The Apprentice's Third Task -
Use £200 To Make More Money

The Apprentice candidates were handed £200 and told to get themselves a business and make money. The team making the most money winning.

This is another of those tasks which needs marketing strategy!

That means think about what sort of things you can sell which have a market. Bearing in mind that you can switch to running a second business during the day.

It was immediately obvious that both teams (or their leaders) were so desperate to get going doing that they hadn't thought very hard about what to do.

So how did it all go this week?

Eclipse Team ("managed" by Tre)

Tre's style of management is really quite antagonistic and based on the assumption that everyone but him is swinging the lead!

Unfortunately I've noticed that such a style of management becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Tre's team decided that they would hire a van load of tools and "tidy" gardens in Richmond. So what was wrong with that?

Let's list exactly what's wrong:

• Richmond is generally a well-kept and well to-do area so people already have gardeners or have tidy gardens
• They were not doing this during the weekend when lots of people would be home, so they'd have to knock on large numbers of doors
• They hadn't worked out how to estimate the work or how much to charge. The result was their first task took 3 people an hour for £25
• Tre split the team into two, but made one purely sales when he should have made each team responsible for getting their own sales, so that they could work out how much effort it would take to do something and price accordingly

Tre spent some time bad mouthing people. I know the editing makes things look more black and white than they really are but I do think Tre is the most obstructive and useless person in Eclipse. Before Jadine was moved to Stealth she would have had my vote. In fact put them on a team together and that would be pure comedy!

When the evening arrived the boys returned their tools and went on to singing for their supper and other stuff...although I'd lost interest in what they were trying to do by then.

Eclipse did win the task by almost doubling the money Sir Alan had given them.

Stealth Team (managed by Naomi)

Naomi appeared to be out of her depth and was not helped by Jadine digging the knife in at every opportunity.

Unlike last week their strategy was weak to non-existent. Whoever decided that facepainting was a good idea needs their head examining and the taking round the corner and shooting.

Look at it this way. My wife is a semi-pro face painter - she does it on a volunteer basis and has painted hundreds if not thousands of children's faces. We both immediately saw the problems with choosing face painting:

• It's midweek, children are in school!!! So almost no one to face paint
• The locations were actually irrelevant as there were no children around ...
• To paint a face takes someone with nil experience about 15 minutes, that's 4 faces per hour each - it needs a lot of children
• I don't know about you but £5 for a painted face seems extremely steep, I think that counts as pricing yourself out of the market
  

Then to cap it all Naomi decided to sell kisses (by calling them kissograms, which they obviously weren't). As Sir Alan pointed out what they did bordered on working in the second oldest profession. And that's not really business in the accepted sense! In fact selling kisses was where the girls got the most money. Although they actually made very little from it.

Was The Firing Deserved?

Gerri was fired because she'd come up with the wrong locations. But really the whole face painting idea was a bad one and Gerri should have turned that back to Naomi. During the firing session Sir Alan had asked Gerri who she thought he should fire and rather than answer the question - which would immediately have let her off the hook she ummed and ahhed and so Sir Alan then came back and asked her why he shouldn't fire her? A question she seemed badly prepared for.

When she answered Sir Alan she replied as though it was totally her fault they'd lost the task. It wasn't. As I said it was the wrong task and she should have put that point forcibly and explained why - that is no location has many children around during the school day! But she couldn't and because she couldn't she was the right one to go.

As Sir Alan noted Jadine has her card marked for being a bad influence on any team she's in. I can't wait for them to get down to two teams of two and for her to be in one team with Tre - sparks will fly!