What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (68 page)

I could see problems on the horizon. Why on earth would you set up a line of business for fax machines when, in fact, the market was already dwindling? Not only that, every Tom, Dick and Harry in Hong Kong and China was now making a cheap fax machine. If anything, he should have decided to get
out
of that business, not try to expand it. Similarly, in the satellite market, he employed some product manager who decided to expand the range beyond that of the products we were shipping to BSkyB. They came up with a new series of specialised satellite receivers - complex and up-market models, none of which had a hope in hell of succeeding. And in the computer market, he was talking of relaunching a whole range of new models. Anyone could see this was like shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted.

Through all this, I had to button my lip. If I'd started to impose any pressure and suppress any of these ideas, it would have been seen as me trying to take back control of the company and undermine Rogers. If ever the expression 'watching your mother-in-law drive your brand-new Ferrari off a cliff' was appropriate, it was now. During this time, I noted that people such as Hyams and Saward were disregarding me and my comments. They were simply in awe of all this LoB and BU jargon floating around the company.

One of Rogers' ideas was to try to introduce inkjet printing into Amstrad, a very advanced technology in which we had no experience whatsoever. Rogers had heard about a company owned by IBM, located in Stockholm, which was in financial difficulties - so much so that IBM wanted to shut it down. This company had some technology in the art of making inkjet heads, the most important part of any printer. Rogers put it to me that this was a similar deal to Dancall and he wanted to acquire the assets of this company from IBM. I showed a willing interest, as it sounded good on paper.

We hired a jet and Rogers, Saward and I flew to this factory in Stockholm. By then, Rogers had employed an ex-colleague of his from Philips called Jacob van Houdt, who was the nearest thing I'd seen to Stan Randall - he bunnied off of scratch, mixing his fast-talking with loads of technical jargon, so it really sounded like he knew what he was talking about. Rogers felt that employing him was going to be useful from a technology point of view, particularly in the development of new products. Van Houdt joined us on the visit to Sweden.

In the same way that I had walked around the Dancall factory, I walked
around this Swedish plant. It was a gigantic place and only part of it was allocated to inkjet head development and production. They were unable to demonstrate any of these inkjet heads and things were further complicated by the fact that the intellectual property rights for the technology actually belonged to a small development company in Cambridge who had licensed the rights to this IBM factory. I was not happy with what I saw - it was a massive can of worms - but Rogers was insistent that we buy this business and let Jacob run it.

We returned to London and Rogers and Saward pursued their investigation into this project. A while later, I asked to be brought up to speed with their evaluation, but Saward told me dismissively that I shouldn't interfere - the process was still ongoing and we had to deal with it professionally, as instructed by Rogers.

Ian had really caught the business bug, but his involvement in what he saw as a megadeal was distracting him from his real expertise on the technology side. He was starting to talk about profit and loss forecasts and product sales - for a product that hadn't even started in production and which, in any case, was merely a
component
to be used within a printer. It wasn't even a finished product! I remember telling Ian to calm down a little and concentrate on the electronics and give up trying to be the businessman. I didn't want to suppress his enthusiasm, but I wanted to clarify a few simple things with him. I asked, 'What is the factory here? Where is it? Define it. Is it this massive shed that you think we're going to buy or take over? Which are the employees assigned to the inkjet department and how are we going to section them off from the other five hundred people working at this place?' Of course, he hadn't thought any of this through and had no answers. But then neither had Rogers.

At the end of their deliberations, Rogers recommended to me that we spend PS10m acquiring this asset and put Jacob in charge. I told him that if he was asking
me
to make the decision, the answer was no. It was a wise decision. Eventually, the Swedish company went into liquidation and no one bought the technology, which turned out to be total garbage compared to that being developed by Hewlett-Packard and other Japanese companies.

Meanwhile, at newly acquired Viglen, Rogers would attend board meetings with Hyams, who was enjoying it tremendously. No longer was he going to be bored dealing with contracts, licensing and other minor litigation matters - he now saw himself as a senior executive, making decisions. Be under no illusions, David Hyams was very intelligent and a good lawyer. The problem was, he didn't want to do lawyering any more.

Rogers and Samson were also regularly attending Betacom board meetings. The management there, especially the accountant, were able to wind Rogers around their little fingers. The managing director, Norman Becker, and his finance director had this bee in their bonnet that even though Amstrad owned 66 per cent of Betacom, Betacom was still a separate public company and they had to ensure it was not influenced by the 'big, bad wolf Alan Sugar. I could imagine this being Becker's big boast down the pub - how
he
was running this business and how Alan Sugar couldn't do anything about it.

My son Simon had moved to Betacom, as it was the only company in the group that was still involved in consumer electronics. Simon had some very good contacts in supermarkets and mail-order companies to whom he'd sold loads of TVs in the past. He tried to implement the sale of TVs through Betacom, to increase their turnover. It was a no-brainer - a 15-20 per cent margin could be made and selling TVs at PS80-90 trade price would dwarf the turnover of their stupidly priced PS3-4 telephones. However, this was a 'not invented here' idea as far as Becker was concerned. Simon told me that at a board meeting, with Samson and Rogers in attendance, Becker put forward some argument about how they would not be able to handle the after-sales service returns and so Simon's idea was buried.

A lot of their business was dealing with mail-order companies, where up to 25 per cent of what they sold came back by way of returns. A subsequent investigation found that information on the value of the returns inventory sitting in the warehouse was totally flawed. Rogers had not recognised this and, with respect, neither had Jeoff Samson, yet they approved bonuses payable to the finance director, as well as the execution of share options to both him and Becker - all based on profits which were overstated. The returned inventory should have been written down to a realisable value. The finance director resigned and left the company shortly after he got his share options and bonuses.

*

During this period, I was still interested in new technology and ideas. Apple were making noises about a new product they named 'Newton' - a small, flat device with an LCD screen. Using a stylus, you could write on the screen and operate all the functions, which included a simple word processor and an electronic address book. We got wind of this and in 1993 quickly initiated our own version, known as the PenPad. It was great device which incorporated handwriting recognition and had a full contact and diary section. It was real
leading-edge technology and I was rather excited about it, having lived through the recent disasters.

The problem was, I was used to making 100,000 per month of everything new we came out with - that was
my
idea of a hot item. I'd experienced this sort of success in the mid-to-late eighties with other products I'd launched, but things had changed. Sales of the PenPad were disappointing - the market wasn't ready for it. We'd made 100,000 and had to start flogging them off. Unbeknown to me, we
had
hit upon the right direction; it was just a case of it being too early. However, with the acquisition of Dancall and their knowledge of paging technology, I decided to commission a mark-2 version of the PenPad to incorporate some kind of mobile phone paging system, so that people would not only have an organiser, but also a mobile radio device to send and receive messages.

Ian Saward was put in charge of developing this product and I asked him to draw on the experts at Dancall for any help he may require. Unfortunately, the project foundered - he had problems with getting it to pass the relevant standards laid down for paging. This was because the chip we used in the PenPad was interfering with the radio paging side.

In the meantime, Rogers and I visited Hans Snook and presented the idea to him for Orange to buy and market. Hans really had the hots for it and told me there and then that they would buy loads. He said they had many services they could transmit to the unit, such as weather and traffic updates. I told him this was just the start of a range of products that would ultimately lead to the incorporation of a full-blown mobile phone.

But because Ian Saward was struggling technically with the product and we were getting nowhere, he and Rogers decided to can the project. I was told that the technology available at the time simply didn't allow the two core chips to work in harmony. I also heard after the event that Dancall weren't at all helpful, as they considered themselves separate from Amstrad and always told Saward they were too busy to allocate people to the project.

Why am I telling you all this? Simple. What happened later was that the US company PalmPilot sold tens of millions of the product I've just described. We should never have given up. To add insult to injury, this technology would have been the road map to what is today known as the BlackBerry or iPhone. How sick is that?

I don't want to give the impression here that it was someone else's fault we missed out on a massive market. The fact was, I was really in despondent mode at the time, so it was a case of, 'Okay, if that's what
you,
the CEO and the chief engineer, have decided, then fine.' Had I been
really
fired up, I'd
have kicked Dancall's arse and got to the bottom of why the mark-2 didn't work, as I used to do in the high-flying days. But what with Spurs to run and all the fire-fighting
that
involved, my mind was elsewhere. This was one of my big business errors and it cost me dearly.

In the end, the senior staff (including Samson, Saward, Hyams and Beckett) didn't need to be told by me that David Rogers was not working out. They could see with their own eyes that none of his plans had come to fruition. He was making bad calls and they'd seen me step back and allow it to happen. Eventually, in December 1995, Rogers resigned and took up a job in some giant organisation. He was more suited to the large corporate environment.

Bordan had been very despondent under the David Rogers regime. In the end, he'd resigned and planned to go back to Australia. Now I told him to hang on, as I needed him to run the Viglen business. He agreed, though he'd already made all his moving arrangements (I paid his removals company for the cancellation of the containers he'd organised). While some of the old founders were still at Viglen doing a good and professional job, it was inevitable they would soon be leaving and it was wise to place Bordan there at least eighteen months beforehand, so he could get his feet well and truly under the table.

Jeoff Samson recommended another accountant to help sort out some of the problems in places like Dancall and Betacom, a guy by the name of Guppy Dhariwal, an unusually tall and strapping Indian fellow. I was quite receptive to this because my past experience of Asian accountants had been brilliant. In the early days at Garman Road, we'd employed a chap called Jim Luka who was unbelievably diligent.

Guppy was very much like Claude Littner in the sense that he had no time for bullshit or small talk. When we sent him to Dancall or Betacom, he would come back and tell it like it was, without any embellishments or enhancements. I was in a board meeting just after Rogers had left, listening to all his leftover jargon being thrown across the table - '. . . the LoB this and the BU that . . .' - and I said to everyone, 'I've bleeding had it up to the neck with all that LoB/BU crap.' With an angry and serious face I added, 'Since you love it so much, here's a new buzzword for you - I'm going to send the FBI into Betacom to sort them out once and for all.'

Samson turned to me and said, 'The FBI, Alan? What does it have to do with the Federal Bureau of Investigation?'

'No,' I said, 'I'm talking about Guppy Dhariwal - the Fucking Big Indian.'

*

While juggling Amstrad and Tottenham hadn't seemed a problem to start with, I had no idea what I'd taken on. For one thing, I thought that installing the trustworthy Colin Sandy as Tottenham's finance director and John Ireland as corporate lawyer meant that I'd done my bit in ensuring all future transactions the club entered into would be conducted in a professional and correct manner. Sadly, I still had a lot to learn about how the world of football operated at the time.

One match day, Venables uncharacteristically came into the boardroom and asked to speak to me. He told me he was interested in a player at Nottingham Forest by the name of Teddy Sheringham, but there was a problem because, as Venables put it, 'Cloughie wants a bung.'

I told him I wasn't interested in listening to anything involving corruption and bungs. I'd heard it went on in football, as there had been some scandals in the past, but I told him it was absolutely and totally out of the question. Spurs would have no part in anything like that.