Junior Apprentice Make A Cake of Themselves

Lord Sugar’s eight remaining apprentices arrive to do battle once more. And they get a fast start at 6am.They arrive at crystal makers Swarovski. Unfortunately their task is to ice and decorate cup cakes, sell them and make a profit.

Instinct Project Management Forced on Rhys

Poor old Rhys is fingered for the poisoned chalice, oops Instinct project manager. Further than that Tim manoeuvres his way out of the selling of the cakes by opting to go into the kitchen.

After a brief discussion it’s decided, without that much thought or actual logic that the team will go with a fashion theme. How on earth do you represent fashion in an interesting and appetising way on a cup cake? surely names, mottos and designs should be the order of the day.

Kirsty and Rhys investigate cup cake prices and Rhys leads from behind, behind Kirsty. Rhys’s team didn’t really investigate the market but do offer a range of different prices.

Adam and Emma are trained in cup cake decorating and told they have to do a good job, otherwise customers wont buy. Their cakes are pretty much disgusting and I wouldn’t buy one.

The team are located in Selfridges where they must have a reasonable chance of selling some cup cakes.

The sales of fashion cupcakes is not even a trickle. Kirsty Rhys starts to get the team to pre-ice cakes.

Finally at 4pm Hannah leaves the kitchen and joins the sales team to help with the sales.

Rhys weakly bleats about getting a sales strategy – bit late don’t you think?

Although Tim, Kirsty and Hannah are happy to do Rhys down they’re not particulalry interested in trying to make sure their team wins the task. Tim and Hannah should have been on the sales floor right until the first orders started pouring in. Then Tim or Hannah or both should have gone down, depending on orders.

Rhys is clearly well out of his depth and to be fair you can see he doesn’t really appreciate how to manage people or tasks.

Revoloution Picks A Love Theme

Zoe, is the project manager for Revolution. The team decide to go with a love theme. The team need to make their samples to display on their stall and Revoloution samples actually look worse than Instincts.

Zoe and Arjun work out the number of undecorated cakes to buy, after Zoe admits number aren’t her natural way. Luckily they also stop to investigate how many people are likely to buy more than one – none.

Back at the base their decorator team idiotically suggest making a larger number of cakes (800!). Luckily Arjun has worked out how many they need to sell per hour and scoffs at such a ridiculous number.

When they get to their pitch in Selfridges Zoe and Arjun start to sell their cakes very effectively. Unfortunately Adam and Emma can’t deliver the iced cakes quickly enough. In particular Adam is completely useless as a decorator and takes an absolute age. In the end of course cakes aren’t to the satisfaction of all their customers. What’s worse is we discover that Adam isn’t well – I just hope the customers don’t suffer from the same thing.

Lunch comes and goes and sales dry up, almost completely.

Emma comes up and points out that the sales team are not putting their best foot forward and are putting off customers by their display, or non-display.

Back To The Boardroom For The Juniors

Revolution manages to make £348.82 and after costs of £333.67 make £15.15 profit. Which is a profit, even if it was a rubbish one.

However Instinct manages to spend £352.58, spend £262.84 and arrive at a £89.74 loss.

Sir Richard Branson is the reward for Revoloution’s win.

Meanwhile Instinct have a good go at Rhys. The team suggest Rhys wasn’t pulling his weight.  Kirsty says to Rhys, “you just weren’t there mate.”

Finally Rhys chooses Hannah and Tim to go back into the boardroom with him. Rhys gives an impassioned speech about how it’s a great opportunity for him. However, Lord Sugar heard an impassioned one last week so he’s probably now immune.

Lord Sugar suggests to Tim that he’s been a bit backward in coming forward into the project management position – guess who’ll be project manager next time then?

Ultimately Rhys just didn’t manage the task properly, couldn’t get the team working the right way and didn’t respond to the issues as they arrived. So Lord Alan’s finger pointed his way and sacked him, in the nicest possible way of course.

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