When Zoe said she charged for the two pitches, I think it was around 100 quid, Sugar replied and some something like "if you charged £50 you would have won the (second) pitch." This made no sense because the other team charged nothing so why would the guy have agreed to pay Zoe's team 50 quid?

Unless I've got it all confused, Sugar showed zero business sense when he made that remark.

I think he meant, if YOU gave them £50.

Did he? I thought he meant they should charge £50 but I could be wrong. May check it out on Iplayer.

According to the rubbish millionaire expert on You're Fired, you always charge for collecting rubbish. Zoe was correct to charge although it sort of backfired in the boardroom. Sometimes whatever you do in The Apprentice turns out to be wrong, even if you try to do the right thing!

This .....

If Sugar meant "you should pay him 50 quid to secure the deal" then he was wrong. The guy on You're Fired said he always charges for rubbish removal. You're not supposed to pay the customer some cash to remove the rubbish. The customer is meant to pay you.

Lord Sugar got it wrong, but the whole show was confusing.

The premise of the task was you charge them, not pay them so yes LS was wrong.
Susan really thought she was right last night and when she said "So i'm not an idiot." That made me laugh!!

Was it? I thought it was to make the most profit. It that's done by not charging, as was shown to be the case, then how is it wrong?

I think Zoe thought they needed to charge to remove the rubbish

If she said "We will give you £50 for all the rubbish"..... it might of been a different story.

Well I think thats where the team went wrong.

Actually the premise of the task was you look at the rubble you need to clear. Work out its value. If its resale value is £600 and you estimate it will cost you £200 in costs then you might agree to do it for nothing because you will get a net plus of £400.

If you go to that rubble and there is nothing resaleable, but it will cost you £200 then not only are you not going to do it for free, but you will have to charge at least £200 before you see a penny in profit.

Simples.

I think the task was flawed because there were so clearly items that could be sold on in both the pitches Sugar provided.

Zoe was trying to do the task as it has been described which was as Sugar described it based on 'margins' - charging less than you had to pay to dump the stuff with anything you made from reclaiming rubbish as an extra profit on top.

Helen was able to subvert the model because there were clearly items on which they could make more than enough to pay to dump the rest.

I don't think this was the intention of the task, full marks to Helen for spotting how to win it but it was poorly devised because it let her do that.

Because it was stated at the very start before the task had begun. You are providing a service, they pay you. It makes no sense to pay them for clearing it because you might not sell it and end up paying to dump the stuff.

It's fine if you have a guaranteed buyer lined up but they couldn't guarantee they had a buyer for all their stuff.

It's not where they went wrong.
They were both suppose to put forward a price for removing it and whoever were cheapest got the contract.
The only reason Zoe lost was by sticking to the task and charging for removing something when the other team did it for free.

Exactly, well said. Helen did good because she made a profit on the stuff. But if she had even put a bid for say £30 or something she would of still won the contract and made an even greater profit.

You just couldn't run a business on that premise day in day out.

Often on tasks like this, the pitches provided for you are traps. They generally involve a lot of work for not a lot of money, and they take up time that you could use more profitably elsewhere. This has led to some of the biggest Apprentice fiascos. For example, last year they were bidding to supply bread products. The PM Shibby won contracts for rolls, but massively over-stated what they were able to produce, couldn't deliver, and ended up paying compensation. Meanwhile there was more money to be made in selling higher margin products to the general public.

I think Susan fell into the same trap. She wanted the junk so much she would have bid too much for it. She seems quite optimistic and bubbly, which must be nice to work with, but that's twice now she's nearly sunk a task by trying to spend too much. In real life her approach might pay off more because you wouldn't have the silly deadlines.

it is unrealistic in that you are often not competing if you offer a reasonable price. They said that the first job would have been priced at about £100 normally. All these things come down to costs and revenue - if you bid lower, you get the value of the goods. Sugar was right because even paying out £50 would have got Zoe's team the desks on which the other team obtained £300.

The real problem in these tests is that labour is not included - which is why the businessman said he always charged.

I have had this - I was clearing out an elderly relative's flat and the dealer offered to do it for nothing as there was some value in what was there. When he came to collect, I had discovered that a small corner cupboard actually could be unscrewed - he offered me £25 for it. Two years ago, when copper wasn't so pricey, I had a small tank taken out and decided to hang on to it. The (not so) local scrap dealers were only prepared to offer a few quid for it as I am in a hard water area - plus I had a drive to dump it. It was outside and a bloke rang the bell. He asked if I wanted it and when I said no, he asked if he could have it. he had no additional travel costs as he was collecting scrap metal anyway and I saved about an hour on top, so I let it go. Your own costs are not always the same as the other party's.

It would have lost the task, though.

If it was right for Zoe to offer £50, then it must also be right for Helen to offer the same, because the teams were on an equal footing. If Helen had offered £50, everything else would have worked out the same - the same teams would have got the same contracts, done the same work and made the same profits - except that Helen would now be £50 worse off. So she'd have lost by £44, had she done that. Had Zoe done it, other things being equal she'd have made her loss bigger rather than smaller.

It looked like either team could offer £5 and still win the task, but that figure is only apparent with hindsight. Helen was close with £0. Zoe's bid was uncompetitive, but at least she didn't fall into the trap of over-paying.

You can't say whether they would have lost the task or not, had they secured the second contract. Obviously if Helen's team had offered £50, they would have lost, but if they'd been unable to secure the contract, there's no way to say whether they would have been able to secure extra work to make up for it the way that Zoe's team did.

Similarly, if Zoe's team had won the contract, that doesn't mean that they wouldn't have been able to carry out most of the work that they did on the second day anyway - from the footage we were shown, it looked like Helen's team spent relatively little time picking up the office furniture.

That would be my point, and why I phrased it like that. It's one contrafactual where we can have some confidence. And I think the conclusion is compelling. How can it be right for Zoe but wrong for Helen when the teams are starting from the same position?

What happens if Zoe wins the contract we can't be sure of. It's not reasonable to suppose they could have done all they did in addition to the extra contract. Clearly there's an opportunity cost. We can only guess what it is. I think the only unbiased guess is to suppose Zoe would do what Helen did and vice versa, but I can understand if you don't find that compelling. Where-as the argument about Helen paying £50 extra is compelling, in my view.


They also had to take the time to sell it. Which means finding a place that wants it, that will permit filming, and then all the travelling, etc. We're just guessing. A lot goes on we don't see; it's rarely as quick and easy as it looks.

Any way you look at it, being out of pocket by an additional £50 is a bad thing when the task is won or lost by £6. And to automatically assume it's worth paying £50 for desks you can sell for £300, is just wrong, because it ignores the opportunity costs.

I don't disagree with anything you're saying here; only pointing out that you specifically stated that paying £50 would have (not might have) lost Zoe's team the task. There's a perfectly good chance that they would have won even if they had paid, especially since Edna seemed to do pretty well with securing appointments, and Susan negotiated very well at one point - there's no evidence that Helen's team would have done as well with that (though I'm not saying they wouldn't have).

Essentially - I'm not automatically assuming that it would have been worth it, though I think there's a strong case to be made for that, but you specifically did state that it wouldn't have been.