Fishing

Lessons from BBC TV’s “The Apprentice” – Series 16. 4. Fishing

For me, the best part of BBC TV’s The Apprentice is to reflect and think “what can I learn” from the candidates’ ups and downs?

Episode 4 in series 16 presented a complicated challenge with many moving parts, all of them something to do with fish.

The bottom line is, to win this task your team has to make more profit than the other. As I always say, understand the nature of the task. That’s the first point and it may seem trite but it becomes quite clear that the losing team lost sight of this amidst all that was going on.

And there truly was a lot going on. Ultimately, the way the teams would make money was by selling fish to some restaurants lined up to buy it, and by selling some fish-based food that they would both catch and prepare at a market. They had to decide on a target ‘catch of the day’ to go out and catch which they would make their market fare from, and would also be selling to the restaurants along with some other choices sourced from the fish market.

I don’t underestimate the difficulty. Equally, I’m sure you increase your chances of success if you unite around a common understanding of the task such as that.

So what were the errors, the successes and the learnings? The plight of the hapless losers is always the more enlightening story of the two.

How did they lose? They chose to catch crab and the haul was good, so no problem there. It’s what they did with it, and didn’t do with it, that sealed their fate. What they did with it was make arancini balls for their market food. Arancini balls. I mean, I know what they are because I’ve been to restaurants and seen cookery shows on TV. But I’ve never been tempted to order arancini balls and common sense (bold because it’s a common factor in these tasks) says neither will the punters at the market. It’s not a popular dish. They had the idea of making a crab-based burger, which was an open goal, I think. The balls didn’t sell and, in the boardroom, it emerged that the team had overspent wildly on garnishes for their dish. Cost, you see. Price and sales isn’t the whole story of profit, there’s cost as well. And this was about profit. So, wrong product and wrong financials. Was that the cause of their failure? I don’t think we really know, because they also failed to offer, and hence to sell, their crab to any restaurants. Just forgot. Just forgot what the task was. The poor project manager was instrumental to both failures and got the boot.

The winners’ choice of pollack as a fish didn’t sound like a great start – it’s hardly more popular than arancini balls, I’d guess, and not an obvious choice. But what they did with it was smart – fun and funky fish tacos. Yum.

A dilemma running through this task was the time vs quality dilemma (which we know from the time – cost – quality ‘triangle of balance’ and other elaborations of the same theme in management). Preparing food to go on sale at lunchtime is a time challenge – the arancini turned out to take far longer than the tacos, also a success factor. The wisdom is, surely, what can you produce cheaply, quickly, easily and to a good enough standard that the punters will buy it in numbers, at a profitable price, and be happy? Similarly, preparing market-bought fish to restaurant standard is time-consuming and labour intensive: You only get the best price if you hit quality, but you get no sale if you don’t get it there in time. It looked like the teams balanced this as best they could, investing as much time as they could in the fish prep until they had to leave to make the delivery; and negotiating the best rescue price they could for failing the meet the full standard.

Added to that there was the challenge of buying fish at market to sell at a profit to restaurants with all the usual attendant aspects: Can you get the better of the fish seller at market in the price negotiation? Answer: no, he sells fish every day, you never bought any like this before. Can you get the better of the chef in the price negotiation? Answer: no, he buys fish every day, you never sold any like this before. Lovely editing showing us the candidates cunningly hiding their worst fish under their best and the chef cunningly going straight to the bottom of the crate to check the quality of the hidden fish! These tasks are hard.

A complicated task in unfamiliar waters. Blowing the costs (the garnishes) is an error of financial management. Choosing a hard-to-make, hard-to-sell product (arancini) is an error of common sense and commercial nous. Forgetting to even mention your main product to your prospect is lack of focus and … daft.