The Apprentice Week 1, ‘Fish Food’- Business Lessons Learnt

Last night saw the return of the hit BBC program ‘The Apprentice’ starring business guru Lord Alan Sugar on his search to find a new business partner. The first episode entailed the 18 candidates selling seafood products across London with ingredients sourced from Billingsgate fish market. Team Versatile in blue, led by Selena, opted to sell budget calamari and fishcakes to the general public.

On the other side, Team Connectus in yellow, headed up by food blogger April, made an expensive tuna nicoise salad and high quality fishcakes to sell to high-flying business people across the city. As per usual, some of the lines from the candidates were comic such as Joseph Valente describing himself as “the ultimate persuader of women” and the “godfather of business”, unsurprisingly this series’ applicants seems to have as many odd-balls as ever. Here are the biggest business mistakes the teams made in episode 1:

The Calamari Disaster

The biggest head-in-hands moment of this week’s episode has to go to Team Versatile getting the storage temperature of the calamari wrong. For calamari to be fit to be sold and eaten it needs to be stored at around 2°C, not the 15°C which the team in blue left it in for the majority of the day. To make matters worse, the team were aware of this before they left for the day and vowed to keep it under control! Unsurprisingly the seafood spoiled and the team had to throw away half of their stock; you would have thought if you had researched how to store calamari you would at least stick to the rules. Despite this, Team Versatile made a decent profit of £200 and managed to win the task. This begs the question of what the other team could have possibly done to perform worse and make a lower profit…

Where Was The Negotiation?

One of the biggest mistakes that Team Connectus made was buying from the first fish stall they came across at Billingsgate fish market, without negotiating. This is one of the oldest lessons in business, you have to shop-around a bit before you commit to buying a product- without doubt there would have been a cheaper source of tuna at the market, which Karren Brady picked up on. On top of this, the team failed to negotiate at all going with the first price that the vendor offered. Due to this Team Connectus had significantly higher costs than their rivals, a factor in their loss of the task.   

Failure to Adapt 

Perhaps the biggest mistake that the losing team made was not spotting that their fishcakes were going to be too large. Team Connectus set a target of making 300 fishcakes to sell from their cod, yet only managed to put together a measly 89. The person at fault for this was undoubtedly the chef for the day Brett, who was too worried with meeting the specification of the fishcake recipe rather than acting pragmatically. This is a case of where not adapting to potential issues can cause major business failure and is the key reason why the team only managed a disastrous profit of £1.87!

Lord Sugar was on his usual form as ever, shutting down Mergim’s waffle by asking him “where he was going” and “what his point was”. Our previous blog on the benefits of working for Lord Sugar might interest you, which is available here. The Apprentice is on again tonight on BBC1 at 9pm for the second episode where the candidates will have to create a new brand of shampoo.