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!