The Apprentice – Ricky Hired!

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Created on Thursday, 07 June 2012 08:23

So Ricky hired as The Apprentice! Here’s our breakdown of the final four’s performance.

Jade

The final confirmed that Jade’s strengths are as a salesperson, and together with her enthusiasm and passion I am sure she will go far in the future. Where she fell short was in the vision to come up with a potential new business opportunity and mainly in her failure to construct a meaningful business plan. She had not thought about or allocated costs in the first six months and had not created a potential cash flow or balance sheet.

Nick

Nick had a lot of good qualities and this was proven when one team had to choose someone from the other earlier in the series and they all chose Nick. He is very likeable and has lots of good ideas; unfortunately he wrote his business plan more like a thesis than a practical business plan. He tends to have lots of ideas but then perhaps not enough focus to see one of them through. It was good to see him stand up for himself in the interviews as this strength has let him down in the past where he has not perhaps been persuasive enough.

Tom

Tom constructed and presented a very good business plan. The main concern would be that it was perhaps too ambitious in terms of the first few years’ objectives.

Tom has shown signs that he does not deal with pressure situations very well and maybe if the plan did not go well he would struggle. He also presents the case from the point of view of his own expertise and sometimes needs to think more about the person he is presenting to. One of the main reasons for losing was the business that he was intending go into relied a lot on Lord Sugar’s name to promote it and Lord Sugar was not too comfortable with using his name as the main persuader of people to invest.

Ricky

A worthy winner because of his performance in the tasks and also for the well-constructed business case that he put forward. It proved that the business idea does not need to be the most innovative. It was a simple plan but he was able to show that he knew the business and had market research and financial plans that proved it could be a success. The varied skills that he showed throughout the process confirmed that he would be able to deliver on the plan.

He was criticised for his childlike personal statement on his application but praised for the detail of his plan. Ricky confirmed that he has learnt a lot over this process and would not make the rash statements he made in his personal statement now. I also think that Ricky understood the process pretty well. The entertainer in him (he is also an wrestler in his spare time) understood the to get on the programme you need to present something of an entertainment value. His personal statement achieved this. To win the programme he also understood that you needed to prove yourself over the tasks and also have a good business brain and plan. He was proved himself very capable in both of these aspects.

Your thoughts?

So that’s it for The Apprentice 2012! Congratulations to Ricky. What did you think to Sunday’s episode? Get in touch via Twitter or the comments box below.