Errr, Helen clearly expressed WHY she was offering to do it for free after working out the costs / benefits.

So had this been a 'real world' situation she would have realised she couldnt offer to do it for free.

So your point about what would have happened in a real world situation is moot ....... Helen can only play by the rules shes given.

But the point is what were they intending to do with the furniture? Dump it as rubbish or sell it on? If their intention was the latter then they should certainly have considered paying the guy.something Maybe not as much as £150, but if Susie was of the mind that they intended to flog the furniture then she was basically correct. After all in house clearances the owner of unwanted property is paid money to have his goods removed by a clearer.

How do you know what she genuinely thought, given we never saw her express it on camera? All we can do is speculate, and it seems to me that she must have known in her own mind that offering to pay to remove it (oe do it for free) could be worthwhile if the rubbish was worth money. What we do know is that Zoe didn't grasp this at all.



She suggested paying to remove the 'rubbish', which is what I was referring to when replying to the other post. And, isn't it self-evident why Susan might want to offer to remove the goods for nothing/pay for it? Granted, she didn't explain herself (as I said above), but, unless you believe she was trying to screw the task what other reason could there be for her thinking?

I still can't believe people are defending Susan when we ALL saw her in the car .... hours after the event going 'Oh so I was right after all...'

A statement you would never have had to make if you knew in your mind that the goods you were carting away were more valuable than the cost of carting them.

Agreed, that sentence alone showed conclusively that she didn't really know either way but just got lucky in the end!

I didn't see her suggest anything of the sort. I saw join in a discussion in which she seemed to have mistakenly thought that the others were talking about paying for the stuff, then back down when they said she'd got it wrong.


Yes, but she didn't.


As I've said above, either she genuinely got it wrong, or she has a technique of saying things in such a confused way that she can claim to have been right whatever happens.

Ah well. As none of us saw any footage to clarify things, or have any insight into Susan's thinking, all we can do is speculate. My opinion is that she probably did know that taking 'rubbish' for nothing/paying for it is a financially viable model (something even her detractors here seem to agree on). What we do know for a fact (because it was aired, and Zoe later admitted as much) is that Zoe didn't understand that concept at all.

It's like scrap metal dealers & old cars - once upon a time, you had to pay them to take an old banger away, but now, with the price of scrap metal so high, they will pay you for the privilege.

She was right to start with. Was 'put right' by Zoe and Edna, upon which she said she felt stupid. Later she realised she had been right to begin with (which she was). None of this is contradictory. Susan's mistake was letting herself be swayed immediately by Zoe, who told her she was wrong.

Facepalm, again.

Let me ask you this: Forget what Susan or Helen did. If presented with this challenge, what is the smartest business strategy?

Two teams bidding for a clearance contract. A room full of good quality office furniture. The aim is to make a better offer than your opponent, so the client awards you the job.

What do you do to maximise your chances of winning here? Tell us what the smart, business-minded strategy would be.

But Zoe did what the guy on You're Fired (who works in this industry) would have done.

I think this has been one of those tasks where it's easy to criticise in retrospect because one team's very high risk gamble paid off. If Helen and co had lost (and it was extremely close), Zoe wouldn't be under fire for choosing the wrong strategy.

Regards the expert, the situations are incomparable; he has a staff that needs paying, an office to rent, transport costs etc (as his competitors do). None of that applies here. Also, I find it hard to believe, whatever he publicly says on the show, that he would turn down the opportunity to profit from the sale of semi-precious metals because of the need for a fee to remove them.

"I've got a load of copper that I need to get rid off. Want to take it off my hands?" "Only if you pay me to." I don't think so.

There's also the fact (as I and others have noted) that, here, they were directly competing with each other for the contracts. So, if one team won the contract, the other team, by definition lost out. Thus, it made more sense to offer a service, even at a loss. Again, this isn't comparable to normal business in general, where there are many more opportunities to be had.

And the criticism (from me anyway) isn't so much that Zoe chose the wrong strategy, but that she couldn't even comprehend a model alternative to her own. There clearly was, because it won. At least with Helen, she knew the risks, and that there was another way of doing it to her way, but she still chanced her arm. Innovative thinking that put her above Zoe.

Depends. Given there were three options, pay them. charge nothing and charge them, she had a 1 in 3 chance of being right - regardless of whether she had a good business sense guiding her.

Reading from Lord Sugar's remarks and the guy from the trade, its not a situation where there's a standard right answer. It depends on the nature of the trade, the negotiation, experience and instinct. In this case there's direct competition to outbid, but there's little knowledge on what can be made or how much time a job will take or what else (better or worse) may be on offer if you don't get the 2 contracts on offer. Melody challenges Helen's calls too proving again that the answer isn't obvious.

Zoe seems to have bid whats normal for the trade. She doesn't spot a difference between the two contracts and misses that the office furniture is more likely to sell, represents a more certain profit and won't take long. Its not that clear that she ought to have offered money for the second lot.

Zoe goes somewhat OTT, but her criticism of Susan then looks vaild. Susan doesn't argue explicitly that either contract ought to be bid for and give reasons. She seems confused too, and, if she has spotted a logic with the office furniture, or has a gut instinct, she has no argument to back it up. She then even doubts her own argument. She also does do what annoys Zoe - which is to identify (some of) the factors that ought to shape a decision and go on and on about them. As Zoe points out, that is what you would want to know , but , as there's no way of knowing it, there's no use in detailing the questions you can't answer and not deciding what to do.

In the event , I thought they majored too much on Zoe's mistake. She spotted it after, and, if anything, over-reacted to it.. It was never decisive though as she managed to get to within £6 without either contract. We saw from the detailed negotiations, that Helen having a bit more rubbish to pay to dump, a bit more metal found, lor getting £6.01 more or less in any of several negotiations, would have left Zoe winning anyway.

Its interesting if he has really put a negative marker down against Zoe - who is showing she has drive and can work hard - and whether Helen now is a dead cert for the final because he thinks she really does have the instinct needed to make the right calls and make things happen, even without enough information.

Clearing out unwanted furniture to make space would be for the company's benefit, but £50 cash could go straight into the pocket of the middle manager, the person who says yes or no.

Absolutely. He was as wrong as Susan was. Scrap clearers provide a service for which they are paid. They don't pay to take the scrap. What would be the point?

It's not the first time Nick has been wrong but he has yet to be wrong as many times as Margaret was in her years in the series. She would never have lasted as long in a job in the real world making as many errors of understanding as she did.

I think she probably would.

Oh God, youve just criticised St Margaret of Papyrus ...... that'll set the masses against you lol.

For what its worth I agree ... I think she was highly overrated.

And, yet again, I direct someone to my earlier posts in the thread where I detail where my company has done exactly that and turned a good profit. And those last 4 words, since you ask, are the point.

God... The key word is scrap. You don't pay the client if it is just useless scrap. But if the 'scrap' happens to be sellable items, it is perfectly right to pay for it IF it still makes you a profit and IF it wins you the job over someone else.

All that matters is how much you are in profit at the end of it, not whether you broke some 'tradition' of junk removers supposedly 'not paying'.

Nick and LS were both correct. Susan was correct (even though she stumbled on the right answer). Paying a small amount for the desks and chairs would have won the task for that team.


Quite. It looks like this new task not only befuddled some of the candidates but a lot of the viewers as well, clearly!

Me and the Mrs cried with laughter at that one.

Bid lower than the other team and guarantee some kind of money BEFORE hand incase you can't shift it maybe?

So it wasn't just me. Nick suggesting she was right in the boardroom really threw me and I thought i'd totally misunderstood.

How do you bid lower than zero and still get money up front?

There was no way they weren't going to sell the furniture. £100 would have been too much, but it wouldn't have been unreasonably to have offered some money for it.

On the first job Susan said to Zoe 'e just offered to take the stuff for £150'.. ( which was over the estimate of £100 anyway), ..'if it were me I'd do it for free', which is exactly the same conclusion as the other team had. Zoe then gave her a look as if to imply she was the stupidest person alive and said 'are you trying to sabotage me?'. On the second job Susan suggested paying some money around £100 or more for the desks etc. She didnt clearly state how she came to this conclusion maybe she thought the value would be more and it was worth it, or she did indeed get confused about what they were meant to be doing. Seeing as she suggested doing the first job for free, rather than paying for the rubbish, it came across that she did have some understanding of the task, more so than the other two.

Im willing to concede slightly on this, but her complete and utter failure to get this across, along with her 'Doh Im stupid' look and comments is something we cant just ignore or forgive.

I think from what I saw Susan was just lucky but I'm willing to accept that she may have thought it through and considered the selling value. We saw in the Apps task how awful Susan can be at trying to get her ideas across and if she started rambling like she did in that task then it's no wonder her ideas get shot down.

However from what we saw with Chris last year, LS has no problem with people just being lucky. In fact he seems to like it and will give them high praise for taking risks.