Junior Apprentice: Cheesy Without Sir Alan Sugar?

The Junior Apprentice has arrived!

And, we all know that Sir Alan Sugar has morphed into Lord Sugar. Has that changed him on this new version of The Apprentice? Well I can report that it hasn’t, not one jot.

Junior Apprentice Cheese Task

So this first task is to sell some cheese. And by the way not just any old lumps of cheddar. No, the plan here is to sell a variety of cheeses, including some with eye-watering prices.

The girls choose the obvious market to go and sell their cheeses – Covent Garden. Because it has a high throughput of people over the day. The boys on the other hand chose a market that on paper looked as though it should be a good place to sell cheese, but as it happened wasn’t.

Credit Crunch Lunch

Tim Ankers came up with the Credit Crunch Lunch which meant the boys had to buy stuff to go with their cheese. They really should have realised from other Apprentice tasks that loading yourself with more costs hits your profits.

Anyway, Tim produced some credit crunch lunches and they sold like hot cakes.

Only problem: he didn’t make enough and his project manager Jordan De Courcy didn’t allocate anyone else to help him. In fact poor Jordan came across as the most inept project manager I’ve seen on Apprentice for a while.

The Apprentice Sell Cheese in Bulk

The boys really struggled to sell cheese. Part of the problem was that  their sales seemed to be with office staff dashing out to get something to eat and consequently only lasted over lunchtime (12-2pm).

They’d also dashed out without knowing the cheese prices and subsequently set-up their stall but had their heads down working out the prices, and making mistakes on prices and just taking too long before they started selling.

Jordan then decided to bag up some cheese and try and sell it “business to consumer” and dumped the vast majority back into a cool box for fall-guys Tim and Rhys to sell, “business to business”.

To be fair to Tim (Fall guy 1) he did suggest restaurants might like to buy it. Unfortunately Jordan hadn’t told them the cost price of the cheeses they had. So Tim and Rhys basically just dumped it at a massive loss to a happy chef.

Girls Start Slow

The girls were much slower to pick their team name, to pick their project manager and to get out to their pitch. However, they did have the sense to work out how much the cheese was first!

Covent garden was a good choice as it turned out and they managed to do some good selling. Zoe Plummer managed to be very convincing as a saleswoman and sold cheese left right and centre. The problem being, that her project manager wanted to make her mark and tried to interrupt her in the middle of a little negotiation. And Zoe told her, politely, to get lost.

Back To The Boardroom with Cheese

The girls managed to make a fair amount of profit from their cheese sales. In fact they should be pleased that in general the team seemed to operate well together.

The boys on the other hand had been led by someone who had difficulty taking control, or even deciding what to control. The consequence was that everything was done in an ad-hoc manner. The result was that the boys made a stonking great loss.

Fingers were pointed by Jordan at anyone who was passing. After all he’d said he was the most qualified to win the competition and the loss couldn’t be down to him, could it?

Well in reality the whole management of the team was done badly and Jordan did deserve to get Lord Sugar’s firing finger.

That said I do think that Tim and Rhys were slightly to blame in not even considering the cost of the cheese they were dumping. And Tim made a real error by not insisting on Jordan doing more Credit Crunch Lunches.

Did I enjoy this version of The Apprentice? Without a doubt, and I look forward to the next episode.

LiveJournal Tags: The Junior Apprentice,Sir Alan Sugar,Lord Sugar,BBC,Adam Eliaz,Arjun Rajvagor,Emma Walker,Hannah Cherry,Hibah Ansary,Jordan De Courcy,Kirsty Cleaver,Rhys Rosser,Tim Ankers,Zoe Plummer,Cheese Selling Task