Plenty of people get fired who do not deserve to.

I believe she would have been fired as it would have been the reason for the failure of the task. I like Helen, tipped her as a dark horse a while ago.

I also do not think she would deserve to be fired.

Helen might well have been fired, but if they lost the edit could have been very different. I doubt Jim and Tom completely wasting the first day whilst Glenn and Leon used it productively would have been passed off quite so much as harmless comedy for a start.

exact-a-mon my learned friend (that's learn-ed ... not learned).

You going to fire Helen who understood the task, organised everyone, took a calculated risk (ie she clearly weighed up the pros and cons it wasnt just some random ..... oh lets do it for free on a whim decision) ....... over say Jim who can't be ar..ed getting out of his truck and is hollering to people on a loudspeaker?

Jim is already in line for the scrapheap ...... so he would have gone.

Helen showed that she understood that you had to think on your feet, and negotiate to get what you want and change your strategy with the different contracts on offer (she actually changes mode later too and approves them going for the building contract) She makes ther ight calls and pulls off a risky move which suggests either a lot of luck or quick ogic or instincts. You could argue that she should have differentiated between the two contracts on offer, and bid for the furniture - but, in the event, that would have been a losing move.

I think she's going to be safe as long as she clearly gets one call right, and doesn't lose by too much.The question would have been who went instead of her, and there's probably something there in how close it was, how Tom and Jim seemed to waste a long time not geting much, and how the team were fleeced on the building contract. However we didn't see enough detail there, and, if she hadn't got the contracts ,they might well have spent their time very diffeently.

Well I'm glad you finally admit that to pay the client for the junk (i.e. Susan's idea) is a legitimate tactic.

Can you remind me when Helen suggested doing this?

"admit"

Odd choice of word.

We sell our copper to a scrap metal dealer, but it is only copper and not mixed, assorted, junk that needs to be sifted with all of the time and cost associated and some of it sent to land fill.

Of course paying for scrap is a legitimate tactic, it was just utterly stupid in the context in which Susan suggested it given that most of the stuff there was junk and she had been advised by the expert in the business. She also showed she misunderstood the task.

She suggested paying the desks and chairs (eventually sold by the other team for £300). How was that utterly stupid? Can you explain please?

She ignored the advice of the expert in the scrap industry.

What guarantee would they have they would cover their costs if they had paid for them ?

What guarantee would they have they would turn a profit on the tables and chairs ?

Yes the other team sold them for £300. That does not mean that team would. Just look at the buying task for example.

They could just have easily not sold them or sold them for a few quid.

..and therein lies the difference. Helen made an assessment, felt what value she could get out of it and then priced accordingly (ie, flat fee of 0 ... neither charge nor pay).

Susan was just throwing random figures in the air .. 'I think we should pay more than a 100'. Why? She even had the opportunity to explain herself to Zoe and Edna and said nothing, because she didnt even know herself why.

If she had said ...... 'Well Im looking at these chairs and furniture and I think we can get at least £300 for them' then maybe she'd have a point. But she didnt. She didnt give any rhyme or reason as to a bid of around £150 ..... the Susan defenders are giving her credit where its not due.

Does someone who is so clever sit in a car hours after the event and go 'Oh .... so I was right ......' No. Because they would have already known it ....... she was clueless and luck smiled on her. Thats no way to run a business. I can flip a coin and call heads and win. That doesnt make me a genius, nor does it mean the next time I flip the coin I'll get it right either.

At least Helen spelled out her strategy, so rightly or wrongly, EVERYONE could see her thought process.

I think you are missing the point. The furniture was not rubbish so to speak. There were good quality with a resale value. Even the guy on the phone said that 'he was wanted to get something for the furniture'

That furniture was apprently worth £300, the guy clearly couldn't be bothered to source some buyers for it, so like LAS said - 'they should have just given him £50' so that they can reap the profit.

There is no guarantee for anything in life, but there was a good chance someone was going to buy the cheap office furniture.

The scrap expert never told them not to pay for anything. Such advice would be silly. If sellable goods are sitting there in front of you, there is no 'rule' that says you mustn't pay for them. All that matters is making profit from the deal.

Of course there's no guarantee. There is risk, but there is also profit and there is also the chance to deny your opposing team profit. Therein lies the win.

Utterly stupid? Your reasons are, yes.


Helen was PM and so had to spell out what her strategy was and show 'leadership' to her team.

Susan was not PM and only had to make suggestions. She did and was shot down by her PM.

Both Susan and Helen were thinking along the same lines. Helen took a little while to work out they didn't have to charge. Susan instantly assumed they were supposed to pay the guy for the desks.

Susan was doing what seemed obvious to her, rather than slowly arriving at that conclusion.

I ask you again, now that you have admitted that there is nothing wrong with the idea of paying for the office furniture (hooray!) please can you remind when Helen came out with that as an idea - (I don't remember seeing her say it, that's all.)

I am not missing any point try to be less patronising.

On another day the furniture may have been worth £50.

It was only worth what someone was prepared to pay for it.

Of course there is a chance someone would buy it. The issue is how much they would pay for it.

That showed her lack of business nous and immaturity. She may have done it just to get attention. She really seemed to have no idea when she was making the statement. I do agree that Helen was more logical and calculating. Perhaps Susan is the sort of person who plays hunches and gets them right most of the time.

Napoleon said something along the lines of "I would rather have a lucky General than a good one". Maybe Susan is in that category.

You're fired. :sleep:

The trouble is luck comes and goes. Logical thinking rarely does.

Susan may have drawn a 21 in this game of Blackjack, but there have been plenty of instances (I can sell 60 on my own in less than a day) where she's hit a bust.

I think it was so clear that they had to buy the furniture at least because it was high quality with a high resell value. Susan probably did express her views but they perhaps just didn't show it.

I wouldn't trust the editing 100%

If the fake tan had flown off their stall Susan would have been 'right' when she said she was confident she could sell more than they bought because she was experienced in the cosmetic business.

As it turns out she was wrong on that one, and instead of saying 'it's not sold as well as I thought' she tried to deny having said it and then said it was up to the project manager to assess her ideas.

On this task from what we saw she didn't put any kind of coherent understandable argument for paying for the furniture.

Admittedly Zoe hadn't thought past charging for clearing the rubbish but when Susan mentioned giving money to take the furniture she did - however ungraciously - check out if she had understood the task properly with Edna.

Even if Susan did know what she was talking about - which quite honestly I doubt - her inability to put her ideas across and persuade people to go along with her is a big weakness.

The task was lost only by £6 despite Helen's cleverness in spotting how to win both contracts. If they'd lost we all know that LS would have absolutely slated her for her high risk strategy and not sticking with 'margins' which is what the task was all about.

We know that they got there at 6, because we heard Helen saying that the latest they could get there was 6, and then we heard the business owner complaining that he was just about to lock up when they got there. We also know that the end of trading for the task was 7.30, because the voice-over man told us so. So therefore they can't have spent more than 1 1/2 hours on it.


If they could have made even more money on it, then they'd have been better off not getting the contract Melody sorted out and concentrating on the furniture.

But that's pure speculation. If the worst you can say about a job is that it could have netted them more than the third of their total profit that it actually netted them, had they had a bit more time, then that's a case for making more time for the job, not that the job was a bad one.


That's also speculation. Even just £200 would have been 2/7ths of their total profit for the day. Which, again, for 13% of their total time working would have made it highly profitable.

Well, according to almost everybody else (Karren, Nick, Lord Sugar, the You´re Fired scrap guy, Melody, Zoe, Susan etc.),she did use the wrong tactic (as people were tipping the scale one way or the other). Nobody on the management would have agreed with her had she lost.

As both Karren and Melody (and the scrap guy) said, it was a very high risk option.


P.S. Did anyone else notice that Natasha played another blinder with her 500 pounds suggestion

No, I'm talking about the team having to pay if they had to throw away things that they weren't able to sell. We don't know if they managed to sell all the furniture, I think we only saw them sell desks.


...and they would have lost by £94, which means that the other team probably had other jobs that were just as profitable. Or at least in the same range. I'm not saying it was a bad deal, but it was never the one important contract that the teams just had to get no matter the cost, which someone seems to believe (including Susan).

Which is wild speculation based on absolutely nothing. So not a terribly strong point on which to make a case.

But let's assume it's true, for the sake of argument, and that they did have to throw some of it away and thereby didn't make as much money on the deal as they otherwise could have. It still gained them 33% of their total income in 13% of their total working time. So it's still an incredibly good deal.

And if we do assume that they had some surplus furniture they had to get rid of, then all that's saying is that they had a larger pot of money that they could have dipped in to, had they had more time. Your argument is essentially "if the completely arbitrary and unsupported speculation I've put forth happens to be true, then they might have been able to make more money on the deal - therefore it was a bad deal".


We saw them selling the chairs, too. Is there any particular reason you believe that they didn't sell it all, other than that you believe it supports the point you wish to make?


Would they? You're assuming that that job lasted as long as the jobs that they did and that they therefore wouldn't have had time to remove and sell the furniture and do another smaller (albeit profitable) job in the time they spent doing one of the jobs they actually did.

You're also crediting Venture with the money that they gained from the furniture job, and to do that you have to assume that they would have found a different job which also netted them £300 in an hour and a half. I don't think that's a safe assumption to make.


It does seem to be the most profitable in terms of time vs, money. Of course we don't have a full picture but, from the information we do have, it looks like a clear winner. And not having the full picture doesn't really give us a license to make stuff up and base our arguments on false premises.

I read this thread and was going to post (in the same vain as you) but just gave up reading your better posts. On a side note is that you Tom??? (Multi post thing not/never working now? using FF not sure if that is causing it?)

That's a valid point. I hadn't realised they'd got to the desks so late. So the argument would be that if Helen had bid £50 she'd have lost the task, but if she hadn't got the contract she'd have lost even worse.

Susan never denied saying that they could sell the number of units she recommended they buy. What she denied (accurately) was Helen's assertion that she said she could sell that number of units herself)


Granted.


Which shows how random it can be. They were so close that you have to say that the success and failure of the teams was not down to the overall strategy but to small fforts to get an extra few quid here and there (like asking £410 instead of £400 for the scrap).

Yes, the four chairs. What happened to all the cabinets? They didn't look like an easy sell to me.


I'm not assuming anything. £200 for the furniture instead of £300 is £100 less profit. Everything else would've stayed the same.


Then you shouldn't do it either. You're speculating as much as I am, basing your argument on quite vague information about time, not taking the job's potential cost into account, and not knowing the time/money aspect of the other team's jobs.