The Apprentice on BBC1 gets some bad press. Mostly, I think, because people think that it is a real business programme rather than an entertainment programme. Some of the tasks would be difficult to complete in two months, never mind two days. Who would expect to design and brand a new electric toothbrush in two days? Of course, This does not excuse them creating a product that looks like a turd!
The tasks seem to be made even harder by splitting the teams into two and then ensuring that one team cannot talk to the other. How can they be expected to design a coherent electric pod when the team designing the inside does not talk to the team designing the outside? The success and failure of a task sometimes also rests on their culinary skills, again, not something that they really should be judged on (unless that’s their business!).
However, all of this does not mean that we cannot learn something from it. There are three things that I have noted from this year’s series:
Negotiation is not haggling.
The teams frequently have to agree a price with someone to either buy or sell an item. This inevitably results in haggling, not negotiation. Batting a price backwards and forwards to come to an agreement somewhere in the middle is haggling. Only once have I seen any candidate introduce another variable, by offering to wash dishes after an event so secure a lower price for food. Apart from that, no one ever tried to vary the discussion to try to take the discussion away from the price.
Price is never the only variable that you can include in a negotiation. However, if you want to successfully negotiate a price, you need to think of other variables in advance. When agreeing a price for the corporate away day, taking one element out of the package in return for a lower price was never considered. You can be sure that had they done this, the buyer would quickly have agreed a higher price.
Engaging with the customer is worth a fortune.
When trying to do a deal, none of the candidates ever tried to build any rapport with the other side, or at least we were never shown any. However, if you want to do a deal, this is so important. The importance of engaging with the customers was highlighted again on the corporate day where one side spent time with their customers and one rushed them through the museum, resulting in them arriving for lunch early, with all the problems that came from that!
It costs nothing to build rapport apart from time but it is so worthwhile.
Ask the customer what they want.
While the whole set up of the tasks makes it difficult, it is critical that you ask your customer what they want. Neither team, when designing the electric pods, spent time asking the customer about their requirements. Of course, they had been required to come up with an idea before they ever spoke to the customer (who does that and why do the producers make them?) but they still didn’t take the time to understand their customer or their budget. As a result, neither side made anything like as much as they could from these companies. They could have won the task easily had they simply designed the pods to the requirements of these companies.
Always, always ask your customer what they want. It does not matter what you would like to design or sell them, it matters what they want.
There is so much that people can learn from The Apprentice as long as they remember what it is all about. The candidates do perform well in many aspects of the tasks and they should be applauded for this. The whole way that the show is constructed seems to set them up for failure although there are huge amounts of what they do that we never get to see. No matter how “bad” they seem, I’ll keep watching for the entertainment alone!