IF YOU CAN MAKE BIN LIDS, YOU CAN MAKE SATELLITE DISHES!

THE STORY of Alan Sugar’s famous satellite dishes is one of my favourites.

The phone had apparently rung in Alan’s offices one day and his secretary had said: ‘I’ve got Rupert Murdoch on the phone.’

Alan replied: ‘ I suppose he’s somebody who says he went to school with me?’

‘Actually, no,’ Frances said. ‘He’s the man who owns The Times and the Sunday Times and the News of the World.’

When Alan is focused on something there is no escape, but why should he care about Rupert Murdoch, who’d never crossed his radar? Until then, Murdoch didn’t matter to him. But that was about to change.

So he went to see Murdoch, who told him about his plans to launch Sky Television, which was going to beam a footprint all over Europe.

‘What’s that got to do with me?’ Alan asks.

‘Well, you’re rated as the best man at mass-market electronics so I want you to make the dishes and the system units that will receive my signal and squirt it into people’s television sets.’ ‘How many would you want?’ ‘Uh, I don’t know, let’s say 100,000 pieces per month from about March?’ (It is now September 1989.)

Alan goes back to the office and speaks to Bob Watkins, his long-time technical director, who is just about recovering from a near-nervous breakdown from whatever the last project was.

‘Bob,’ says Alan, ‘we’re in the satellite business.’ ‘But,’ says Bob, ‘we don’t know anything about it.’

Alan brushes this off. ‘That doesn’t matter. We’ll find out about it.’

When Amstrad first got into the PC market, Alan and Bob’s team took the lid off a couple of PCs and peered into the back, only to discover there was nothing there — a few boards and electronic bits and the rest was empty. It was a load of hokum: make it big and charge a bigger price was the attitude.

Same thing when Alan got into the satellite business.

Alan and Bob got in the people who made the dishes (mainly for embassies and government installations), and asked them to quote for a small dish, about 3ft wide.

The experts, like all experts, made a serious face and said it was going to be very expensive: there was the curvature of the steel to be taken into account, the delicacy of the component parts, yadda yadda yadda. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Alan. ‘How much?’ ‘Somewhere in the region of £75,’ came the reply.

So, they were thrown out and Alan said: ‘Bob, get in the people who make dustbin lids. They’re the same size. What’s the difference?’

They came in, and were also sent on their way. Finally, the contract went to a firm who made hubcaps for cars: you get a big piece of metal, and a big press comes down and boom! There’s your dish.

There is a reason this man was a multimillionaire at the age of 33.