With the change in broadcast date, and a busy week last week, I’m only now getting around to sitting down to write about the final of the Apprentice.
First off – and nobody is more surprised about this than me – after correctly predicting the final two, I also successfully predicted the winner as well. Not [...]

It comes up every year in the Apprentice at the interview stage. Every year without fail, the interviewers take up the references, they check out the CV’s, and as Yasmina discovered tonight, if you’ve got your own business they’ll pull a copy of the published company reports and accounts.
Perhaps the grilling that Lee McQueen got [...]

We found out in the opening of the Apprentice tonight that the shopping channel task is a favourite of Sir Alan – certainly I have to agree. The annual trips to Peterborough really do produce some amusing episodes, and often really shake things up. They also produce some surprises, this time being no exception.
The established [...]

Even a scholarship to Sandhurst can’t save you when you back the wrong horse.
The show sales task on the Apprentice always comes down to product choice, and there are two distinct strategies. Either you play it fairly safe and go for two products that you think will sell, maybe going for one low price and [...]

Sometimes Sir Alan fires people for the task, other times he goes for someone on his list of weak candidates. This week it was definitely a chance for him to get rid of a weak candidate – and he was faced with a choice of two letting the real guilty party off.
The task was to [...]

It never fails to amaze me how many Apprentice candidates seem to think they can sell ice to Eskimos, but fail to get the basics right in picking the right product, for the right customer. This week with Sir Alan having set up pitches with a high class designer store and a long established hardware [...]

There is a classic mistake that candidates on the Apprentice make, over and over again they fail to read the instructions, miss the giant sized hints that they get given, and mess up as a result.
In previous series, the shopping list task has been about making the most money possible, getting everything on the list [...]

Some teams are just unmanageable. The divisions in Ignite that we saw last week came even more to the fore this week as Kimberly – an early favourite in some quarters to win – struggled to keep the all out war between bulldozer Philip and Lorraine in check. The problem was that the two of [...]

Sometimes the candidates on the Apprentice lose through multiple mistakes, sometimes it’s one catastrophic mistake. This week we had both, on the one side we had a poor leader, who struggled to guide his team, and produced a poor product, and struggled to sell his product. On the other side we had a popular leader, [...]

Tonight was one of those Apprentice episodes where I was really left wondering if I was watching the same show. The general opinion on You’re Fired seemed to be that James should have gone, and that the failure was down to him, but I’m not so sure. I’m with Margaret, that on this task he [...]

There seems to be a pattern developing in the Apprentice with two teams competing to lose – much the same as usual some would say. There is a criticism often levelled at the show that it is not a realistic representation of the real business environment. Certainly on paper, the owner of a successful sandwich [...]

Every Apprentice task has it’s traps, and the first one of this season was no exception. Sir Alan explained it pretty early on in this weeks show when he said that all you needed to do was to get a sponge and a bucket and go and wash cars. However the trap was that the [...]

In case you haven’t noticed the vast amounts of pre-publicity, tonight another batch of the self-proclaimed “cream of British business talentâ€? lines up to be Sir Alan Sugar’s new Apprentice.
As a precursor to this, we also had another round of Celebrity Apprentice which was notable for having two established business people in the form of Gerald [...]

I’m somewhat getting used to not agreeing with Sir Alan over the final winner of the Apprentice, indeed over the four runs of the competition so far I think I’ve only actually agreed with his choice once.
The grand finale this year pitted Alex and Helene against Lee and Claire, with Sir Alan arbitrarily deciding which [...]

As previously, this past week we got two chances to find out a bit more about the remaining Apprentice candidates, firstly with a programme profiling each of the semi-finalists with contributions from friends and family, and secondly with the traditional tough interviews from friends and colleagues of Sir Alan.
Taking the family contributions first, it showed [...]

After literally begging for another chance, on the Apprentice last night, Michael finally got his marching orders. Once again he had asked for a chance to prove himself, this time being put in charge of the team for a sales task, something that should have been right up his street.
The task was to sell rental [...]

I don’t know whether the producers of The Apprentice make a note when they are picking candidates, or whether there is some strange kind of symbiosis between getting on in business and being a frustrated actor or director, but whenever Sir Alan dusts down the advertising task there are always one or two candidates willing [...]

Watching The Apprentice this week, you sort of felt that Michael should be walking out of the boardroom to the strains of The Great Escape. Thanks to a classic demonstration of boardroom suicide from Sara, where as often happens to someone at this point in the series, she had just had enough and didn’t properly [...]

One of the things about the Apprentice is that every so often it does throw up a surprise in the boardroom. This week was one of those weeks.
I said last week, that the shopping list task is usually entertaining, and this time was no exception. As has been shown in previous years it is a [...]

One of the difficult things to balance for participants in the Apprentice is the conflict between the fact that the tasks are performed as teams, but the competition is for a single winner. On the one hand you are expected to work as a team, whilst on the other you want to ensure that [...]