Well should Mhairi be reading this from France - Bonjour! We watched The Apprentice Final without you and if you don't want to know who won stop reading .......now! It wasn't Susan 'Inventor of GPS' Ma, it wasn't Jedi Jim, it wasn't Helen 'Flawless Victor' Milligan, Tom 'Mainframe' Pellenreau took it for the nerdy good guys everywhere. Supposedly, had this been any previous season of The Apprentice, Helen would have been the winner, but the change in format meant that here near flawless record of 10 wins in 11 tasks just didn't cut it as her business plan wasn't up to scratch. In fact it got a lot of flack, but I can see it working.
Basically she wanted to act as personal assistant for the world and his wife. So, for a monthly fee, anyone would be able to have a service that organised their dental appointments, sorted their dry cleaning, could book their accommodation and table reservations for business trips. This would be a franchised affair, so as more branches popped up in cities the bank of local knowledge would grow and as you used the service their bank of data on your preferences and habits would grow. Kind of like Google's ever expanding database of every aspect of our lives. (I know Google's data-whoring is greatly vilified, but I've found it to be a boon - I may pick up on this on a later post.) If I had a job a few grades up from the one I hold now; one where I was sent on trips and had suits that needed frequent dry cleaning and a chic and suave social calendar to adhere to, I would totally use a service like this. Think about it: I can ring AMSistant (crappy attempt at Lord Sugar branding notwithstanding) and say that I need to be in New York for business two weeks this Thursday and, without ever being there before, would know that they could book me a hotel room, get me dinner reservations, sort my flights, and perhaps arrange for a night out on Broadway if I'll be there long enough and all based on the things I have done on previous trips so I'll be happy. A phone call of a couple of minutes sorts a whole business trip tailored to me. Pure genius.
This business was not invested in for two reasons:
1) Not playing to the creators strengths. Now, I seem to remember Helen having a shot fired at her in the Boardroom a few weeks previously saying that she'd only ever been an assistant to those running companies and had never run a business before. Now she, is essence, wants to run a personal assistant company and they want her making cakes and pies?
2) Inability to provide contacts. I doubt any personal assistant comes able to arrange a specific favourite table in any given restaurant, the list of contacts and the pull you have with them grows with time. But Helen would surely have contacts in the area(s) she's worked in before to start with and her 50% partner Lord Suger must surely have a little black encyclopaedia of contacts to bring to the table. If this were to be a true equal partnership than the business should have been about what the two parties could achieve together with completely pooled resources. If Sugar did just want to front cash and wait for the ££££ to roll in, I think that just makes him an investor. This is the difference between 'The Apprentice' and 'Dragons Den'.
Tom's business was a well thought out 'double-strike' system of running a service to help businesses assess their risk of losing money through sick days brought on by back pain and showing them how to limit that risk by altering practices whilst also selling a chair, of Tom's own design, that aims to promote posture and thus prevent the onset of back pain. I can see business using it just as, health and safety legislation being what it is, I'm sure they'd want to help stop any lawsuits from employees injuring themselves from sitting at their desk correctly. It sounds asinine, but it happens! However, Seeing Lord Sugar's reaction to it with his aides, I was a little surprised he went for it. Though it would seem he just wants to cash in on Tom's other inventions already in the market, which seems a little unfair to invest in one candidate in spite of their proposal when you're snubbing the superior candidate because of their own proposal.
However... in other news check this shizzle out:
This is all stuff they're actually working on now. Stuff that will feasibly be coming to market soon. I almost literally cannot wait. I want to say more about this but my brain is so excited about the possibilites that it refuses to form transcribable coherent thoughts on the topic. I may have to return to this later also.
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