Raj Dhonota

Episode 9. Creating a new brand of biscuit. Pitching it to three major supermarkets. The team with the most orders wins. Helen Louise Milligan was project manager for Venture, Zoe Beresford project manager for Logic. Venture win. Zoe Beresford, Susan Ma and Melody Hossaini end up in the boardroom. Zoe Beresford is fired.

In this episode we saw how difficult it is to pitch to major retailers. These major retailers source products from across the world to ensure that they purchase products that offer them the highest return in the shortest possible time. Imagine the responsibility on their shoulders for getting a decision wrong. I wonder if the person who chose to stock Lord Sugar’s Emailer plus is still in a job?! Only joking Lord Sugar!

Clearly, pitching to large retailers is an area Lord Sugar has a lot of experience in. No doubt he was speaking from experience when advising the candidates that “if what’s in the box is rubbish,” the packaging does not matter. In essence the lesson here is the same as it was in the pet food task; that first and foremost the product has to be right. Without the right product, you can do all the marketing in the world, but you are likely to fail. That’s not to say marketing is not important. If you have a good product but the marketing is totally wrong, you stand to fail just as fast; but with the right product you can work on and improve the marketing a lot easier than having to change a product that is flawed.

Many people feel that wining a contract with a major retailer would be a massive step to success and overall there is little you could disagree with, but it is certainly not the be all and end all if you fail to get a national retailer on your books. These retailers may buy volume quantities but they will also drastically squeeze the profit margins of anyone supplying to them because of their buying power. So it’s not always the pot of gold it seems – pretty much like the £250,000 on offer on The Apprentice! An alternative would be to target multiple smaller retailers who may not buy as much, but where the profit margins are higher than would be the case (per unit) when selling to major retailers. For example, take our end to end ecommerce platform. Not only does it let people set up and run their own online store for less than the daily cost of a bar of chocolate, but it also allows suppliers from across the world sell to retailers across the world – giving suppliers increased orders and buyers the benefit of reduced prices. Vendimal even lets buyers sell supplier products without having to buy them first – a great way to start a business with very little money.

On to the firing. From what we saw Zoe’s fate was sealed because Lord Sugar believed that her failure to use her experience by going to the bakery personally was the reason the team lost. Ultimately the underlying justification cannot be doubted, but given how random the firing decisions appear to be, you can’t help but wonder whether had she gone, and then lost because of the marketing, Lord Sugar would have gone down the road of “So you went for the easy route did you. I see. You had experience in this field and did not want to take the risk of taking on something new. This is a business you know. And people will need to do tasks they are not used to doing. You haven’t shown me you can do anything else and I have to start thinking about who I want to go into business with. I’ve come to the conclusion…Zoe you’re fired.” But he did not so this could be a historic moment – is that two or three decisions during the series where Lord Sugar appears to have made a decision based on what actually happened during a task? That could be an Apprentice record!

Episode 8.  Selling unique business products to French retailers.  Each candidate is given a sales book in which they must record their sales.  Tom Pellereau was team leader for Logic.  Susan Ma was team leader for Venture.  Venture win.  Leon Doyle, Tom Pellereau and Melody Hossaini end up in the boardroom.  Leon Doyle is fired.

Eight weeks in and I have become both bored and frustrated with the consistent inconsistency in the boardroom.  The candidates may be better off playing the lottery than trying to determine what the rules of the game are.  On the one had Lord Sugar states at the beginning of each episode that he is “not looking for a bloody sales person.  [He wants] someone with a brain.”  Yet here he is again analysing the level of people’s sales as an indication of their performance.  Holding Tom’s sale book up in the air he criticises Tom saying “No sales Tom….No sales Tom.”

Then we have Karen Brady criticising Melody Hossaini for individualism, asking Melody “did you not understand this was a team effort.”  Has Karen not been listening to Lord Sugar or is she confused with the whole process too?  You can’t blame her really, she can only go by what Lord Sugar says, and that seems to change by the week.  One week they are criticising the “we we we” i.e. team approach, and next they are criticising someone for not taking the “we we we” approach.  Board stop yo-yoing around and make up your minds about what it is that you are looking for.  This level of inconsistency would never stand up in the real world.

Finally, having made selling a mandatory requirement in this task from the outset with the sales book, Lord Sugar decides not to fire the only person in the final with zero sales! Instead he chose to fire Leon on gut instinct.  It’s comical!

At the beginning of the episode Lord Sugar stated the reason for sending the candidates to Paris was that he did not want “any new business of [his] restricted to the UK market alone”.  That’s ambitious given the prize on offer may be nowhere near a £250,000 cash injection.  But more importantly, he seemed to be unaware of what it takes to sell internationally in today’s global marketplace.  I say this because selling internationally is what my businesses do day in day out, and I therefore have real experience in knowing exactly what is required to be successful in the global marketplace.  It is fact that when selling internationally buyers are three times more likely to buy from businesses that sell to them in their native language, as opposed to selling to them in a language that is foreign to them.  This is not only validated by my own experience, but has also been shown to be fact by respected market research companies such as Plunkett Research and Forrester Research.  Clearly, Lord Sugar was unaware of this; had he been aware, he would not have criticised Leon for letting Melody use her French language skills to sell to the French and therefore would probably not have fired him either.

Further when criticising Leon, Lord Sugar gave the example of when he first started out in business and had to communicate with suppliers from China, Korea and Japan without knowing their language.  I feel it’s a bit of a misleading example because buying from a seller (which Lord Sugar was doing) and selling to a customer (which the candidates were doing) are two different worlds.  In Lord Sugar’s case, when he started out, the reliance would have been on the supplier’s from China, Japan and Korea being able to converse with Lord Sugar in English.  And you can bet they did a good job of communicating with him in his native language because he ended up buying from them! In short, it’s the ability of the seller to be able to communicate effectively with the buyer that increases sales.

So all in all, did we learn much from Lord Sugar today?  In my opinion it is impossible to decipher any lesson with such inconsistency being displayed in the boardroom.  What we can conclude fairly however, is that if candidates are being judged on a task,  the very least you would expect is for Lord Sugar to understand the principles of selling internationally in today’s market and therefore not criticise candidates without merit.

Episode 7.  Coming up with a new free premium magazine and pre-sell the advertising to some of the biggest media buyers in the country.  The team with the highest amount of advertising revenue will win.  Jim Eastwood was team leader for Venture.  Natasha Scribbins was team leader for Logic.  Logic Win.  Jim Eastwood, Susan Ma and Glen Ward end up in the boardroom.  Glen is fired.

Given Lord Sugar’s previous misconceived stereotype of technically able people, it came as little surprise that Glen was fired.  In fact it was plainly inevitable.  In a previous episode Lord Sugar had wrongly stated that it was a very rare animal for a technical person to become a business person.  Today Lord Sugar went one step further by stating that he had “never yet come across an engineer that can turn his hands to business. “  Really?!  What about Bill Gates (Founder of Microsoft), Paul Allen (Founder of Microsoft) Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle), James Dyson (Dyson) to name just a few –  all previously engineers who are now multibillionaires!  Is Lord Sugar really trying to tell the millions of The Apprentice viewers that he has never heard of these people?!  And what about the thousands of other engineers or technicians who have their own small to medium sized businesses?  Again, surely someone who was previously an Enterprise Tsar would know this?  What kind of a statement does this make to those people who are technically able, who watch the show, and are thinking about starting their own business?

Lord Sugar made a reference to my favourite British sitcom, Only Fools and Horses.  He wondered whether Glen “was… one of those people who thought Only Fools and Horses was a business documentary.”  Well in my opinion you can learn just as much from Only Fools and Horses as you can from The Apprentice.  They both show you what not to do in business.  You would probably follow Lord Sugar’s logic in the boardroom as you would follow Del Boys’.  The only difference being it is explicitly clear in Only Fools and Horses, and requires just that little tad of thought on The Apprentice.  What’s more the rest of the similarities are clear; they are both meant for entertainment, ridicule business logic and have a heavy reliance on Sell, Sell, Sell.

In all this analysis of what Lord Sugar says one of two things is clear.  Either we do not see the real Lord Sugar, or his reasoning and judgement is flawed.  I say this because we do not see the kind of logical decisions or opinions you would expect of someone who has been as successful as he has.  For me it has to be the former because his decision making is blatantly inconsistent and has clearly had to be warped to make the right decisions for the benefit of The Apprentice as a show, which is totally different to making real business logical decisions or statements.

On a final note, given the way Lord Sugar handed the responsibility of team Leader to Natasha at the beginning of the show, I think we can safely predict that Natasha will be fired when Lord Sugar next has her in the final three of the boardroom.  Watch that space and let’s watch the justification for the firing especially if her performance on the task does not merit her being fired.

Episode 6 and another reference to “waffles” in the boardroom.  Thankfully on this occasion, unlike Lord Sugar on the last, Nick was not making a joke at the expense of someone’s origin.

This week’s task.  Setting up a junk removal business. Collecting rubbish. Disposing of it and making as much money as possible.  Helen Louise Milligan was team leader for Logic.  Zoe Beresford was team leader for Venture.  Logic win by £6.  Zoe Beresford, Edna Agbarha and Susan Ma end up as the final three in the boardroom.  Edna Agbarha is fired.

This is my sixth week of watching The Apprentice and I’m struggling to keep the interest going.  However, I’ll try to persevere with my battle to see whether Lord Sugar can teach us any valuable business lessons whilst on the show for as long as I can.

For me, it was fairly obvious that once Edna Agbarha was in the final three, she would be fired.  I come to that conclusion simply based on the opinion that Lord Sugar does not respect education as a whole, and it seems he always has a point to prove whenever he comes across someone with a good education.  In this case his justification was that he did not think he and Edna would gel in business. Not sure where the criterion of one’s performance on a task went in that decision? I do wonder how many missed opportunities his attitude towards education has cost him.  I agree education is not the be all and end all, but it certainly deserves more respect that Lord Sugar gives it.

Furthermore, Lord Sugar was wrong to belittle Edna’s efforts in arranging the appointments that had earned her team their revenue, claiming it was simple to make a few random phone calls and arrange a few appointments.  Ask any sales person and they will tell you that one of the hardest parts of selling is cold calling/getting appointments from scratch.  You can’t tell me Lord Sugar doesn’t know that.  I am sure he does which makes you think that he was just lining Edna up to be fired.  However, if it is a fact that has missed his radar, then perhaps he should have replied in the affirmative when Nick Hewer asked him if he needed training from Edna!

It was certainly right to commend Zoe Beresford for stepping forward as Team Leader and also for admitting her mistakes.  Time and time again I come across people from all walks of life, and at all levels of the corporate ladder, that will not admit to making mistakes or are too afraid to make the right decisions because of a fear of failure.  If these people were able to put aside their fears, or spent more time learning from their mistakes as opposed to covering up their backsides, their companies or businesses would be in a much more favourable position.  In this respect, behaviour or characteristics that show this positive attitude should always be highlighted to help inspire others to do the same.

On the flip side I do think Lord Sugar could help the candidates and viewers learn more by clarifying some of his more vague criticism of the candidates.  When he fails to I do get the impression it is a superficial criticism with no real substance.   Only by being told what one’s weaknesses are, can one understand and attempt to improve them.  In this example, Lord Sugar told Susan Ma “I’ve seen a few things that you are good at.  But there are a lot of things I am not happy at all with.”   Well, ok.  But, why not tell her what he was unhappy with so that she could attempt to improve on those weaknesses in the next task?  Good constructive feedback is essential to improving the performance of employees and it should be no different for candidates on The Apprentice.

In conclusion on today’s episode, I have come to the conclusion that rubbish was the perfect theme for The Apprentice!