Week 7 of the Apprentice 2012 was all about buying wholesale stock, selling it and re-investing the profits. The previous week, week 6 Katie was fired during the selling gourmet street food task. Did you read our review of week 6?
The teams are called to a wholesale warehouse at 5pm in the evening where Lord Sugar mixes the teams up a bit. He hints he’d like to see those who have not had a chance as project manager yet be project manager. Jade volunteers for team Phoenix and Nick volunteers to lead team Sterling.
Jade’s team waste a lot of time deciding where to go and not enough time deciding what to buy. Their items seem very much a mixture with no clear direction. They have also picked two locations which are a long way apart. Jade decides to split the stock evenly between the two locations and Azhar mentions the word strategy a considerable number of times. To be fair to Azhar he does suggest giving more stock to the market traders who are further away from being able to resupply.
Nick’s team, Team Sterling, have a more balanced approach with a clear strategy to sell beauty products. These include fake tan and stick on nails in the shopping centre as well as other good such as mops in the market. There seems to be an awful lot of generalisation about the people of Essex in last night’s episode, however the fake tan and nails are flying off the stall. Nick asked the market team to go and get more and declined their offer of them dropping their remaining stock with him first. The two teams in Sterling were only 5 minutes apart.
Ricky and Stephen seemed to spend an age stuck in traffic going to get more stock and when they did eventually arrive there were only 84 cans of fake tan left. Nick looked distraught at this and asks them to get hot water bottles with the rest.
Jades team were told by Jade to get some of everything again and she clearly did not under the task. Which was in Lord Sugar’s own words “Smell what’s selling” and buy more of that. Azhar seemed to annoy Jade throughout the task by ringing her to prompt them to have a clear plan. Jade’s didn’t seem to listen to him despite him breaking the record for using the word strategy in a 1 hour programme on tv, I am joking but he did say it a lot.
The evening last few hours both teams are at Lakeside shopping centre trying to claim that last bit of cash to win them the task. Each team adopts a different strategy Phoenix and Jade adopt a slash the prices and sell what you can and Nick’s team stay with higher prices.
In The boardroom Jade’s team ended up with assets totalling £838, whereas Nick’s team finished with £955. I have to say Nick’s team had a far better grasp of the task. Sterling are sent to a cocktail bar in London to be served cocktails by bar tender of the year. Cocktail making is something we do offer but don’t offer it very often. We’d prefer to offer either a Pub Olympics or a Race night as it gets everyone involved and there is usually something for everyone. We also offer a range of interactive quizzes and can include a round of guess the cocktail.
Jade brings back Azhar and bizarrely Tom who seemed to be the only one with a full grasp of the task. Our Opinion is Jade should be fired as her complete lack of leadership and any semblance of a plan lost them the task. Had they understood the requirements better they may have won the task. All of our Team building days focus on planning, leadership and communication while making the activities fun along the way. Team Phoenix would certainly have benefited from a day or two on our Team Building events.
While the three candidates were outside Nick Hewer, Karen Brady and Lord Sugar discuss the candidates, Karen says Azhar huffed and puffed and everyone though he was just complaining so they didn’t listen to him. Jade didn’t have any strategy and they were unsure why Tom has been brought back.
Back in the boardroom Lord Sugar quickly stated he doesn’t think Tom should be there and before even building the tension in usual Apprentice style at the end said Tom is staying and he will see him on the next task. Rightly too, I have a suspicion that Tom will be one of the finalists this year.
Azhar and Jade argue about who was at fault, Azhar did make a number of good points from what I saw, one of which was picked up by Lord Sugar about taking more stock further away and did try to prompt Jade to having a plan instead of running round like headless chickens.
In summing up Lord Sugar says everything was jades fault then strangely fires Azhar. I believe this was the wrong decision but I think Lord Sugar has a good idea already who he wants to work with and will get rid of the others as he can.
Anyway next week it’s all about selling Modern Art, a task that always has some interesting sales patter wherne candidates try and shift things they have no real idea about.
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