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The Apprentices are off to the Birmingham NEC’s National Wedding Show to try and sell wedding dresses and a selected line of accessories or wedding cakes.

But first each team must choose a bridal wear supplier from 4 suppliers and either the accessory line or the cake line.

And to make it slightly more difficult the companies involved must agree to be represented by the team who chooses them.

Let Them Sell Wedding Cake

At Michael’s suggestion project manager Helene splits her team by geographic area rather than getting one team to go and see all the wedding dresses. Then later Michael complains that an intelligent person would have had one team go and see all the wedding dress suppliers!

Immediately with his bit between his teeth Michael goes into see Ian Stuart’s wedding dresses and is effusive in their praise. The next moment he tells the camera that he feigned interest superbly, because that’s what he does for a living!

In the end Helene decides to choose the mid-range end of wedding dresses to go for. The only problem with doing that is trying to sell coloured wedding dresses when most people still get married in white. And each sale is still only making a small amount of money.

In addition because she didn’t choose Ian Stuart she loses out on the wedding accessories and has to go with the expensive wedding cakes. And it’s Michael and Sara that attempt to sell them. Michael in particular really goes out and does an extremely hard sell. Sara was also selling fairly hard too, though less gruesomely than Michael. However, it should never have got to that point, either Alex or Helene as the “leader” should have stepped in and helped them calm down and give them some useable feedback about ways to sell without metaphorically ramming cake down people’s throats. But no one stops Michael and he really takes it personally that no one is buying the cakes.

Helene’s stand also shifts a number of the coloured wedding dresses. The only problem is that the sales don’t bring in thousands of pounds and most not even hundreds.

Wedding Dresses By Ian Stuart Pulls Them In The End

Meanwhile Lucinda demonstrates her ability to pick the right people to do things by choosing Style God: Raef and ex-designer clothes stores worker Claire, and who bizarrely claims to be a girly girl, to review the wedding dress sellers.

Lucinda and Lee visit the cake seller and the knickers, flip flop and accessories seller.

Give Claire her due she asks the right questions of Ian Stuart and discovers that’s he won Best Bridal Designer for 4 years running (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007) and that he exhibits them across the world. Raef recommends that team Alpha go for the Ian Stuart’s dressings. Although that wasn’t Claire’s choice she doesn’t need any persuading to go with Raef’s recommendation and they all agree. That in turns makes the up market knickers and frippery seller go with them because Ian Stuart is a brand they really want to associate with.

Plaudits For Lucinda In The Boardroom

When the teams return to the boardroom team Alpha are universal in their praise of Lucinda as a project manager, including Claire who historically has been disparaging of her ability.

When asked for the figures Nick said that Alpha (Lucinda’s mob) had made £5,752.99 Lee’s work with the sparkly knickers made £647.24 and £5,105. Nick also said that Claire had done some sterling selling work and they’d been ably led by Lucinda.

And Margaret noted that Renaissance made £1,925 from selling 5 dresses and nothing from the cakes at all. So the winning team is team-Lucinda, oops I mean Alpha!

Once Sir Alan had congratulated team-Lucinda they all went out of the boardroom and straight into a group hug.

Team leader Helene holds up her hands and admits to making a mistake in not setting a team to go and see all the dresses. Michael, backed by Sara, says that the only reason the task failed was poor product selection.

However, in the end it all comes down to the fact that Sara never takes no for an answer. So Sara’s fired!

Was The Right Apprentice Fired

We have to remember that Sir Alan is not just looking at what people do in each task but the mounting body of evidence from all tasks that the remaining candidates have been in. He also gets a lot of feedback from Nick and Margaret who almost seem to live with the teams!

So I wouldn’t have fired Sara just for that task. However, she seems pretty difficult to work as part of a team and her project management skills were non-existent. Yes, I wouldn’t have taken her on. However, in my opinion Michael has managed to float along without really doing anything that strikes me as useful and he too really put the pressure on for the cakes for this task.

However, the person who I think was pretty lucky to escape for not giving one group the wedding dress checking job, for just standing around at the NEC and straight not managing was Helene. So for that task I would have fired Helene.

Technorati tags: The Apprentice, BBC, Sir Alan Sugar, Ian Stringer, Shazia Waheb, Lee McQueen, Lindi Mngaza, Alex Wotherspoon, Nicholas De Lacy Brown, Jennifer Celerier, Jennifer Maguire, Raef Bjayal, Claire Young, Lucinda Ledgerwood, Kevin Shaw, Simon Smith, Helene Speight, Sara Dhada, Michael Sophocles

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