Tag Archives: Business

Movies & TV, The Apprentice

Would You Pay £1950 for a Picture from an Unknown Artist?

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This is perhaps the question that both the teams should have been asking themselves on tonight’s Apprentice.

This weeks task required the teams to select two photographic artists each from a pool of six, and then mount a one day sale of their chosen artists work. The winner was the team that made the most money. If the teams picked the same artist then the artist would be asked to choose.

From the outset it was pretty apparent that there was nobody on either team that had much of an interest in art. Having said that, because of the fact that it was a one day sale, the usual techniques of selling art wouldn’t really work – the teams had to get art with a good track record that they knew would sell, and then try and sell as much as they could on the night.

However when it came to the choice of artists, realising that they didn’t know the art world, both teams just went for what they liked, and both picked the same two artists. Whilst one, Tim Flach, was well established, and able to provide a client list, the other Elisabeth Hoff had only one collection, of which she admitted she hadn’t sold any, refused to provide her client list, and was charging between £950 and £1950 per print – the highest cost of any of the artists offered.

As is so often the case, Alan Sugar had presented the candidates with a selection of choices in order to spot the shrewd among them. Whilst if a team who had selected work by Elisabeth Hoff had managed to sell any they would have probably won, as Sugar said in the boardroom it was a big gamble – one that didn’t pay off for the team which she ultimately selected. His opinion is clearly that they would have been better going for more established artists with a client base that would be easier prospective purchasers.

Once the decision had been made, and thanks to some major schmoozing from Katie, Hoff had selected Natalie and Eclipse, their fates were largely sealed. Tim Flach was more impressed with Stealth and went with them (Natalie effectively blew it when she took a phone call whilst talking to him, and then comparing the horse in one of his pictures to the highlights in her hair…). Both teams then picked replacement second artists, Vanessa Warren for Eclipse and Linda Lieberman for Stealth – but because Stealth had a much more popular first choice with established customers, they easily walked away with the task, bringing in £4,702 to £1,599.78 from Eclipse who failed at the difficult task of selling unknown work to a brand new audience.

Perhaps they could have brought it back in with a decent selling strategy for the Hoff work – but since the schmoozing from Katie went on to the extent of Hoff dictating the sales strategy, wanting very much of a soft sell, all was lost. Ironically, although both Natalie and Katie continued to cross swords with Adam, regularly telling him that his car sales experience is useless, and pouring scorn on his ideas, he is the one that manages to sell. Relegated to the back room with the cheaper pictures whilst Katie is in full schmooze up the front, he manages to shift a few saving the team from total disaster.

However I’m totally of the opinion that had Hoff gone for Stealth, it would have been them sitting in the boardroom at the end rather than Eclipse. Hoff would have dictated the soft selling technique for them instead, and the pictures wouldn’t have sold for them either. Despite Tre’s distaste at some of the Linda Lieberman work, he managed to sell some of those, and the Tim Flach sold well too, thanks in part to the much harder – “you don’t want to leave empty handed do you?” techniques that were being used.

The final boardroom encounter is interesting as well. The key problem identified by Sugar is that they didn’t make a business decision in their choice of Hoff, and that they allowed her to run the show too much – Katie being chief in his sights for this. One of the issues that Hoff had was with the quality of the labels for the pictures – produced by Lohit, but Sugar regards this as not important. Alongside this there is ongoing antagonism between Adam and Natalie. Also bear in mind that Natalie has been largely relying on Katie through much of the task, and seems to think that they get on well – however as has been apparent in previous episodes Katie tends to keep her opinions for the one-to-one interviews. This week she is cutting about Natalie, and even at one point wishes that Adam would get run over!

It is often apparent that Sugar has access to the tapes of the task, including the interviews alongside the feedback he gets from his two assistants. Occasionally in previous episodes he has been seen to comment on events that occurred outside the view of the assistants, but in front of the film crew. The impression I got this week was that Sugar was clearly gunning very much for Katie when perhaps it was much more of a group decision to go for Hoff and to capitulate to all her demands. Maybe he had seen the interview where she wishes Adam would get run over?

However, when asked to pick, Natalie brings back in Adam and Lohit – and seals her fate. Adam, although he has personality clashes with other team members, sold well on the task, and did what was asked of him. The only thing that Lohit did wrong was the labels, so he is largely safe. If she had brought in Katie, it was pretty obvious that Sugar had a good chance of removing her, but Natalie protects someone she thinks of as a friend, and effectively leaves herself as the only option, and Sugar, “with regretâ€? has to fire her. Maybe she thought that after last week Adam could be in the frame, but in the past Sugar has shown that he will tend to keep people who can sell for a long while, even if they clash with other team members. Ironically, when Natalie is interviewed on the “You’re Firedâ€? show, having seen a number of the interviews that Katie has done, she is less impressed with her and can certainly see the ruthless streak in Katie’s tactics. In fact Natalie sums it up pretty well in her interview in the taxi – she was just too soft and too nice. Whilst that might build a good team on the task, in the boardroom you need to be ruthless, and seeing that Sugar had his sights set on Katie, it should have been clear that it should have been Katie not Lohit in the third chair.

Having said that, probably the best bit of the whole episode was the brief teaser for next week. The task is about selling ‘British Specialities’ to the French, and from the clips it looks like one of the teams is attempting to sell the French, a country renowned for their love of their many home-grown cheese varieties, British cheese…

Movies & TV, The Apprentice

“It Looks Like Kids Vomit in Araldite!�

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This week, The Apprentice was all about sweets. The teams had to manufacture and then sell sweets to the visitors to London Zoo, and the team with the most profit at the end of the day won. The result was the closest yet, with the winning margin being £10. Although not intended, it also ended up being a battle between one team with a smaller stock selling at higher prices, and the other with masses of stock selling it cheap – the higher prices winning.

This was one of those weeks when in actual fact I thought the wrong team won. The whole reason that Ghazal and her team had small amounts of stock is because only half the team were involved in manufacturing. Through a crazy piece of organisation (that didn’t seem to affect Adam and his team) the only place to get the sticks for the lollipops was in London, and the sweets were being manufactured on the South Coast. As a result Tre and Kristina waste four hours bringing the box of sticks (which were only available in multiples of 1000) down to the factory, and head back to London to organise props. As a result they are two hours away so whilst the rest of the team are failing to produce more than 100 lollipops, Tre is back at the house playing pool, and Kristina is washing her hair. That’s not the only jaw dropping moment, in trying to reduce the cost of the box of sticks, Tre at one point suggests to the wholesaler that he do a totally illegal VAT fiddle to cut the cost – with Margaret Mountford, Sugar’s lawyer in the room! The next day in the selling, Tre is by his own admission specifically targeting ‘fat people’, and Kristina is handing the lollipops to small children and then demanding money from the parents on the basis that the parents won’t refuse.

The other team weren’t without their fair share of problems either. To start of with, they do market research which comes up with the fact that most parents don’t want to be feeding sugary sweets to their children. Unfortunately that idea gets cold water poured on it by the sweet manufacturer, who instead recommends boiled sweet lollipops, in which they use ‘natural flavours’. As a result the team decide to produce ‘Natural Orange Lollipops’ and Chocolate lollipops similar to those produced by the other team. Natalie then gets sent off with Simon to sort out the printing. Meanwhile the rest of the team head off to Asda, and stock up on all sorts of sugary (and not very natural) sprinkles that they set into their ‘Natural Orange Lollipops’, and when they are told they have to list all the ingredients, phone Natalie with the wording, and to change the name to ‘Tiger Orange Lollipop’ – unfortunately having got the signs and printing part done, Natalie sticks with the ‘Natural Orange Lollipops’ name – landing the team in hot water with the London Zoo staff. Ultimately they have to cross out ‘Natural’ on all the packets on the day. Alongside this, Simon, having been far too interested in looking at the animals has totally messed up on the location for their stall, and they initially end up around the back of a corporate hospitality tent, wasting valuable time as they move.

Their selling doesn’t go much better. Adam as project manager, decides to manage rather than sell, and proceeds to manage from inside a lion costume for about four hours, and just seems to wind up particularly Natalie by trying to coach the team as to the best way to sell. Alongside this you have Sophie who has a bit of an issue (unlike Kristina) with hassling parents endlessly to buy lollipops that to be frank she wouldn’t want any kids of hers to have – interesting Natalie admits at one point to having the same issue. Although they have massively more stock, and are selling at cheaper prices, at the end of the day they are literally giving the stuff away to get rid of it, and loose by £10. Adam brings Sophie and Natalie into the boardroom.

The whole boardroom is interesting. Firstly, Alan Sugar really doesn’t like the Orange Lollipops – whatever they are called – describing them as looking like ‘kid’s vomit in Araldite’ at one point, and ‘sick on a stick’ at another. He is also less than impressed with the time it takes Natalie to admit that the name issue was down to her. In the early stages of the boardroom he has a long talk with Sophie over the realities of business, especially when she admits that she has problems selling a product that she thinks is poor value. However she does then say that she is aware that she is commercially naive, but that she is looking to learn.

Much of the rest of the discussion is three way between Sugar, Natalie and Adam again over the labelling, but also because Sugar believes that Adam is running a vendetta against Natalie, and because he is disappointed that Adam wasted hours in the lion costume. Then after all of that, he sacks Sophie for not being enthusiastic about the selling.

I have to say that I was surprised at the choice, and it perhaps says as much about Sugar’s philosophy on selling that he sacked Sophie for not being keen on selling the sweets, but selling them anyway, rather than Adam for not selling anything and spending half the day dressed as a lion. Personally I can well understand Sophie’s argument of being unwilling to use sales techniques (such as those being used by Kristina) that she wouldn’t be happy to have used on herself. Certainly I would have thought that if you give Sophie a quality product that she believes in then she’d have no problem, and from my point of view having someone who respects their customer enough not to sell them overpriced rubbish is probably better for long term reputation as having someone who will sell anything. Having said that, the environment of The Apprentice is much more about making as much money as possible in a short time, whereas in the real business world many companies are interested in building a long term relationship of trust with a potential customer – the idea being that a happy customer will come back to buy again.

General, MobLog

Day Trip to Belgium

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I’ve just got back from a day trip to Belgium, Brussels to be precise. I went over on business, alongside one of our sales guys, as our company is joining in with a EU funded project looking at RFID solutions, and this was the kick off meeting.

As you may have gathered from the end of my posting yesterday, this was all organised pretty last minute in terms of the flights, so the cheapest flights I could get where a premium economy ticket going out, and the slightly cheaper (well about £4 cheaper) restricted business ticket on the way back.

This was the first time I’d flown on the BMI premium economy ticket, and considering that it is more expensive than a restricted business ticket, if you don’t need the flexibility in the ticket, I’d rather go for the cheaper business ticket. From the point of view of travel perks, the only perk you get over and above regular economy on a short-haul flight is that you can get into the business lounge. However that proved to be a mixed blessing this morning anyway. Firstly the whole of the air conditioning system throughout Terminal 1 seemed to be having problems, so the BMI lounge had a couple of portable air conditioners, and some fans, but really was just generally warm and muggy. Coupled with that, the lounge is above one of the gates, which is fine if you could access all of the BMI gates – but you can’t. My flight was on a totally different pier, and when I left the lounge to go to catch my flight I was directed through flight connections – apparently the only way to get to the other pier is to spend another ten minutes waiting around to have your bags searched again, because the security staff won’t allow you back into the departures hall to get to the right pier.

Anyway, onto the premium economy experience on the plane. BMI is not not providing any food, or any drinks for free to economy passengers. It’s still complimentary for business passengers, but they charge anyone in the economy cabin, even if you’re paying for the premium economy ticket. The drinks and food aren’t exactly cheap either – what I’d describe as captive market pricing, so you’re looking at £1.50 for a cup of tea. Now fine, if you’re opting for the cheapest fare possible, you expect them to squeeze every extra penny out of you, but bear in mind that my premium economy ticket cost more than someone sat in the business class cabin on a restricted ticket was paying.

The scheduled journey time from Heathrow to Brussels is about an hour, it transpires that about half of this time is actually to cover the sitting around at Heathrow, as the flight itself only took 35 minutes. Coming back you are in the air for 50 minutes, the difference in time being the time you are stacked waiting to land at Heathrow. When I arrived at Brussels I had a couple of hours to kill waiting for my colleague to arrive on his flight from Birmingham. Frustratingly thanks to a massive thunderstorm at Birmingham airport, his flight was late arriving.

Having said that, Brussels airport is not too bad as a place to have to sit around and wait. According to a couple of signs it won a competition as the best airport in Europe a couple of years ago – certainly it is a nice manageable size, and quite easy to find a quiet spot to sit down.

Once my colleague arrived, we had the choice of how we were going to get into the city. Taxis from airports are always expensive, and Brussels is no exception, apparently the fare is around €30 to get in to the city. Having said that, unlike our own Heathrow Express, which costs the best part of £1 a minute for the journey, the Belgian equivalent is just as quick, but considerably cheaper. It cost just €11 for the two return tickets into the city.

The nearest station to the meeting was the Central station, which according to the city map I had printed out was under 1km from the hotel. It was also incidentally, 1 stop on the Brussels Metro. As we had a good half-hour to go, we thought we’d walk, I had the city map, so it wasn’t too much of a problem. Unfortunately, since I initially thought we’d come out of a different exit than the one we actually used, we actually ended up going the slightly scenic route, having gone about five minutes walk in the wrong direction, however we made it to the meeting on time.

After the meeting, after getting lost earlier, we decided to give the metro a try, which even at rush hour proved to not be too much of a problem. The metro is relatively modern – at least compared to a lot of what we have in London, and was quick and clean. Interestingly, whilst London is now filled with ticket barriers, there aren’t any on the Brussels system. You can buy your ticket, and there are machines to validate it, but ultimately there is nothing to stop you just walking on to the train without paying. I’m not sure whether they don’t have a problem with fare dodging, or whether they just aren’t bothered, but certainly everybody seems to be trusted. After our go on the Metro, we even managed to get on a train back at Brussels Central going to the airport too!

Anyway, on the way back, I was on a restricted business ticket, so I got a little bit more space, but more than that a very nice snack meal and drinks – and if I’d paid a little bit more I could have been sat two rows behind in the packed economy cabin…

So the one final question, was whether it was a better choice to fly rather than take the Eurostar, which was what I was going to do before my colleague had to come down from Birmingham. To be honest, although getting to Waterloo is pretty tedious, and indeed the whole process will get even more so when the Eurostar services relocate next year, the journey time is pretty comparable once you’ve factored in all the sitting around. Granted the actual travel time flying is less than half of the Eurostar, that doesn’t factor in all the waiting time all the way through the process going through the airports. We’ll have to see if we have to go for another meeting in Brussels, but I’ll certainly give the Eurostar a good look next time around.