Young Apprentice - Week Four Appraisal

Week Four of this year’s Young Apprentice tasked the budding entrepreneurs with another difficult few days, in which candidates had to select and sell innovative products to the over 50’s at a retail show in central London.

Lord Sugar ironically revealed details of the task to the groups at the Natural History Museum, cue disapproving looks and wry smiles from the majority, as another tricky challenge awaited.

The teams were again shuffled round, with Haya and James claiming the team leader roles for the week.

Team Kinetic

James and his team were firstly tasked with selecting from a wide range of products, aimed towards the older generation.

To the team’s credit, they were sensible and calculated, as they quickly to grips with determining the unique selling points of each product together with the price range they could be sold at.

A ‘designer’ shopping trolley and a hand-vac were duly selected by James, beating off competition from team Atomic for the trolley.

To the retail show, and the hand-vac quickly proved to be popular, as the team demonstrated its use effectively and were clear and concise in presenting its qualities to onlookers. The shopping trolley, albeit a more pricey item, was slower to sell.

Team Atomic

Atomic’s Haya and Lewis had began their meets-and-greets with the product designers well, but then started to stumble around. Lewis was often tongue-tied and lacking in eloquence as negotiations to tie down deals began in earnest.

Consequently the team lost their preferred item, the shopping trolley, to Kinetic, and had to backtrack quickly, choosing an expensive interactive bird box as plan B, together with a pie maker.

The show proved to be even more disjointed to the team, as pensioners gobbled down free samples of the pies without getting their hard-earned cash out. Spectators were impressed by the birdbox but again were not inspired enough to actually make a purchase. Harry managed to shed five boxes late on to the leaders of other stalls, but you quickly got the feeling that Atomic’s stalls hadn’t proven particularly successful.

Pensioners suckers for hand-vac

In the boardroom, both teams, in rare shows of unity, acclaimed themselves as happy with their respective team leaders, as formalities got underway.

Lord Sugar was quick to upset the love-in, point out Atomic’s flaws in failing to bag the shopping trolley as one of their products.

It proved to be a telling factor with team Kinetic bagging an impressive £300 more profit than Atomic in a fairly routine victory.

Lewis was then highlighted as a major contributor to the failure to get the desired products, leading him to be the next candidate shown the door and driven off into the distance.

Kinetic continued on the winning trail, taking it to four triumphs on the bounce, with Atomic still struggling to get out of first gear.

Business Finance with SBF

Here at Skipton Business Finance, we are proud to be able to provide invoice finance to the UK’s SMEs.

With budding entrepreneurs and new-start companies the lifeblood of the economy, we always look to support as many companies as possible with reliable and flexible finance.

If you are the owner of an SME and are looking for cash flow funding, why not give one of our expert team a call today!