The Apprentice

Well, this is the second week in a row that Donald hasn’t given a weekly business tip. I am starting to wonder if those are a thing of the past.

This week each team’s task was to design 3 men’s swimsuits and 3 women’s swimsuits for a fashion show. The team that made the most from orders of their swimsuits would win, but there was a new twist…

The winning team doesn’t compete in next week’s competition!

It was fairly obvious early on that Carey’s swimsuit design was a make or break design, and I was fairly sure it would be a “break” design. Sure enough, they lost again– this time because of the horrible design of Carey’s swimsuit. I really thought that the project leader (Nicole) should have recognized how horrible it was. In fact, I probably would have fired both Nicole and Carey, but that’s just me.

While there are many lessons from this episode, the two main lessons I got were:

1. If you are trying to sell to a mass market, make a product that will appeal to the masses. The losing team made a product that only 1 percent of the population “might” be interested in buying. That just didn’t cut it. If you are going after a niche market, then you have to target that niche. But if you only have six products, and you’re targeting a mass market, then you can’t afford to “waste” one of your product choices on a niche market.

2. If you are running a business, don’t let someone else push a bad idea down your throat.
There were several people who were unsure of Carey’s idea, but he pushed the idea hard. You can’t let that happen in business, unless you want to fail. Don’t mistake a passionate idea for a good idea. Know your market research and stick to it, no matter how excited someone might be about their pet project.

I am still on vacation in Florida, but I did finally get around to watching Sunday’s episode of The Apprentice last night. While Donald didn’t have a business tip this week, I have come up with two of my own that I will explain at the end this post. First, a couple thoughts on this week’s show…

I really, really enjoyed watching it. If you are looking for a recap check out Yahoo’s official Apprentice page which has an excellent recap of the Apprentice Season 6 episode 1. In fact, Yahoo’s official Season 6 Apprentice page is loaded with great Apprentice information.

I thoroughly enjoyed the plot twists. It will be interesting to see how living in a tent is going to affect the performance of the losing team. The winning project manager gets a HUGE advantage in the competition because they get a behind the scenes look at how the board room works. That has got to be a great advantage when they reach the board room.

Now for the two business lessons:

1. You Can’t Sell Without Customers
The losing team was so disorganized. They lost because they didn’t have big signs saying “Car Wash”. How basic is that?

2. Always Upsell
The winning team worked really hard and they barely beat the losing team. The losing team was so disorganized and took forever to get customers, but they did one thing right… they upsold their customers. Instead of just selling 10 dollar car washes, they tried to upsell everyone on detailing. The upsell almost won it for them. The winning team would have won in a land slide if they had concentrated more on upsells, instead of pure volume.

I think the losing team has a good chance of winning next week as long as the project manager from this week (Frank) doesn’t get involved in the decision making. They had a lot of strong members. The ones who stood out the most were James and Tim.

Other than the project lead, Heidi, you didn’t really get to see enough of the other team to tell whether anyone stands out as a frontrunner. Donald really seems to like Angela, the Olympic gold medalist from women’s ice hockey. He almost seems a little starstruck. But if you read her bio, you can tell why he might be.

Lastly, go check out Ivanka’s blog, it’s a pretty interesting read.

The finale’s business lesson was “Take Credit“. I learned this lesson a long time ago at one of my first jobs out of college. Sometimes other people took credit for my work. It wasn’t often but it did get bothersome. I don’t think taking credit for your own work means foregoing humility. In my case, someone I worked with would take credit for my work. So I made sure to let other people know what I did at the same time or before letting that person know. That way, I got credit for the work I did.

That said, I believe that giving credit where credit is due is actually much more important than taking credit for your own accomplishments. I wrote about this a little bit in the business lesson titled “Watch Your Back“. I have found that when you give credit to others, they in turn will make an effort to give you credit for your efforts.

Well, that’s the last business tip for Season 5 of the Apprentice.

“Work vs. Friendship” was the title of this week’s business lesson from Donald Trump. In this week’s business lesson Donald says that friendship and business don’t always mix. His statement is certainly true. It is hard to be someone’s manager and their friend and still effectively manage them when they are clearly not doing their job. I had this problem in my first job.

Just out of college I took a job with a small educational software company. In 6 months time I had a team of 5 people working under me. I became good friends with my employees and at times it colored my objectivity. Four years later when the company was closing down, I had to make decisions about who to layoff first and who to keep. It was very difficult to be objective when making this decision. I was obviously closer to some employees than others, it certainly played a role in my decision. Additionally, laying off someone you consider to be a friend is not an easy job, it can ruin the friendship. Friendships and businesses don’t always mix.

On the other hand, friendships can work well when creating a business partnership. You just have to be sure to define clear roles for the partners and go in expecting to do more work than the other partner. Doing business with friends can put a strain on the relationship, but sometimes it can make you even closer.

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Donald Trump’s business lesson Monday was:

“Death to Traitors”

This lesson was fairly straightforward. In this week’s episode, Allie and Roxanne were less like teammates and more like traitors. With traitors on her team Tammy had no chance to succeed.

If you have people in your business who are not team players, who are constantly down on the company and your business you are in trouble. You need to hire team players, not traitors. You need to make sure that the people you work with have your business’ best interest at heart.

That said, traitors are sometimes created by the business. If your business treats your employees poorly, you can create traitors.

For instance, all of the outsourcing that is going on this country is creating less and less employee loyalty. This low morale could really hurt US businesses. Many US businesses are creating traitors within their companies by treating employees with less and less respect. The businesses in this country need to look seriously at what they are doing, otherwise they may find that they have created a company full of traitors.

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This week Donald Trump’s business message was very simple “Deliver the Goods“.

The boys team “Gold Rush” spent too much time entertaining the crowd to realize that they should have been looking at other avenues for sales. The girls knowing they had their work cut out for them, found an innovative way to make more sales. If Gold Rush had spent more time selling and less time entertaining they might have “delievered the goods”.

This just goes to show that you should never get complacent with your business. You should always continue to find ways to improve, expand your sales, and ultimately “Deliver the Goods”!

Another business lesson that might have been have learned Monday night is “Don’t be wishy washy”. I think that is self explanatory.

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“Watch Your Back” was this week’s business lesson for the Apprentice. Both Sean and Lee did an excellent job of watching their back. If it turns out that Sean winds up on team Gold Rush (it looks like it in the previews), then Tammy needs to watch her back next week.

Donald Trump is right, in business you have to watch your back. I have learned this the hard way. I am just not into playing political games like Lee did this week. However, Lee did a great job of watching his back. The others in the group should have done the same thing, or at least talked to the other people they were not going to attack in the boardroom to make their own alliance.

I think that in the business world you need to keep an eye open to the politics that might be going on and watch your back. One excellent way to do this is by always recognizing other people’s accomplishments and not stabbing anyone in the back yourself.

I always try to recognize other people when they help me out at work. I am sure to let their boss know how much I appreciated their help and sometimes even their boss’ manager. This not only gives them the recognition they deserve, but it helps you make friends.

By recognizing other people they will in turn recognize your accomplishments and be watching your back for you, which is better than having to do it all by yourself.

What is so interesting about this week’s business lesson is that it is very similar to what I said last week in my extra business lesson.

In this week’s business lesson Donald Trump taught that you can and should excel in more than just business. He brings up the importance of having strong (successful) relationships with your family. He says that just because you are working hard on being successful in business does not mean that you can’t be successful in other things.

Donald stressed that it is very important to have balance in your life. This one of the best business lessons you can learn.

BTW- You can go here and take a look at any of Donald Trump’s business lessons from Season 5 of The Apprentice.

As Jill wrote in a previous post The Apprentice was not on last night. So obviously there was no business lesson from Donald Trump this week, right?

Well… the fact that The Apprentice took a vacation Monday night inspired me to write a weekly business tip anyway. This week’s tip is:

Sometimes you have to stop to smell the roses.

Even Donald takes vacations. All of us need time off from our routine. I recently wrote about this on my other blog here. However, The Apprentice made it clear to me how important this business lesson really is. We all need to take a break from our business.

So be sure to take time every now and then to change your routine, take a vacation, take a break from your work, stop to smell the roses, enjoy your family and friends. Do something (besides working on your business) that is relaxing and/or fun.

If you need more inspiration, check out what I think is the best blog post ever on this topic. Alice Seba wrote about this very same topic and I highly recommend you read this post (especially if you’re not convinced that everyone needs a break)…

Week 8’s business lesson from Donald Trump was “Know Your Customer”.

There could have been other business lessons like “listen to your people”, “listen to your boss” (Donald), “make sure the price is right”…

The thing is that the Project Lead of Gold Rush (Leslie) made the fatal flaw of not knowing her customer. She knew the customers were college kids, and yet insisted they would pay 7.99 for a sandwich??? Ummm, I don’t think I would pay 7.99 for a sandwhich from 7 Eleven, why would a college student?

Anyway, you have to know your customer to succeed in any business. It’s as simple as that.

Week 7’s business lesson from Donald Trump was “Be Decisive”.

Despite being indecisive Michael’s team won the task in Week 7. The reason he won is because they followed Donald’s business lesson for week 8, “Know your Customer”.

However, being indecisive drove the rest of Michael’s team crazy! They just couldn’t stand it.

Once you have gone over all the options and you get a pretty clear idea of what is the best thing to do, you need to “JUST DO IT”. Don’t keep going back and forth about your decision. You have to be decisive in business.

You don’t want to overanalyze things. Being indecisive is actually a problem I struggle with, and when you have this problem you just have to look over the facts and make quick decisions. You aren’t always going to be right, but everyone makes mistakes and the longer you agonize over a decision the less fun you are to be around and the more stressful every decision becomes. Eventually you will just stop making decisions altogether. And that is no way to run a business.

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?

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.

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.

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.