Yep for me that should have been a sacking offence. A clear single task losing mistake by the PM (who has boasted the the figures were her strength) - but it needed someone articulate to be on the chopping block.

In past years on of the potential firees would have been hammering that point when dragged back into the boardroom. James & Nurun however didn't have the wits

Last week with the technology task, I was thinking that Narun could do something with scarves. She obviously knows her fabrics and her colors, and they could have added the phone charger or whatever on the scarf. Hermes has scarves costing over $1K and they don't look as good as Narun;s scarves. Didn't she say she sells these kinds of goods to the Asian market?

As for the candles, I could not believe the prices. Would any hotel manager or small store manager or lounge manager pay so much for any candle? I don't think so. Makes me wonder how much of this is set up.

I would not pay much for something that I had bought in the street.

The thing was they took over £1,500 profit which is exceptional; they had room to be flexible on price as their cost price must have been about £3 for a candle and they were told to be selling it between £15 and £25 by Roisin. They weren't meant to drop below this and they all did. There were small mistakes made by Roisin in terms of trade sales but I thought the criticism was pretty harsh. Lord Sugar is very much no nonsense this year as opposed to what he has been in previous years even with really shoddy performances where a lot of people get away with doing nothing or making really stupid mistakes i.e. Dubai last year.

It's not about how much you personally would be willing to pay.

It's that selling direct to customers should always gain you more margin than either selling it to an intermediary who then sells it on to a customer (as in the case of the gift shop) or to a trade buyer such as the hotel or the private members; club, who would expectto pay less because they are buying in bulk. It's a fundamental basic of business. The more people there are involved in the selling chain, the more the profit margin has to be shared out and therefore everyone receives less. Therefore selling direct is more profitable than selling via a supply chain.

I was reading the bios for each candidate, it sounds so obvious now in hindsight that Lindsay wouldn't have lasted... if you go to her bio page, she's the only one of the lot who doesn't list "I'm arrogant and don't take no for an answer, etc." as her weakness... basically she was the only non "alpha" personality in there

That is a little sad. Maybe they hired her hoping for a meltdown.

This is my view too. I thought Roisin was pretty impressive. She managed the team with a no-nonsense, decisive approach. She came up with an excellent product which looked much more attractive than the other team's (and the costs for both teams were the same in the end so it wasn't even, necessarily, more expensive).

They lost because James' sub-team completely ignored her instructions and sold for far below what she had told them to.

In terms of culpability I would put that loss primarily down to James but I do agree with LS's decision because James has potential and the other two had demonstrated over several weeks that they didn't.

She was picked because she went from single young mother from a council estate to having her own business teaching 300 kids. You don't need to be "alpha" to be successful in business, unfortunately the selection process is full of people who are. And hanging around people who are constantly like that will wear you down.

You may not need to be overtly alpha, but I think you need to be determined, of steely will and have a strong drive to do will in business. You may do this in a quiet, more subdued way externally (a la Bill Gates) or in a loud aggressive way (a la Mark Zuckerberg). I didn't see any of these characteristics in her. Maybe she was just overwhelmed by the whole thing.

I doubt that. I believe she was convinced she could do it and I'm willing to bet they believed she could do it as well.

Obviously the process wasn't what she expected. Not only she had to deal with a group of different personalities, she had to deal with the process of filming itself. Some people can be reserved when there's a camera or two around, sometimes to the point of accidentally sacrificing whatever got them a place in a TV programme.

She wasn't the first to experience that. A couple of candidates looked rather shell-shocked during first two or three episodes in each series as well. They went early, too. Such is life. Credit to her, though; she stayed to the end. Some can and do drop out due to a (usually manufactured) family issue or illness. She didn't. She deserves some credit for that.

Hi, just spotted your reply. Maybe Nurun did more re her scarves but the edit decided not to show it. I remember she said that anyone (female) could wear that type of scarf. I did wonder at the time if she was being sidelined.

I've also seen some very expensive scarves which I didn't think were worth their cost, as their fabric wasn't good quality. If Nurun set up a shop, she'd do very well.

As for those candles and difusers, the NT used to charge same prices years ago. Top hotels would do the same to impress their customers. But would the customers feel the same I wonder. It seems to me that the wrapping was all that mattered, and the candles/difusers just happened to be there. When the Candidates said how lovely the difusers were in the cubicle the assistant placed them in, all a customer would see was the wrappings! I reckon if the assistant placed a lovely bowl of fresh flowers in that cubicle, the effect would have been more pleasing to the eye.
Also feel that this Apprentice series is more set up than usual, which is a pity, as it used to be a great series, and even Dara has been watered down.

But it was up to Roisin to see that supposed disadvantage, and make sure everything was going the right way, but she didn't do that, and therefore should have been fired.

The problem was that this task was lost on different levels. It had the same scenario as the Sandalwood task from Series 5 (the other team was basically crap), however that had one fatal mistake which was the costs (which got PM Paula fired).

This task was lost on many different points (so basically all three of them in the final boardroom could get fired with a good explanation). Roisin could have gone for the diffusers sale (to the gift shop instead of the hotel), James could have gone for letting Roisin cancel the sale on those last 2 diffusers and then giving them away as a freebie and Nurun ultimately went for her poor sales skills (which let James sell those candles later in the day for a too cheap a price).

What probably saved Roisin is the fact that she was a good PM (diffusers issues aside).

Ah well, that's the thing, I don't see Roisin as a good PM, as she didn't behave like one.

I'm not sure James could have done anything about stopping Roisin's gift shop sale as he had done his bit already and was out of the loop. Where he could have been fired was for sacrificing margin at the altar of retail sales. He showed a fundamental lack of appreciation of the importance of profit over volume - although the reality is not quite as cut-and-dried as it was made to look in the episode, as evidenced by the fact the end result was so close.

To be fair, as LS pointed out, it was only close because of the time limit. In the real world they still had a lot more stock to sell which would have increased their profit still further if they had more time.

Absolutely - but my point is that this was not a task "in the real world". No Apprentice task is, really - the closest we get is the one that asks teams to keep turning over stock and then measures the task at the end by total asset value - i.e. cash plus value of remaining stock.

The aim here was simply to generate as much profit as possible. How the teams arrived at that in terms of the amount of stock left over at the end of the task wasn't really relevant to the task outcome - although the real world point Sugar was making was.

But she didn't need more ability to do irrelevant things. If she can run a school for 300 students with 6 staff at one pool. She can probably run one with 18 staff at 3 pools. Now, if he wanted a national chain, she might be in trouble - but he's only offering 250k . What she needs is probably not even that costly - its some start up cash, advertising, recruiting, some figures checked, and an office. It was the same with Francesca last year. she might easily scale up to one or two more outlets, and he wasn't offering to fund a global dance school set up. In the end, he went with Leah who is running one clinic so far (??) , and then wasn't running one?