New series of the Apprentice starts

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.