The Apprentice Week 3: Shibby's shabby jokes fail to impress
This week's Apprentice clearly showed the need of any good business leader to always have a good overall view of everything. The task was simple, bake something and sell as much of it as possible to corporate and individual client's.
Thankfully both teams managed to make a decent profit, as they did with the nearly identical task in the first episode when the would-be Apprentices had to make and sell sausages.
Team "Synergy" led by the increasingly obnoxious Melissa Cohen appeared to get off to a bad start due to the inability of the team to make a decision on what they were going to make.
Things went from bad to worse however when, having made the decision, Melissa was totally unable to provide the cost of her product during a sales pitch. One would have thought that she would know the price of what she was selling before going into the meeting, but apparently not.
Luckily for her alleged "maverick" Alex Epstein came to the rescue with some common sense and the ability to do sums allowing Synergy to seal a corporate deal. The two came to blows later however when they took to the streets to sell their wares, with Alex and Stella English urging an indecisive Melissa to take the team to a more lively area to sell in.
Melissa made a cheap shot about him failing all his GCSE's and he responded saying he got 11 A*'s. Oh dear, they are aged 27 and 26 apparently, although it's hard to believe.
"Synergy" was blessed however by an efficient bakery team, lead by ex-Royal Marine Commando Christopher Farrell, who appeared to use his military training to create a smooth operation, without the Dan "the dictator" Harris histrionics.
By contrast Team "Apollo", lead by Dr Shibby Robati, were a team divided. After Shibby secured a very large order for bread rolls and other products from a 4-star hotel, he passed on the information to his own bakery team. Unfortunately the bakery team for some reason thought this was a potential order rather than a confirmed one.
As a result the "Apollo" bakers did not even start making the order for nearly 2,000 bread rolls, croissants, muffins etc until the sales team reached the factory at 8:30pm, just three and a half hours before the factory was due to close.
Their inevitable failure to come up with the goods did not go down well with their customer, who received only 16 of the promised 1,000 bread rolls and £130 in compensation. Shibby's joke that people at his hotel should "go on the Atkins diet", did not go down well either.
Despite this disaster of a deal Apollo did manage to make a profit by some hard muffin selling in Covent Garden. However it was enough to defeat Synergy, whose team members could override the shortcomings of their leader.
Shibby, having failed to lead his team to victory, brought Paloma Vivanco and Sandeesh Samra into the boardroom. Paloma's crime in Shibby's eyes was her attempt to get him to confirm more un-fulfillable corporate orders and her dislike at his unprofessional conduct during negotiations (which Lord Sugar's aide Karren described as being "like a sulky child"), while Sandeesh was accused of the "cardinal sin" of not pulling her weight.
Shibby, apparently attempting to play the comedian he claims to be, did no favours for himself in the boardroom by declaring that he was selling so hard he had no time to "break wind" and that Sandeesh could have "walked around with her top off" in order to attract customers. Cue grimaces from Lord Sugar.
With "jokes" like that Shibby had to go. And he did.
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