I'm going to set up a business that makes no profits at all. (Jim).

I'm going to set up a luxury concierge service even though I have no experience, contacts or knowledge of the market and only really know about bread (Helen).

I'm going to make tailor-made chairs in the marketplace that no employer imaginable will ever commission (Tom).

I'm going to sell cosmetics with a million percent markup (Sue).

Last year LS had to abandon all of them and push his winner into an entirely different business. This year they did seem to have business ideas that rose above the tragically awful.

I imagine they were much better prepared - last year's series was the first under the new format and I suspect Helen in particular may have applied with the old format in mind. I agree overall they were a lot better.

LAS knows how to back a winner, no wonder he's recently gone into an equal partnership with Susan.

yes, he obviously did respect her business apart from the hopeless business projections. I wonder if he will do the same this year in some way.

All four business plans seemed workable this year. Even Jade's plan would have beaten any of last years.

I don't think Tom's business plan is workable though. Jade's business plan is not going to make money.Only Ricky's and Nick's business plan that I think workable.

I disagree, I don't think any of them were impressive. Ricky's would work but wasn't exactly inventive.
But I think that whatever the candidates' skills, almost anybody needs expert help in setting up a succesful business model, especially in terms of the finances. I would like to see them get some help in fine tuning their ideas from Lord Sugar's team - surely part of taking on a partner is sharing expertise in order to maximise the potential of a business?
I don't think Jade was going to ever understand the financial side of her plan, although she would be a great manager & motivator. Tom needed help from somebody who knows about investment & hedge funds, and although Nick coould probably design an impressive online system to achieve his plan, I don't think he had researched enough whether it would be used fully, nor how it would generate income.
But maybe with these gaps filled, any of them could have progressed successfully?

If Tom can get the investment then it's perfectly workable. I'm surprised Sugar didn't go for it.

I've been in contact with a good friend of mine in the City overnight, who tell me Tom's plan is VERY workable, and that wine investment is a topic of great interest right now in the current economic climate where there are relatively few good investment opportunities. It's also a market driven a lot by investment from the Middle East and Asia, which I believe was touched on in the programme itself.

Sugar didn't go for it because it was more risky than Ricky's plan and a bit ambitious for Sugar's taste. That doesn't mean it wasn't workable.

More analysis of the finalists' interviews and plans at my last blog of the series here:
http://slouchingtowardsthatcham.com/...-12-the-final/

I think Jade would make a decent manager - but her plan requires her to be a CEO, not a manager. Plus, as they said in the show, who wants to be seen to be investing in a cold-calling operation these days? That's so 10-15 years ago.

Nick's plan might work, but it's boom or bust - I outline a few examples that have worked in my blog post (link in my post above), and my gut feel is that it has a low chance of success. But you could say the same about Facebook back when it launched, and that's done okay, hasn't it? He's launched it anyway, so we'll see what happens.

I think Sugar's reading of the final two was about right. Ricky has knowledge, experience and passion to make his targeted business work - he has a good chance, but equally it's limited in its scale. Tom's plan is very workable - but risky - if he can get the investment in place, but as I've noted elsewhere it is a topic of great interest in the City and with foreign investors at the moment. As was mentioned in the show, all he's doing is extending his current company's investment strategy into a financial investment instrument. I think a lot of people here have rubbished the idea simply because they don't understand it. I understand it - only a bit - but I'm told by people who do totally understand it that it is a genuinely good idea.

I couldn't see how Nick's would work. Yes, I get recipes off the Internet, but I would not send an order off to Tesco just for the ingredients for one recipe. The delivery charge makes it unviable. Not only that, if one of the ingredients is, say, rice, I would want to be able to specify a particular brand. If a recipe requires 500g of flour, are they going to send me the smallest possible pack of flour to suit the recipe, or a larger pack, which is more economical? All in all, too many variables, and in the end wouldn't save any time at all.

I couldn't understand Tom's idea - anything to do with investment is over my head. Jade's call centre idea sounds hideous to me - can't stand unsolicited phone calls. Ricky's plan sounded impressive, but I didn't really take in much of what he said - I was perhaps too mesmerised, like Claude.

To be honest, I think LS not only saw it as risky but also as massively out of his comfort zone. He has no expertise in or knowledge of financial trading. Really he is a products man, but obviously willing to take a punt on services this time round, as long as the services are easy-peasy to understand.

And only really works if you are starting with bare cupboards. Its is likely you'd have some of the ingredients for any given recipe already.
Indeed, I tend to start with what I've got & look for a recipe that will use them, buying as few extras as possible!
Would only really be of any interest for an unusual recipe for entertaining etc. (for me anyway.)

Partly what I was saying above, the partnership should add value & Lord Sugar could not add value to Tom's plan in terms of his expertise. Tom needs a different kind of partner.

I can see all of that, but there is no getting round the fact that the women on the YF panel thought it was a wonderful idea and that they would definitely use it. I see that it is launching on i-tunes, so he obviously still sees it as a possible winner. I guess people like Denise Van Outen and Jo Malone are an identifiable demographic - affluent women who (probably) give rather classy dinner parties but don't have a lot of time to source ingredients.

Also, usually the ingredients that you don't already have for a recipe tend to be the obscure things that you never buy. So you'd be looking for rose water, panko breadcrumbs or fontina cheese, not the sort of products that supermarkets tend to stock.

Actually, did he ever explain how giving you the price of a few groceries would earn him millions?

Absolutely right. The sort of one-off ingedrient you see on Masterchef and then can't find. And the supermarkets are not going to be interested in that. Poorly thought through idea - the guy got fascinated with the technical side and didn't look at the obvious WHY WOULD ANYONE USE IT?

Hilarious!!

Personally I thought Ricky's idea was a little pedestrian. There are loads of recruitment agencies which specialise in technical recruitment (I work in the pharmaceutical industry). Some of these are really niche, so I could see nothing new, exciting or innovative about Ricky's idea. Rather boring to be honest....

I rated Nick's idea the most, although I know little about hedge funds so Tom's idea could have been very good. I am really pleased though that the telemarketing idea bit the dust.

Some of the popular TV cooks do actually tell supermarkets the contents of the programs far in advance of it being broadcast so that they can stock the items appearing on the programs. However it's likely to be a one off and if you try for that exotic ingredient a month later you will not find it on sale anywhere.

Not much in it.

Tom and Jade pitched things that had zero chance of being accepted - cold calling and hedge funds are well down there with making coats from kitten's fur in [ublic acceptability. The idea that Lord Sugar would back an investment bankers son, who had never even gone for an ointerview, running a risky hedge fund like those that caused the current depression was absurd. Equally he wouldn't want to be on newspaper front pages as "Thousands complalin about cold calling by Lord Sugar". Its not that clear if Jade was serious or really under-estimated the scale of the project - but hers wasn't a possible winning bid even though her theory was more tried and had more chance of working than Tom or Nick's.

Nick's idea was a solution to a non problem that ignored all the practicalities and the limitations of computers.. It was a kids solution to the question where does my food come - the sort of thing Adam would dream up. It might appeal to anyone who would send for a Waitrose van when they ran out of sugar, or someone who didn't mind the wrong ingredients turning up, or paying for what they already had in the cupboard again, or who had time to waste relating one internet page to another and working out what they had and then paying for a van to deliver something else.

Ricky at least has something concrete he can do - dull as it is.

In a way thats better than last year with Jim and Helen. Jim had hot air. Helen had an idea - though no idea how to do it - let alone at the scale she said. Tom's chair idea was silly - but being silly is arguably no worse than offering something no one would take up like Tom 2012 and Jade did. Tom 2011 at least had a product to offer from his past.

The only really good proposition Lord Sugar seems to have had offered to him over both years was Susan's - with the figures cleaned up and more thought.

There's a different question though what people want out of the process. Nick and Tom may just have wanted publicity to attract other backers. Jade may have wanted to get to the final for other reasons too. I get the impression being on the show has done Laura and Katie's prospects quite a bit of good too.

And somewhere those ingredients have to be related to whats in a computers list of whats in stock. What does it do when it sees Canadian chedder or water melon or vanilla essence - send you anything canadian ,cheddar biscuits, water, ice cream or anything with essence in the title? Has he ever tried the Tesco search engine or noted what odd substitutions you often get.

All this years finalist's plans were flawed and I certainly wouldn't invest £250k in any of them.

I mean Ricky's from what I could gather is just a recruitment agency . Not in these times when there simply are not the jobs available.

Tom's sounded real dodgy. If I understand it correct he needed a lot more people to put in money for his goal of £25 million.

Jades definitely out.

Nicks sounded the best and all the women on the YBF panel liked it. I'm not sure I'd want to part with £250k though.

I thought for £250k he'd take the risk.

Not Tom's risk. No one like Lord Sugar or the BBC would risk attaching their name to hedge funds . This wasn't about trading wine - it was about beting on the price of wine without actually having seen a drop of it. Hedge funds are essentially involved in precisely the gambling with virtual money that caused the current depression.They do nothing economically useful to anyone but the people who gamble in them. The name is toxic to anyone like Lord Sugar's reputation. And like all gambling, the chances of losing everything are random and here dependant on factors that can't be predicted. In this case, Tom was inexperienced- or his banker father would have to have been running things - so the risks of losing everything were even higher. Lord Sugar knows nothing about hedge funds, or wine, so his ability to control the outcome was minimal. What was more, Tom wanted to use Lord Sugar's name to draw in 25 million from other punters - leaving Lord Sugar's name tarnished when it all fell apart.

Lord Sugar couldn't possibly be seen to be backing casino capitalism on a show where he has been pushing the idea that a bit of effort can bring success in the real economy. Its precisely the wrong message to send out and the BBC could not be associated with. Even worse, Tom had an investment banker for a father and was shown as having had a silverspoon existance - that was about as popular as having Voldermort as his father and also sent completely the opposite message that the way to be successful was to be born rich. You just can't have the BBC associated with the idea that the only venture he could find- after looking at tens of thousands of people - was a rich kid playing with virtual money.