The Apprentice

Welcome to our new blog!

On this blog, we will be covering one of our favorite shows NBC’s hit TV show The Apprentice. We want to hear from you. Who are your favorites? Who would you like to see go next? Please try to keep it clean— our kids read this.

Monday’s Apprentice business tip from Donald Trump was “Keep it Simple Stupid”. 

Team Gold Rush kept it simple and came up with a great billboard advertisement for grape nuts cereal.

On the other hand, team Synergy did not keep it simple. Their message was way to complex. In marketing a product you need to keep things simple. You need to appeal to the basic wants of people. Not only was Synergy’s message complex, it did not really appeal to most people’s basic desires.

The other thing one could learn from this is that it is important to consider the marketing platform when running a marketing campaign. While Synergy’s marketing campaign might have worked in a TV commercial, it was way too complex for a billboard.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I found Brent’s behavior as annoying as the next person.  However, I don’t think there’s any way you could say he was responsible for the team’s loss.  It seems like (and granted we’re only seeing a tiny edited piece of all the interactions) the team didn’t like him from the beginning, and I can only assume that’s because of how he looked.  He did seem a bit sloppy in his dress, weight issues totally aside.  And he was a bit bizarre at times.  But he was never really given a chance to show whether he could perform, either in a leading or following road.  I don’t think, by any stretch of the imagination, that Brent was going to be THE Apprentice, but I think he got the short end of the stick.

Donald Trump will be attending auditions, even though his wife Milania just gave birth to their son Barron William Trump.  Open call auditions are set throughout the country for March and April.  Contestants are now auditioning for The Apprentice 6, which will be in Los Angeles.

Perhaps you may remember Troy from the first Apprentice.  He was the “good ole boy” from Idaho who, despite only a high school education, survived far past many of his Ivy League educated co-competitors.  Troy is doing a lot of things this day, including hosting his own syndicated show.  If you want to catch up with Troy and read some of his thoughts on business, real estate, and more, then check out this interview.

Brent Buckman was the apprentice candidate who was a tad, um, large.  Well, he’s lost over 60 pounds on his bagel diet.  It’s a bizarre diet that consists of eating 4 bagels every day and not much else.  It kind of reminds me of Jared’s Subway diet.  Perhaps Brent is hoping for a nice endorsement deal from Lender’s.

Well, last night was another example of how important it is to bring the right people to the boardroom if you’re project manager.  If Dan had brought Lenny to the boardroom, I think he would have gone home.  Instead, he chose to bring Lee, who had done nothing to contribute to the loss.

I didn’t think that Dad did a great job as a leader.  He was a bit frazzled.  He had a hard time delegating to anyone other than Tarek.  He didn’t step up and make decisions when they needed to be made.

Speaking of Tarek…  he better not go back to the board room, or I think he will be going home.  How many second chances is he going to get?  I’d much rather see Lenny go before him, but I’m not sure that’s going to happen.

I was glad to see team Synergy win, simply because I like Roxanne.  And because I wanted Andrea to SHUT UP!  I think in real life, I’d probably like Andrea, but I think she’s way too driven as an individual to play nicely as part of a group.

So, that’s the wrap for this week.  What did you think?  And who do you think will be The Apprentice?

Donald Trump’s business tip this week was to listen to your people.

In Monday’s show there were a lot of contestants talking but not listening. The worst offender was the project leader of “Gold Rush” (the losing team), Dan. He didn’t seem to listen to any of his people, until the very end of the task. And then he only listened to one person (Tarek), who gave him bad advice. Everyone else on the team disagreed with Tarek’s advice, but did Dan listen to his people?

 No!

The show was rather interesting, because not only did the leader of the losing team not listen to his people, the winning team (Synergy) had a listening problem as well. The people on Synergy weren’t listening to their leader. That is not surprising, because now that Brent is gone they have to find another scapegoat. The problem is that their target is in my opinion one of the best competitors on the show (Roxanne).

You have to listen to your people if you want to succeed in business. What if you don’t have people working for you?

Then you should listen to your friends, family, and better yet your customers. You don’t have to agree with them, but you should sincerely try to listen to them and understand the point they are making.

There is much more to listening than hearing!

Listening is hearing AND understanding.

It is important to listen to your people and to listen to your customers. Not doing so is bound to hurt your business.

I have a quick update for you.

Just wanted to let all of you apprentice fans know that this coming Monday (April 3) The Apprentice is at a special time: 10PM ET/PT.

It seems to me like too many of the candidates on the Apprentice have broken the number one boardroom rule “bring the people responsible for the loss into the boardroom with you.”

Last night was no different. Bryce (The project leader) for Gold Rush, brought in the wrong people. He did not bring in the two people most responsible for the loss and worse than that he brought in Lee who was celebrating a religious holiday and was in no shape or form responsible for this loss. If you bring in the wrong people, you get fired. It’s pretty simple.

Now, sure Bryce might have gone home anyway, because the fact that his team was late to the meeting with the executives from Arby’s was really his doing (and Charmaine’s). But he might have made it through if he had brought in Charmaine and Tarek.

I think Charmaine must be playing this game really well behind the scenes.  This is not the first time that someone has gone home because they didn’t bring Charmaine into the boardroom.

I just found out that Yahoo has all of Donald Trump’s business lessons from the Apprentice online. You can replay the video segments from each Apprentice on this page.

 Pretty cool.

This week’s business lesson from Donald Trump was “Command Respect”. Now in this week’s episode there could have been a lot of other business lessons, like “Get to meetings on time”, “Don’t blow off questions from executives”, and “apologize when you make a mistake”. All things that if Bryce had done at the outset their team would have had a MUCH better chance of succeeding. Another good one, is “treat your customers with respect”, showing up late for a meeting without an execuse and/or apology violates this rule.

Getting back to Donald’s lesson, you have to command respect from your people. The way you do this is by treating them with respect. That does not mean you let them walk all over you, but you have to seriously listen to others and respect them. Bryce did pull his team together, and while he might have commanded respect from his people by doing so, he failed to command respect from his customer (the Arby’s execs), which ultimately lead to his firing.

In some ways I wish Bryce stayed, because he did a great job of helping them work together as a team by showing his team members respect, but he didn’t show respect for the customer nor do he show respect for Donald, so how could they in turn show respect for him?

Last night, NBC showed two weeks worth of episodes for the Apprentice ( week 7 and week 8 ), so we will have several posts to write about the episodes over the next couple days.

Stay tuned…

Not much voting yet, but here are the results of our last poll:

Who do you think should have gone home Monday?

Bryce: 50% (3)
Lenny: 33% (2)
Lee: 17% (1)
nobody: 0% (0)
Total Votes : 6

The first episode Monday was the episode for Week 7. The task for week 7 was to remodel a special Boy and Girls club room to help promote an Ace Hardware community outreach program.

Team Gold Rush started off on the wrong foot. Lenny got caught up in what he wanted to do, before meeting with the Ace Hardware execs. He failed to prepare any questions for the execs. Not only that, but he didn’t ask the Ace execs what they wanted. He just went full steam ahead with his plan. Boy was that a bad mistake.

Synergy had their own problems. The project leader Michael was very indecisive and it almost cost them. However, they did listen to the Ace Hardware execs and managed to make a room that was exactly what the execs at Ace were looking for.

It was pretty easy to pinpoint Lenny as the one that would be going home. Right before the boardroom, Lee was telling Lenny how he would stick up for Lenny. While it was admirable, I think Lee could have talked himself off the show in that boardroom. I get the feeling that Donald really likes Lee. He can probably see a little bit of himself in Lee.

Anyway, Lenny went home as expected and Gold Rush probably lost the weakest player they had left (which was good for them).