Budding small business owners should be glued to the gogglebox in order to learn some valuable lessons about business from TV smash hit show The Apprentice.
I’d advise anyone thinking about starting their own business to watch the show as an example of what not to do in order to be successful.
The show is hugely entertaining but I do wince at it sometimes because the contestants seem to approach sales and negotiations without preparation, planning or much discussion.
The contestants are clearly under pressure to sell in order to win tasks but the way some of them go about it serves as a textbook example of the wrong way to approach the process of making a sale.
Time and again you see the teams getting their sales strategies wrong and never achieving the full financial potential of the products or services they are selling.
And that’s the crux of the matter because Sir Alan Sugar has been consistently clear about what he expects in the TV show which is now into its fourth series.
Love him or loathe him, there are lessons to be learned from the man who built Amstrad and as much as the programme serves as a warning about what not to do, there are also some real gems of what to do to make a success of any business.
The main thing that strikes me every time I watch it is that Sir Alan wants the contestants to understand they should be turning in a profit on each sale. It’s the lifeblood of any successful business.
But you see it week after week. Contestants get pricing wrong or end up panicking and practically giving away products to get as much money in the kitty as possible at the end of each task – but often I think they could have got so much more if they’d have had better preparation and better strategies.
Ian Thornton is from franchise network Apollo Blinds
