New series of the Apprentice starts
by Tom on March 25, 2009
in The Apprentice
I have always been a massive fan of the Apprentice ever since it launched. I have pretty much watched all the UK and US series and enjoyed them. It is great to see business based shows reaching the masses although I am doubtful they offer any real business value. If nothing else they might make people aspire to more than being a footballer or a rock star.
This season started off as usual with the back to basics task whereby the teams have to do some really simple task in order to make the most money. It is always very similar and in previous seasons has involved selling coffee, flowers, lemonade and that sort of thing.
As (almost) always – it is boys vs girls to start with. All the usual ridiculous characters are there battling to see who will be the alpha male on one side and queen bee on the other. Both teams managed to pick passable names relatively quickly for a change too. This part is pretty painful watching so we can skip over it.
The task was cleaning. It didnt matter what they cleaned – they just had to clean stuff and whoever made the most profit won. The obvious choice here is cleaning cars. Interestingly the guys team did some shoe cleaning for a bit which seemed to be going well – they made £60 an hour between three of them which by far tops what they were making with cars. However they only did the one hour then went on to clean cars.
The car cleaning from both teams was pretty ridiculous. It is by no means difficult, or complicated in any way to clean a car. Yet somehow both teams struggled – even with simple concepts like closing car doors before pressure washing. To cut a long story short, the teams spent £100-£200 on cleaning materials and turned over £250-£300. We are looking at roughly £100-£150 profit per team of 7 or 8 people. This means essentially each team member generated only £20 profit in a day. How are these the greatest up and coming business minds of the country? Kids make more money selling lemonade outside their house.
Two recession beating tactics
I have done a lot of trade fairs and spoken to a lot of business people over the last three months. There is the obvious theme of the economic slowdown or credit crunch or if your prefer the technical term – recession. Everyone is cautious and the focus seems to be on cutting overhead. From talking to all these people I have noticed two main trends – firstly, dropping less successful lines of business and focusing on the main money makers, secondly taking on new products in order to build more revenue and split the risk.
Focusing on the most successful parts of the business is a solid approach. Drop anything which is not performing so well and put your man power where it is most productive and generating the most return. The obvious problem here is that eggs in basket situation. You have increased exposure to reduced demand on one product line.
Taking on more products is a more pro active and adventurous approach. If the new products complement your existing business then you are leveraging your existing customer base and generating more revenue from the same number of customers. There is amazing potential to have a great return on investment if you do not have to do the initial legwork finding customers. If your new product is in a totally new industry you run the risk of having to do all the hard work and investing now with no reward for the first few months. This is dangerous territory in hard times when cash flow is tight. We all know though – fortunes are made during recessions, and it is a great time to boost your market share whilst your competitors are too scared to act. Be too bold however and you wont last.
Blogging or not as the case may be
I have obviously not posted here for months. It is not that I didnt enjoy it, it is not that I havn’t been publishing content online regularly. I have just not found time nor the focus to do much with this. Changes have meant I do not have the spare time I once had so much of. Recently though, inspired by a few friends, social media and blogging have become something I would like to do more again.
Instead of starting a new blog I plan on using this one. I love the name – Technogumption. I will still talk about techy things and internet marketing is still something I am very interested in. The biggest change will be that the blog is now more personal.
Lets see how it goes.