived in my council block to have a Saturday job, a holiday job, a paper round or whatever,’ he said, keen to play down the significance of the beetroot days. ‘It was necessary – if you wanted your own pocket money you had to go and get it yourself.’ Another job he took was at a local department store.There, his natural brilliance as a salesman came to the fore. He was so good at selling footwear to the customers that he was offered the chance to promote himself from a Saturday job to a full-time job. It wasn’t just his employers who noted his salesman’s tack. Sugar also was described by his headmaster as someone who could sell anything to anyone. He himself had fallen for