Episode 3

Starting A Business From Scratch

So I thought I had agreed to be a candidate on The Apprentice, but clearly I didn’t read my contract clearly. Apparently I agreed to be an extra on The Apprentice! On a more serious note, I'm not that bothered about my lack of airtime, I'm here to put my head down and get the work done. It’s a shame if that doesn’t get included on the show, but I know what I'm contributing and as long as SAS knows, I'm fine.

This week, we were asked to start a service business from scratch and make as much money as possible in Richmond. I was in the winning team.

I thought Tre was an ok-good project manager. However in my opinion, in this task he was not able to work at a strategic level. As you saw from the episode, he spent most of the day mucking-in and doing the gardening. While I commend him for this, I think he missed out on being able to see what was happening to his team and was not able to plan the activities for the evening. Now, I'm not a big fan of gardening, but I asked him on multiple occasions to step back and let me do the gardening so that he could devote more time to planning. I think he trusted Katie too much and this resulted in him losing control over Katie and Paul.

Katie and Paul were adamant they wanted to pursue the high-risk/high-return idea of hiring Simon out as a DJ. We were all against it, given (1) it was a Tuesday night, (2) restaurant/bar owners are unlikely to just impulsively fork out the kind of money we wanted to charge and perhaps most importantly, (3) Simon isn’t really a DJ!! In the end we chose sing-a-grams, where people (mostly drunk) could buy a song for other people (also mostly drunk). We had a great time doing it and it really helped rally up team morale at the end of, what turned out to be, a very long day.

Lohit Kalburgi