Last nights program was a bit of a fiasco. How did they work out who had won. One big order from VIRGIN keep fit.

BUT what about all that equipment they were going to have to buy for the centres. Space hoppers £2 more like £15 the cheap ones will not last with adults on them. £0.50 more like £4 for a skipping rope and Hulla Hoop £1 well perhaps £6 so

£25 worth of kit with 20 in a class is £500 per centre x 119 centres is £59500.

If you work their figures out £3.50 x 20 = £70 x 119 = £8330

Hmmm .. So working on that looks like the other team WON

Not surprised VIRGIN wanted it they were just buying kit

No, it was purely based on the selling of licenses to the gyms.

These kind of tasks are always confusing to most people, as stuff like sales and profit gets mistaken for one and another.

This was not a task based on their business model, but rather a task based on pure sales to the gyms (the costs being left out of it).

There are basically 3 kind of tasks in terms of selling (or perhaps even more):

1) orders
2) sales
3) profit

Agreed but following that formula you could offer each GYM a complete set of new equipment costing £30,000 in return for an order of £20,000 and it would be a no brainer.

If they are going to perform like that in real life then £250,000 is not going to go far at all or will someone step in and point out the error.

completely agree, may as well bribe them if its based on that and no outher outside factors.

Absolutely. It's nonsense.

It was in the end , but doing it on sales alone without looking at profits after costs didn't make any sense .Its just bad task design by someone who just assumed no costs. If they could do that without penalty, you could have offered a fitness course where everyone got a gold bar to lift up and down - and could keep it at the end of the course. That would sell well to gyms and customers......

there's also the point its not a real order is it ?and with Stephen being in the "health Club sector" whose to say they didn't give him that order just to Hopefully help him win and stay in

I've long since given up on this show being any credible test of business acumen, but this week was a new low. Sterling/Beat Battle secured a development deal plus an order at their asking price. Phoenix/Groove Train got an order at HALF the price they were asking for, after also agreeing to fund the equipment costs. LS pointed out the latter fundamental flaw in his initial sum-up, then completely ignored it 5 minutes later. In every other sales task I can recall, the (simplistic) formula has been sales - costs = the magic number. On this basis, even going with the cost figures they pulled out of their a*ses, Phoenix/Groove Train were *slaughtered* by Sterling/Beat Battle.

Would have been nice to see one of the losing team show some balls and point this out in the boardroom...

Absolutely spot on. The other team should have won.

If steven ends up having a business plan that siralana wants/ a business plan that made it to the final - then i am inclined to believe this happened! if steven had failed it would be hard to justify sackng someone else so they invented an order that made no sense at all due to the cost of materials

I agree that the costs should have mattered but then they didn't in the biscuit campaign when Jedi Jim promised Asda celebrity endorsement (was it Harry Potter branding?) in the last series.

Maybe costs are only accounted for when LS provides them with a budget like in the shop task last week when it was about profit and not sales?

I think it's pretty safe to say that one of the Phoenix/Groove Train gang is going to win the series. The only reason such a flawed concept could have won is because they didn't want to risk the 'winner' coming into the boardroom and making such an arse of themselves that they'd have to be fired...

The second point may well be true. But Asda must have given feedback on their order - ie, we're sceptical about HP but we love the product anyway. so the order stands, rather than 'only if jk rowling hands out samples on launch day'.

If the gym people had said 'we want it without the props' then the order would have been fine. maybe this was edited out?

I doubt it. The free equipment was the major USP of Groove Train. I always think it's a bit of joke when one team get orders from all three retailers and lose to a team that get an order from only one retailer.

Just like the Popcorn task in the Young Apprentice. Three very good candidates were eliminated on the basis of one made-up number from a retailer.

However, as flawed as Phoenix's business model was, I don't think the win should have been awarded to Sterling. The task rules were clear at the start: Whoever gets the most money from the gyms will win the task. Regardless of costs.
This was similar to design tasks, where they pitch to retailers and the team with the most orders would win without considering the cost to produce the product. If Sir Alan had said at the start that the cost would have been taken into account, then fair enough, but he didn't and consequently, Phoenix assumed (not unreasonably) that they had an unlimited budget.

It was (as previously mentioned) like the ridiculous Jim pitch in the Biscuit task last year. He was promising millions of pounds of endorsement (which was just ridiculous) to Asda, but even though Lord Sugar mocked the pitch, Venture still won.

It sucks, but those were the rules of the task and, consequently, Phoenix should have won, in my opinion.

yes they do seem to use those rules so next time offer them all diamond-encrusted pimp cups!

There was a very telling comment made by LS in choosing the winner of this task - he opened by saying: "Well, however you look at it..."

expand please

Agree completely. Heck, Sugar even spotted it in the boardroom. It was possibly the biggest travesty I've ever seen on the show. The win was a combination of fluke and a completely ludicrous loss making deal. I sometimes think Sugar should have one wild card per series where he can over rule the financial numbers if it's obvious the winning team should blatantly have lost, but somehow conspired to win.

All the orders on the tasks are fake. They are 'hypothetical' orders based on the product/service's potential but in real terms they're meaningless orders.

It's most likely Sugar decides who wins and then they work the orders, the actual numbers, to suit his decision. This week he decided he preferred the bouncy retro dance routine so they got the best orders. I wouldn't be surprised if this is how it's done.

Let's not forget, this is a show where the two finalists get hired (prior to last year's change in the format when Tom got the investment), where the boardroom is fake, the secretary is an actress, where they film the "getting in the taxi" scene at the beginning of the series! So why should the 'orders' be real or make any sense?

I do broadly agree, but in fairness, we've never subtracted the price of --

a. Hiring a camera.
b. Hiring an edit studio.
c. Hiring a location.
d. Paying the actors.

-- etc. etc. etc., all of which would make massive dents in the profits of a campaign, so sales-without-expenses is kind of the only way to calculate a number that means anything in particular.

Honestly, though, I think Phoenix inadvertently called the production team's bluff. The gyms won't actually be running the memberships, and nothing in the rules said they couldn't promise peripherals, so I figure they just had to work around it.

If Jim can promise the cast of Harry Potter and a multi-million pound advertising campaign, it's not entirely out of left field to promise a few space-hoppers. Keep them looking daft in the edit ('cos it was a fairly dunderheaded thing to do) but when it comes to it... what are you going to do?

Judging by Lord Sugar's comments on twitter when the Young Apprentice semi-final went out, I'm willing to bet that this isn't the case at all!

To say he was annoyed about which team he had to fire would be something of an understatement.

I agree up to a point - in the real world all costs would be a factor. But I think there's a distinct difference between the marketing costs, and the value of the product / service itself. And I think when they're doing the tasks its reasonable to assume they have an equal budget to spend on the marketing costs, and that the product / service itself should be of an equal value.

[quote=thenetworkbabe;57759124]It was in the end , but doing it on sales alone without looking at profits after costs didn't make any sense .Its just bad task design by someone who just assumed no costs. If they could do that without penalty, you could have offered a fitness course where everyone got a gold bar to lift up and down - and could keep it at the end of the course. That would sell well to gyms and customers......[/QUOTE]

I'd miss out. No way would I take up an offer like that because I'd think there MUST be a 'catch'.