What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (24 page)

We had created a brand name for products such as amplifiers, tuners and speakers, but I could see that there was a great market for peripheral items such as headphones and microphones. I was encouraged to move into this area by Nick Lightowler at Comet, a high-level buyer in the hi-fi division. Nick and I were roughly the same age and he liked my cavalier approach. He also admired the way I'd screwed his Japanese suppliers by taking a chunk of the low-cost amplifier and tuner markets away from them. Our heavy advertising in the hi-fi magazines fed straight into the Comet business model. Customers would see our adverts, see that Comet was the cheapest seller and buy what they wanted from them. We became a big supplier to Comet in the hi-fi sector.

Nick would call me and say, 'You know, if only we could get hold of headphones that had two knobs and three bells and five whistles, that sold for nine pounds ninety-five - they'd be a massive hit.'

I owe a lot of my success to the interactive relationship with Nick. He saw merit in advising me of what he wanted, because I could pull it off quickly. This type of feedback was manna from heaven to me. I would get in touch with Imai and ask him to send me details of headphones. In a short space of time, not only could I come up with the exact specification Nick wanted for PS9.95 retail, but a whole range of headphones starting from PS5.95 up to PS15.95.

The speed at which Imai and I worked was incredible. Bear in mind that there was no email, no DHL, no FedEx or UPS in those days. We are talking 1973-4 - samples had to be sent by airfreight, letters had to go by express airmail. There was no fax machine, so you couldn't send pictures instantly. And even if you did take a picture, you'd have to wait for it to be developed before you could airmail it.

I made up a range of headphones with our brand, allowing Mr Imai to work on the artwork for the boxes. They were an absolute smash hit when they got to the UK. They sold really well at Comet, as well as at G. W. Smith, Laskys, Henry's Radio and all the other companies offering discount hi-fi equipment. This peripheral business - where I imported goods fully assembled and ready for sale - was looking quite good.

I added a range of magnetic cartridges to our product line, a cartridge being the small device fitted at the end of the arm of a record-player which contained the stylus that picked up the music from the grooves in a vinyl record. Shure and Goldring were the big brand names for cartridges in those days. These small lumps of plastic with diamond styli sold for a load of money and looked overpriced to me. It was all one-upmanship, snobbery and hype. Using Shomei, I found a maker in Japan, and we put together a range of three cartridges that I think, to be honest, were all the same but were different colours. They had different model numbers and different types of stylus, such as elliptical. According to the gurus in the hi-fi magazines, elliptical styli were the best, so I simply asked Shomei for elliptical and got them.

The telex became my business tool and I'd bang out messages to Shomei all day long, going home at seven or eight at night and getting into work early in the morning to see the replies back from Japan. Because they were eight hours ahead of us, there was only a short period of overlap during which one could get direct answers from them. By about ten thirty in the morning (UK time), you'd lost them; they'd gone.

You may recall that earlier I mentioned a gangly looking fellow called Peter Jones who used to work for the company East West. This chap realised that young Alan had actually got a better business now than his old bosses had. He suggested he should come and work for me, as he was so well connected in the industry. What a turn of events - Peter Jones, someone who used to take the piss out of me as I was humping cartons from the loading bay of East West, now asking me for a job. I naively believed that he
was
well connected and engaged him as a salesman. In hindsight, I suspect he saw it as an opportunity to be more than just a sales employee - maybe he'd end up as one of the bosses or a part-owner. Why he thought this, I don't know - I can only imagine he had witnessed me as a young hustler becoming quite successful, and thought that if this bloke could do it, so could he.

One day, he told me that he'd got himself a free two-week trip to Japan, courtesy of his old employer at East West. By now, I couldn't have cared less if he was going to spend two weeks or two years in Japan. The guy had turned out to be totally useless. I remember discussing him with Gulu when I bumped into him at a trade exhibition. Gulu had followed my career and was already starting to develop his 'I started Alan Sugar off myth. He was singing my praises to everybody walking past. 'Do you know him? Do you see this man, Alan Sugar? He started with me. I used to give him stuff to sell, and now look - he's making all this hi-fi now and it's very good,' and so on.

Gulu asked me how I was getting on with Peter Jones. I remember joking
that Peter, whom I referred to as Rigor Mortis, had taken his kid to Madame Tussauds and was told by the security man to keep moving, as he was being mistaken for one of the dummies. Gulu loves a good joke. He laughed, but in truth I think that summed up the pale, gaunt Peter Jones.

Before going off on his jolly to Japan, Peter asked me if it would be okay for him to pop in and see Mr Imai, as a representative of Amstrad, while he was there. I thought there was nothing to lose with this exercise and agreed. When he finally got back, he told me he'd placed an order for 20,000 toggle switches!

'Why?' I asked in disbelief.

He said that he'd been treated so nicely by Mr Imai that he just
had to
place an order. I could not understand this complete lunacy. First of all, he knew nothing about the component side of the business or whether we even needed these parts, and secondly, he had no authority whatsoever to place orders and commit me to 20,000 toggle switches. Considering we used four per unit, this meant I'd have to make 5,000 units to eat them up.

I went crazy, telling him I couldn't understand what he thought he was doing, slinging his weight around without any consultation, without any phone call or telex message. The man was a liability and was bringing nothing at all to the party. I think he got the message and left the company.

*

Although business was booming, like the rest of Britain, we were to be dogged by the three-day week between January and March 1974, a consequence of the miners' strike. To nutshell it, all companies could use electricity only three days a week. Of course, we couldn't operate without electricity. The authorities didn't actually cut off the supply, but if your factory or shop was seen to have the lights on on the prohibited days, there were significant fines and possible jail sentences. It was taken seriously and companies had to abide by the rules. It was a nightmare - I was unable to fulfil orders.

We came up with the idea of buying twelve-volt soldering irons - powered by car batteries - for the girls on the production line, so they could still assemble PCBs. However, as the end-of-line testing could only be done using mains power, we were stumped. That was until an enterprising person in Holland advertised generators in the
Evening Standard.
Stan Randall and George Shrubsole did a quick calculation of how much power we would need, which enabled me to enquire about buying a second-hand generator from Holland. With a bit of swift action at the bank, I sent the money to the Dutch company, and a few days later this monster turned up on a flatbed lorry.

With some difficulty, it was manoeuvred into the goods lift and offloaded
on to the factory floor. When we fired it up, the bloody thing made such a racket, it nearly deafened everyone. It was not practical - the staff couldn't work in such an environment.

The next day I got hold of my builder. We punched a hole in the wall for the exhaust pipe, fitted a muffler and built a complete wall around the generator, using two layers of plasterboard spaced four inches apart, with fibreglass wadding in the gap for soundproofing. This worked to a certain extent, but as the floor was concrete, the generator vibrated like mad and the noise was still unacceptable. Finally, we found some rubber mounts that took away the vibration, and we ended up with an acceptable electricity supply with the minimum of noise.

One of our employees was not a happy camper. He thought this three-day week meant he could look forward to two days off per week for the duration, so this idiot secretly went to the trouble of filling up a gallon bottle with water and poured it into the fuel tank. When it came to starting the generator up, the diesel, being lighter than water, rose to the top of the tank and the machine wouldn't start.

We had no idea what was wrong, but after a bit of troubleshooting by George Shrubsole and myself, we did the obvious to see if the fuel was getting through. On draining the tank a little, we were shocked to see that water was coming out - we couldn't understand it. We drained the water from the tank and finally the generator kicked into life, but we'd lost a whole morning of production.

Angry at this obvious sabotage, I went on to the production floor and started ranting, demanding to know who had done such a stupid thing. No one owned up there and then, but, typical of the workplace, the message got back that it was this particular idiot. The guy was a manual worker of quite low intelligence and it was clear that he hadn't thought up this prank himself, but was goaded into it by others. In the end, you kind of felt sorry for him. I made it clear that the people who'd put him up to this had been noted. There were a few red faces.

*

There was another machine that fascinated me around that time. It was situated next to Ann's hospital bed in Barking Hospital. She was pregnant with our third child and at the first sign of an ache or twinge, Rita suggested we ring for an ambulance. As an experienced mother by now, Ann was well up for the delivery and just wanted to get it all over with as quickly as possible and move on.

Alas, this was not to be. The baby would not pop out. There was no medical problem at all; it was just a false alarm. However, the hospital would not let her check out, so she spent the next three days doing her nut in this place.

The family and I came to see her at visiting times. Not being the greatest conversationalist on earth and having said the usual 'How are you?' and gone over how fed up Ann was, the remainder of visiting time saw me poring over the machine they had linked to her, trying to see how it worked. Apparently, it was pumping some stuff into her to induce the new baby. Ann was very frustrated. She just wanted it over with and vented her anger on me. 'You're more interested in that bloody machine than in me!'

We often laugh about that moment, and it reminds me to put the record straight about something. Ann is perceived by the rest of the world to be this quiet, dignified, kind and shy lady. That is 100 per cent correct - except when it comes to me! Trust me, she ain't that shy and quiet. As I tell people, she knows how to open her mouth to me all right!

One of the days I visited Ann, her grandfather Izzy wanted to come along. I picked him up and on the drive to the hospital, he said to me, 'I've changed my name, Al.' He used to call me Al.

'What are you taking about?' I said.

'Yeah, my name is now Ian Taylor.'

'Ian Taylor? What are you on about?'

'Well,' Izzy said, 'all the others have changed their name to Taylor, so I thought I should.'

'What others?'

You know, Jack and Harry.' He was referring to his sons.

I'll stop here for a while and explain the rationale behind name-changing. When Jews came to England with names like Schneider, they felt it would be a good idea to change them to something a bit more anglicised. They didn't want their names to stick out like a sore thumb when applying for a job or a council flat, as there was a lot of anti-Semitism in the days of Jewish immigration. Moreover, in the workplace, they felt more comfortable with their anglicised surnames.

In the case of Izzy Schneider, his sons changed their surname to Taylor. Schneider in Yiddish, I was told, means 'tailor', but there are conflicting stories, as I'm also told it means 'cabinet maker' or 'woodworker'. Anyway, who cares? They changed their name to Taylor.

Now you have the background, I can explain why this was so funny. You see, Izzy's sons had changed their names
forty years earlier,
when they were
about eighteen and Izzy was about forty-two. And here he was - forty years on, at the grand old age of eighty-two - announcing that he was now Ian Taylor. It was hilarious. I could not stop laughing. Actually, I think he got a bit angry at me.

I'm convinced to this day that it wasn't the machine that induced Ann into labour - it was me telling her this story at her bedside, with Ian beside me. She was biting her lip trying to hold back the laughter, not wishing to upset her granddad.

I went home that night after visiting and, for some reason, Ian stayed at my house - I think Rita and Johnnie had taken the boys to theirs. At four in the morning, on 10 March 1974, Ann rang me from the hospital to say that we'd had a girl. Great news.

In those days there were no ultrasound scans to let you know the sex of the unborn child, so predictions were all down to old wives' tales, with everyone putting in their two-penn'orth. 'It's laying in the front - it's a boy. It's laying high - it's a girl. Your bum is much bigger than when you had the first two - it's a girl,' and so on. During the pregnancy, Daphne, who I called a ringer, would say with absolute authority, Ann is having a boy.' Then, four weeks later, she'd forget she said that and come out with, 'It's going to be a girl.' Finally, when the baby arrived, she exclaimed, 'There you are - I told you I was right.' That's what a ringer is.