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These 442 comments are related to the topic:
The Apprentice
The Apprentice
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Replies: 442
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They built it up too much for him to choke
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the choke was a complete set up to add drama. the guys a pro.
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don't like Marks branding at all. looks very public sector
Agree - didn't like his logo. Doesn't look at cutting-edge or hi-tec |
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do you think Karren Brady asks not to be called Baroness Brady or has Lord Sugar vetoed it.
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Mark has practiced that grin a thousand times in the mirror....you can be sure.
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The Baroness Brady CBE. Baroness Brady seems clumsy (perhaps owing to the alliteration) and Lady Brady sounds ridiculous.
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Bianca's use of christian names for her tights seemed silly, even if it works for Coca Cola. The particular names chosen were not obviously aimed at ethnic minority women. The packaging did not seem worthy of a premium product. Even after knocking a third off the price, £24 sounded a lot for an item that would mostly be worn only once: as one of the market research women said, at that price she'd expect it to make the tea.
Felipe was the only member of Bianca's team to voice any doubts. We see the same phenomenon on Dragons Den and even X-Factor or BGT, where people have not been told by those close to them that their product is rubbish or they can't carry a tune in a bucket. If I were Bianca, I'd have made more of the smartphone app to match skin tone, and then sell online. This would mean she could start as a one woman business. (It also means she could use Mark's SEO service and Solomon's shipping company!) |
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The contrast between Mark's effective team management and delegation, and Bianca dismissing three fifths of her team and ignoring market research was clear.
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One thing that confused me was Bianca limiting her market to women over the age of 30.
Mark's (or really James and Solomon's) dancers were annoying. I don't go to many product launches but I've been to a few, and in general prefer it when they get to the point. It might be different if there is direct visibility of the product but here, dance was just a metaphor. |
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Tights in different colours wasnt exactly the greatest idea id ever heard but compared to the woman who invented a new ready meal that already existed it was genius.
Surely this must be the last season of this now. They seem desperate to talk it up as a serious programme with good young business people fighting for a large prize but its got zero credibility. By just picking so many clueless types for entertainment has made it quite good to watch but its no longer real or sensible. It looks more like something Ricky Gervais could star in each series. |
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@Dotchinite re Apprentice past its sell-by date.
To a point. The £250,000 prize and Lord Sugar's backing is well worth winning. But I do agree the producers have ballsed it up, especially this series where they seem to have gone too far down the Big Brother route. They started with too many candidates so that in the early episodes it was hard to keep up with who was whom. The double and triple firings were intended to be dramatic but soon became routine and even contrived. And too many of the candidates had clearly been cast as "characters" with no chance of winning -- what Lord Sugar himself referred to as dead wood. This meant that even by the end, we'd not seen enough of the last 5 or 6 on tasks for us to properly judge, and they'd only been PM once each. (For instance, Sanjay tonight did an exceptional job producing the video but up to now we'd only seen him moaning and whining.) The tasks are still too based around sales, and encourage candidates to rip off the public because there is no rating of quality or likelihood of repeat business. The treats taken in isolation did have the wow factor, especially the one in Iceland, but looked at in aggregate seemed to have been chosen by a pair of production company interns, one of whom favoured variations on a spa (spa in Britain, spa in Iceland) while the other did variations on sport (football, boxing, motor racing etc). |
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I don't mean to be sexist but speaking from personal experience, "the cars will be with you in 30 mins". Has any Man on here known a women be ready 30 mins after waking up, 3 hours more realistic.
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There isn't a single aspect of this show that bears up to any any analysis. Best just to treat it as light entertainment.
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clim - bon - line
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Just watched the final & surprised that there was no Roisin. Had the teddy been hurled out?
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Roisin, best candidate material, awful business plan.
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She would have made the final and probably won under the original format
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I meant that I was surprised she wasn't there to help when the two finalists were choosing their helpers - all the other losers seemed to be there
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I noticed that. She was in the audience for the second hour iirc.
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@pumphol -- Roisin, best candidate material, awful business plan.
On reflection, I'm not sure her business plan was as bad as first thought. And ironically, it was probably because of the technical quality of her business plan, as you'd expect from an accountant, that Claude was able to see that once he'd corrected Roisin's unrealistic assumptions about the ease of gaining credit from suppliers, that she'd run out of cash in two or three months. This was the hole she tried to patch up by talking about a bank loan, which we saw anger Lord Sugar in the boardroom. Presumably Roisin had been misled by her experience at Ernst & Young auditing global corporations: it is one thing to give credit to Hewlett Packard (Ireland) but quite another to retool a production line on tick for an unknown kitchen table startup. And according to interviews since The Apprentice, Roisin has followed Lord Sugar's advice to launch into a small market then expand (so Dublin, then Ireland, then UK and so on) so that expansion is financed organically from profits not loans; and also to partner with an established (Irish) food producer who knows the market and has established relationships with retailers. Though by all accounts her key ingredient, while tasteless, has a most unpleasant texture, in which case maybe it won't get beyond the trial stage. Bianca's business plan for premium tights did not survive the final -- by the end of the programme she'd knocked over a third off the price with no consideration of what this meant for quality. She's since told the papers she'll go ahead but at under a tenner. Roisin's plan, then, in hindsight, was probably better than Bianca's but both had the crucial flaw that the women were unfamiliar with their chosen industries and would be reliant on Lord Sugar to do the work for them: arrange manufacturing, open doors with retailers and so on, as well as providing all the money. Ironically, Solomon's plan-free, 50 per cent clip art proposal was probably a better business idea since he'd actually got experience of doing this (arranging manufacture and shipping) for himself, though as Claude complained, the complete absence of financial projections meant it could not be evaluated. |
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Maybe that is the flaw with the new Apprentice business partner format. Experience.
It's ten tasks followed by a sub-par episode of Dragons Den. The crucial difference is that the punters in the den are actual entrepreneurs who have actually put the graft into designing, making and selling their products, whereas most of the Apprentice candidates just have ideas and pipedreams. It is telling that of the three winners so far, inventor Tom had a track record of getting products onto shelves, and Ricky and now Mark were both basically just going self-employed and doing what they'd previously done for their employers. In the other direction, of course, the Dragons have a fit of the vapours if anyone asks for £250,000. £30 to £50,000 is more their mark. |
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Roisin's plan as it was then meant she would have done the £250,000 in within two months, so LS had no option but to ditch her.
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@bigH re clim - bon - line
Actually, Sarah had a point, and Mark did take it onboard, since by the final presentation there was a space between Climb and Online. What does seem odd is that Mark had got this far in the process without having thought of a name for his company. (And climbonline.com is already taken: it is a blog for rock climbers. Probably its owner is wondering why he got so many hits on Sunday.) |
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Indeed. Come up with a name and bag the .com and .co.uk domains
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@pumphol -- yes. In that respect Roisin was a bit like Susan Ma and her plan to sell cosmetics a couple of years back. Her business plan also fell into the trap of making all the assumptions in her favour so she ended up promising the moon on a stick.
As punters, we know that while Chelsea probably will beat West Brom and Man City overcome Sunderland, it is when you string ten of these certainties together that your footie accumulator comes unstuck, and Ladbrokes survives for another week. It may be significant that after the programme, once Susan had scaled back her ambition to more realistic levels, Lord Sugar did invest in her, and similarly Roisin and Bianca also seem to have found backers at a lower level. |
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Ram - four winners so far. Leah is the other one.
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Can you please leave your football 10 fold on here, I may have a sneaky fiver on it
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@i_agree_with_nick -- aargh! Yes, Dr Leah slipped my mind. She fits the pattern as well, since she already had experience in cosmetic medicine.
Too many of them just seem to have an idea and rely on using Lord Sugar's money to buy in expertise. I could take Bianca's plan a bit further. She's identified a gap in the market: skin tones for Black women. OK. So let's sell tights online, with a smartphone app to measure the precise colour of someone's legs, and then feed that result into a small dying machine which does one or two pairs at a time, and injects the precise mixture of different dyes needed. So Lord Sugar, can you pony up the quarter of a million, and find me someone to write the app, and also find me the small, computer-controlled, dye-injection machine? (Hmm. Actually, that might even be viable if such a machine exists, which it may well do.) |
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Ideal for selling online in so much as they're lightweight, easy to package and unlikely to be damaged in transit.
Cash needed for website design and advertising. |
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Yes, sell online because with the smartphone app to measure colour, women will not need to see them in a shop. This time next year, Rodney, we'll be millionaires.
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Bianca's business plan for premium tights did not survive the final -- by the end of the programme she'd knocked over a third off the price with no consideration of what this meant for quality. She's since told the papers she'll go ahead but at under a tenner.
Not having a realistic price point - not even ball park - as evidenced by its subsequent shift, is quite worrying when she has put together an actual business plan. |
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Its Transition Year stuff lads (secondary school). Grade C level.
Why the fascination? |
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nothing else to talk about since side show bob left
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Quote from one of this year's candidates: "I want the cars. I want the girls. But most of all I want the power."
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYpA6XC0i2Y
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Good clip.
Being a socialist, Cloughie probably despised people like Alan Sugar especially as he was a poster-boy for Thatcherism. The irony being that in many ways, they were similar characters. |
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Not to mention Sugar was in the Labour Party.
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Yes - he was also a large donor but he's recently resigned.
I admire Clough and Sugar - they've both been tremendously successful in their respective fields and both did it the hard way from the bottom up. |
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And both became walking parodies of themselves
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i_agree_with_nick 06 Oct 15 11:49
I admire Clough and Sugar - they've both been tremendously successful in their respective fields and both did it the hard way from the bottom up. You could add Gareth Thomas to the list too - he's been tremendously successful in his respective field, and done it the hard way from the bottom up... |