Current Article

The Apprentice Jenny Celerier, Another Katie?

By jimsym on Apr 5, 2008 in Jennifer Celerier, Raef Bjayal, Series 4, Sir Alan Sugar, The Apprentice

Hi, Enjoy the post. If you find this blog useful, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed so you don't miss out on the nuggets. Thanks for visiting!

Table of contents for The Apprentice - Series 4

The task this week was to start a laundry business, just for one day. The teams were given an industrial laundry each. Oh, and
just to make it interesting the laundry is only available until 2am!

And of course they have to get customers, process the laundry and deliver it before meeting up with Sir Alan the following
afternoon at 2pm.

Child’s play? Not with these apprentices…

First I’ll go through the trials the boys and girls team faced, how they pitched for two showpiece laundry loads (a hotel and a fishmonger), then the
boardroom and then my view on the firing.

A Renaissance For ex-NCO Simon

Raef Bjayal volunteers as Renaissance’s project manager, as long as the boys are, “behind me 110%.” Give me strength, is Raef a
management platitude generator?

Simon Smith raises his hand to say that he’d operated a laundry in Bosnia, so had a pretty good idea how it worked He also makes it very
clear the team could mess it up. Just what the assembled viewers are hoping Simon!

Raef sends a team to knock on doors with the intention of working the street “till it bleeds money.” The team discover that
going for bedding works.

After the fishmonger pitch Raef tells half the team to head back to the laundry to start processing the hotel stuff.

The boys, under ex-NCO Simon’s direction pile into the laundry and make a good start. But it’s obvious they’re snowed under.
Simon rings the rest of the team to ask them to come and help.

Raef gets the sales lads coffees (what about the monkeys in the laundry Raef?).

After some more time Simon rings again to disrupt the calm of the boys in the back of the car. Raef says they’re on the way and
then after ringing off, says, I can’t stand whiners.” Raef is not acting like a leader, people are human and need to feel they’re supported.

After some hard grafting and finishing almost exactly on the 2am deadline the boys complete all the laundry, including the ironing. The next morning they give it all back without a hitch.

Alpha Arguments Deepen Divisions

Jenny Celerier volunteers to lead Alpha. Jenny gees up the girls by saying “we need to go and work our cotton socks off today.”

Then she proceeds to speak at them for an hour giving everyone a sales lecture. It may be what she’s good at but it’s not what
they need!

She continues by saying, “we need to brainstorm.” It’s obvious that Jenny really, really likes the sound of her own voice.

That’s something that is underlined later in the evening when one of the team observes that it wasn’t a brainstorm because she didn’t listen to
anyone.

Every time someone raises a question she tells them to stop, because she hasn’t finished. As time goes on through this episode you realise it’s not because she hasn’t finished it’s because she wants to monopolise the floor.

Lucinda points out that it costs £2.00 per wash and is told to speak to Helene about “her ideas.” Later Jenny suggests pricing each laundry item at £4.99!

Meanwhile as the girls are spoken to the boys have taken all the ironing equipment with them, so the girls can’t use it.

The girls go door to door and are finding it difficult to get business. Although having an opening where you say we’re a NEW
laundry business is suicidal.Who wants to trust stuff to a new laundry when they don’t know whether their procedures are
working?

When they ring Jenny she says it’s clear they need to concentrate on the domestic market. No, wrong again Jenny! You were over-
priced, because of what you said to the team.

In the end the girls head for the right place, restaurants, where they get business, at last.

After the fishmonger and hotel pitches (see later) Jenny rings Helene up to ask for something on tumbler driers that she’d asked her scapegoat (oops I meant
Lucinda) to research for her. Lucinda pointed out that Jenny hadn’t asked her to do anything, despite Lucinda asking whether
she wanted her to do something.

What made me laugh was the face Jenny made when she came off the phone with Lucinda and then said she didn’t expect a member of
her team to act like a spoilt, silly little girl. Right back at you Jenny!

Eventually (at 8pm) half the girls arrive at their laundry. Unfortunately they’ve a great number of bags from lots of different people. Shazia works out a system to make sure everything is kept together for each customer.

By 11pm Jenny’s team has got another £100 of laundry, although if they’re priced at their previous rates that could be more like £400 worth of washing. The other part of the team has been washing since 8pm, without assistance.

Shazia noted to Jenny that they needed to get back before the boys to get the irons. Like an absolute idiot Jenny lets the
architect of the identity system walk out the door to go and get the irons - send someone else!

Jenny is a bulldozer who, as one team member said, goes on and on. To make sure she wasn’t the only one who would be in the boardroom she had another go at her chosen scapegoat (Lucinda).

When the girls try to sort out the laundry Shazia says they shouldn’t have left early as they were the ones who were in control.

Then in the car on the way Lindi suggests a 15% tip from everyone, so they can maximise their income! Get real, people don’t have to tip at all!

Then Jenny apologies to the customer for them having to pay!

Then everything goes wrong and Jenny’s team lose people’s clothes.

Renaissance Win The Hotel Pitch

The boys check their prices against a laundry company (99p per double sheet) then Jenny says, without any checking, “let’s charge every item at £4.99″.

The girls pitch to the manager first, he normally pays £200 for his 1,000 items. He points out to the girls that their prices mean he would be paying £4,999. Ah, they say, but that includes a hot line manned by two of the team. Is it me or are they just stupid?

Were the girls so ground down by Jenny that they blindly did what she said? Didn’t any of them think to say that you could buy a towel for less than the charge Jenny suggested. I noticed Lindi being very supportive of whatever Jenny said, not a good sign.

Oh and by the way notice how Jenny didn’t do the Hotel negotiation herself, even though she was in the car with the two who did the negotiation? I think she’s very political and recognised that if it went wrong it would be one of two show pieces that would highlight the problems and show the two involved in a bad light - which it did!

The boys come in and priced the job at a shade over £500.This time the manager volunteers the price he’d be willing to go for and the boys (with Raef as part of the negotiating team) accept the £200.

The Laughable Fishmongers Pitch

The two girls who are in the same car as Jenny look at the laundry and decide that it would take two wash loads (so cost £4) so they pitch £10 (normally the fishmonger pays £60).

The fishmonger hints it might be a lot less than he normally pays. They make it £15 for including ironing. He then hints again, by asking whether they’re sure! Then he says with a smile, “let’s go and check it.”

Come on girls he might as well shout, “you’ve under charged me!”

Afterwards the girls debate whether they went in too high or too low…They’ve even got a global pricing leader on their team, surely they should get their prices sorted out?

Meantime the boys propose £49.50 but as the fishmonger says the girls came back with an unbelievable price. And Raef has the sense to say they’re not going to go with it.

In the boardroom

The ladies are fined £50 for losing some clothes and lose after making £195.55 compared to the boys £328 profit.

The boys then go off to a slap-up tea at the Ritz, during which there’s piles of male bonding and Raef even stands up to make a mini-speech. That man will go far!

When the girls get back in the boardroom Sir Alan points out the flaw in their hotel and fishmonger pricing and is flabbergasted by the girls asking for tips and the girls hotline with a personal account manager.

Jenny pounced on Shazia’s absence as the reason for the error in the clothes. Then she made another dig about her favourite scapegoat (Lucinda). Finally the girls started to argue amongst themselves.

Was The Firing Fair?

When Jenny was asked where Shazia went wrong she said that for the entire process she felt like she was breastfeeding Shazia and Lucinda. She also said Shazia lied - which made Shazia look baffled. Certainly any lies must have been cut during the editing process.

Jenny said that neither had supported her and that they couldn’t deliver.

Shazia was fired for the heinous crime of leaving the laundry before all the clothes were identified.

All the way through this task Jenny made sure she had a scapegoat.Then at the last moment through what another team member said in the boardroom she realised she had another in the form of Shazia who’d left the laundry before every load had been identified.

In actual fact during the whole task it was evident that Jenny kept making mistakes, blaming others and setting up a scapegoat. She was articulate and able to browbeat the other team members about what she said they’d done. Neither of whom really stood up to her. However, she positively proved that she was a totally incompetent project manager because she let Shazia go back to the house to look for the irons.

Lucinda didn’t come out of it particularly well and shot herself in the foot by not waking up for the 7am meeting. In the Apprentice anyone who doesn’t make a meeting is already on the downhill slide.

Shazia should never have left the laundry as she knew the tracking system she’d devised and could have checked that it worked through to the last load. However, in the urgency of getting the irons the “project manager” simply forgot about Shazia’s important task.

In the end Jenny should have definitely gone. The most heinous crime is setting up a scapegoat in case you fail. Compounded by what appeared to be deliberate lies about her team and the fact that she was completely unable to stop herself from talking complete and utter rubbish and wasting people’s time during the task. And while I don’t think Jenny is the same as Katie, from season 3, it’s obvious she’s going to stop at nothing, and no one, to get what she wants.

del.icio.us 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, laundry task, Alpha, Renaissance