The Johhny Vaughn lookalike should have been booted.

WTF was skiing?

any idiot could see that wee boys and cars was what would sell. No one was going to buy a dvd unless it was a parent.

There was no point going on about over stocking DVDs unless they had a scooby doo about demand which they did not so it was not a factor. You cannot criticise Liz for thinking that it may be bad to run out but you can criticise Stubags for not thinking about that.

The main 3 errors were

1. skiing

2. starting late

3. Under ordering dvds

I was thinking 'kids - you need to appeal to kids' at the start for the same resons as skip_tech. So I was pleased that Jamie also cottoned on to the idea.
But where it went wrong was they then failed to actually do something that really did appeal to kids - where was Joanna then
What is ironic is that Stubaggs managed to produce a kid friendly product by accident - though I suppose him still having a mental age of about 5 probably helped.

So true

The mistakes were:

the pricing (Liz and Sandeesh's fault)

the over-ordering (which the oh so bright Liz based on an estimate of being in demand 100% of the time)

the lost hour (due to Sandeesh's desicion to put the people who had been trained on the production system in charge of sales and the person who hadn't already been trained in charge of production)

not putting the person whose idea the skiing had mostly been and who would therefore have had more enthusiasm in trying to sell it (Sandeesh's fault)

dropping the price, which was too low to begin with, before any other options had been even considered (Sandeesh's fault)

Liz and Chris having the sales technique of a gorilla with a sledgehammer (Sandeesh's decision to put them there).


Whoever Sandeesh had taken into the Boardroom with her, she would have been out because all the decisions that led to the problems were hers.

I found it interesting that all LS could throw at Jamie was that he felt he was ultimately playing an important role and said so, and that all that KB could bring up this week for her weekly dose of Jamie bashing was that he was telling a bad PM what she was doing wrong.

To be honest, I didn't actually think that either vids were bad choices at the time - though skiing isn't really kid-freindly and needs the winter wear. What lost it for them though was the pricing and costs.

James Max gave a quite funny opinion of Baggs' vid on his twitter account:

"Stuart made a video so people can make it look like their child is being repeatedly run over by a tit in a BMW, how can he lose?"

http://twitter.com/thejamesmax

"the over-ordering (which the oh so bright Liz based on an estimate of being in demand 100% of the time"

hang on what was she to do? - base it on a pure guess at demand based on what - she did what any astute business would have done.

These were mistakes (except for not putting Jamie on sales; I don't think his having had the idea would have made him any better at selling the product) but so was using a skiing background. If they'd used a car background from the start I think they'd have won in spite of the other mistakes.

Liz based her estimate on 8 DVDs per hour. The people showing them the software said about 4 per hour was the maximum. So she was out by a factor of two in her initial estimate, before they decided to spend an extra fiver to get even more. A good estimates has to be based on the data. Anything else is just guesswork.

No, they had two computers so could theoretically knock out eight in an hour. Why do people keep forgetting this point?

But in the absence of being given a mean and standard deviation, it's a reasonable rule of thumb to average the maximum (8 per hour) and the minimum (0 per hour) to give a ball-park figure: i.e. 50 DVDs, rather than 110. This would still have turned out on the high side in reality, but at least it would have left some leeway to manage demand. This alone would have reduced the losing margin to below £10.

Unfortunately, admitting that one's sales team aren't necessarily super-humans who are inevitably going to max out production capacity is something that requires a degree of humility and management acumen, things that aren't exactly in over-supply on this show.

To ibeca
If Stuart would have lost by about the same margin. What would you say his mistakes were

I think way too much is made of the DVD ordering. Okay, so they over-ordered. You can buy 100 writeable DVDs for around £10. Even with a loss of only £40 55 extra DVDs wouldn't have made any difference.

Their other option was to buy fewer and send someone out to buy more if they were running out. The problem with that is that if they were that busy they couldn't have spared the manpower to send someone out to get them as their team only had 4 members.

Sandeesh was right, it was better to spend an extra fiver and end up with a surplus of DVDs than it would have been to run out in the middle of the day. There weren't many other things she was right about, but she was right about that. The over-ordering of DVDs seems to have been brought up as an issue purely for Surallen to have something negative to say to Liz in the boardroom.

The supplier they were using (and probably had to) was charging 50p a disc. 55 extra is therefore £27.50, even though I suspect no-one here would spend that much on blank DVDs.

Almost certainly as costs were to be deducted as part of the task. Seems a lot but they came with library cases. The individual price might have changed with quantity as it would in the real world. 100 off seems a likely number for a discount. They still over ordered but something like 80 would have been the sort of number that shouldn't see them run out.

Buying both seperately would bring the cost down to 35p each, using Tescos and Sainsburys.

What really did for their sales was choosing skiing. What then doubled their costs was hiring (?) the toy car. Depends how late they did that.

From the voiceover they worked a 10am to 8pm day (possibly 9pm - Liz's calculations were based on 11 hours, but Helpful Voiceover Man definitely said 10 when trading started), opened at 11am, and the car was obtained at 4pm. Prices were slashed at 3pm, at which point only 8 sales had been made. This is about as good a timeline as I can make out.

Skiing was not a bad idea, they just had a crap video. If they had both Skiing and a car it would have been better, you cant beat having a car, all the little boys would be all over it.

Should have been cars for little boys (and StuBaggs )
and ponies for little girls. Would mean trying to source a ridable toy pony though...

You assume that they had the requisite software on both machine.

The laptop wasn 't a Mac, it looked to be an Hewlett Packard (running Windows), so it wouldn't have iMovie to import the movie from the camcorder tape and burn it to DVD.

Do you seriously believe that there is no Windows software that can import camcorder tapes?

Indeed.

I seriously believe that there was no software installed on that HP laptop that could import camcorder tapes.

My favourite windows software was Pinnacle Studio myself, but have dabbled with both Adobe Premiere Pro and Roxio Videowave at times.

Plus, for windows, you would also need DVD burning software.

Also the laptop may not have had a compatible IEEE1394 (Firewire / iLink) port to support the single tape machine that they had.




I currently have a Mac with iMovie, as part of the iLife suite, and Final Cut Express. (All I need is some inspiration to use it. )

But that's nothing but speculation. You have no way of knowing how the laptop was configured. Or what equipment may have been present but not appeared in shot.

You can't (reasonably) criticise someone on the basis of how you think that the equipment might have been configured.

Having used both Macintosh and Windows computers for video editing, albeit on a personal basis only, IMHO the speculation is valid.

I was just pointing out, to parthy, that they were two different, possibly incompatible systems. Different hardware, different software so they would have had to train them on two separate systems (which is unlikely).

I believe the only attempted criticism was directed at me.

Err, as Jepson is pointing out, how can you guess what software etc they are running? What they had there is almost certainly a turnkey system. All hardware (inc camera) and software supplied to do the finished job (you just 'turn the key' and off it goes). It was supplied by the people that trained them to use their system. They probably supplied the dvd's that were tested to work with their burners. I haven't seen people doing blue screen videos for the public before, but it looked to me like a franchise business. All neccessary equipment is supplied (background tapes, screens, etc) as part of a complete working package.

I took a one day course once just to use a mac (long term PC user). The tutor who was evangelical about the apps that came with the OS, had never used a PC (windows or linux). He had no idea that nothing I saw looked 'amazing'. I've seen PC freeware with more features than some of that stuff. Of course that system was running whatever software it needed to successfully do the job with the minimum of skill.
You won't need to be a proper trained film editor.

Yeah - Skiing would've worked better if they just used some stock footage from skiing down an actual mountain rather than just Skiing in Milton Keynes.

I think is was a huge mistake not having Jamie on the sales team - but it seemed that Sandeesh decided that just because she'd worked with Chris and Liz more in the past so was more comfortable with them.

Jamie made a very good point to the team when sales weren't going in that they were dressed wrongly - would you really expect a team in a business suit to be trying to sale you a DVD of a fake skiiing experience? That point was just completely dismissed though (by Chris) as being complete wrong.

Jamie could see that it wasn't working out and was getting frustrated because it was his idea - but he wasn't given any chance to try and fix it and was just ignored or accused of being too aggresive when he made any suggestions.

Stuart is a truely terrible PM but his team won because Sandeesh lost. If anyone else had been PM of that team I think they would've won.