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Could Lord Alan Sugar do it all again today starting off on a shoe string?

Anyone that has read the history of Amstrad will comprehend the genius of the man behind Amstrad’s meteoric rise and his rags to riches story. Having thoroughly enjoyed Alan Sugar's autobiography "What you see is what you get", it is hard not to be in awe and be inspired by his story, salesmanship, persistence, understanding of failure and the other simple business practices he employed to obtain success in any of his business ventures. However, being a young businessperson myself in this tough economic climate, one has to ask could a young Alan Sugar starting off today be able to become such a success? First and foremost, nearly all sectors today are dominated by enormous corporations, and it is virtually impossible to get a foothold in any of them unless you have substantial capital behind you, not to mention the industry expertise that would also be required. I would love to see how an entrepreneur of previous generations including Lord Sugar would fare in the business world today starting with a shoe-string budget, no reputation and no contacts. Whilst Lord Sugar was the vanguard of early consumer electronics, in my humble opinion, I believe Lord Sugar would find it very difficult to achieve the riches and success in today’s business climate like he did the 70s,80s,90s,00s. For a start I think it is fair to see given the advancement in technology a new Amstrad could not compete in the consumer electronics industry today would not be making the next ipad, 3d TV etc because of the expertise, research and development, competition and tight margins and ultimately investment required to make these consumer products. Even Lord Sugar admits himself a lot of Amstrad’s consumer products contained simple components such as transistors, pcbs etc and Amstrad found it tough to compete as the other companies advanced through R & D in the late 80s. I think it is fair to say that it is inconceivable that a 2011 startup Amstrad could compete with the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Philips etc given the aforementioned reasons (especially given the fact that in the 80s Amstrad controlled over 30% of the European PC market and they struggled to keep up then). Does anyone disagree with this point? If so please provide reasoning? Furthermore, if an up and coming Alan Sugar could not compete in the consumer electronic industry today, what industry could he make his fortune in today (given the fact that most industries are already saturated with massive conglomerates)? I know Lord Sugar has other business interests today but these business ventures are a direct consequence of the success of the Amstrad consumer electronics business. If you are reading BBC, I would love to see a tv show whereby these entrepreneurs e.g. Richard Branson, Alan Sugar, Peter Jones etc setup up a new company in any industry of their choice and were given 10,000 GBP and a year to make the company at least 1,000,000 GBP net profit. The stipulations would be that the entrepreneur's new company could have no brand association with any of the entrepreneur current business interests (it can be an industry they are currently involved in, but every cost, contact, investment and sale would have to be accounted for) and the entrepreneur would have to remain anonymous or use an alias name. Furthermore, they could not use any of their current business contacts and money, they have to do it all from scratch. The results would be highly interesting and it would be a fantastic watch. Would anyone else like to see the programme "From Entrepreneur to Fledgling Startup"? It is known that BSKYB now owns Amstrad entirely, but for the purpose of this question, it is proposed that an up and coming Alan Sugar would use the Amstrad name.

Public Comments

1. Likely, yes.