Heh. Good point.

Even if he does intervene, it's going to be pretty minimalist. I mean, what's he going to do - do a police-style lineup and divine telepathically who the famewhores are? Or just magically stare at their reh-soo-mays and split the serious candidates from the joke ones? (In all seriousness, I suspect he probably can spot some of the more obvious ones, but if he Sugar was that good at reading people he would be a world champion poker player ...)

I take Monkseal's point about Tre, but Katie was absolutely capable of coming across as professional. If you think about how she was in Week 2 on the dog product task as PM, she was probably one of the best early leaders in any of the series. I'm sure it was part of her plan - come across as a really awesome person initially so it's more of a shock later - but it worked, and shows that she is capable of being professional and getting a good job done. I think it's entirely possible that she was chosen for the line-up not because she made good TV, but because she seemed a credible candidate for the job. That must happen - Lindsay Bogaard, for example, had a very calm, professional demeanour, and I don't think her major cock-up on Secret Signals could ever have been anticipated.

As for Tre - maybe on paper he just seemed quite credible. Was he a fame whore? As far as I know he hasn't done much TV work or anything since then, although maybe that's just because Katie got all the attention from that series.

Lord knows he tried - he was shopping himself around as a rentagob to every two bit reality tv spin-off show and satellite channel discussion programme that'd have him as soon as the programme finished.

I absolutely think Katie would have presented very professionally, and IIRC she had one of the strongest backgrounds on paper of that series (although her application form obviously had all that twaddle about showing her business acumen by nicking people's husbands on it, which would have marked her out as "a character" at least). It just shows that you can set out to filter out a certain type, but the oddest people can turn out just to be there for the fame.

In my experience you pass the CVs around people you trust and they pick the most capable people out for you. Spurious arguments then come in often from referees (Karen and Nick in this case) The person making the decision at interview then goes and hires the most hopeless one half the time- because they are most like them, or they like them - even when they are the least capable of doing whats needed. It was very Apprentice - with no practical tests in sight. .

I think the thing with the new format is that there's very few contenders in there. Once you deduct "lacks experience", "too small an operation to size up" , "not someone for me", "a lawyer", "i' ve no idea what you do" , "I don't want to be in that field", "no way am I going to Glasgow to look at our business", " your hedge fund or call centre is too risky, or politically toxic for me" and "you are a stock show character no one would touch" there's few people left. Take out the dud plans that make the semi final, and the falling apart CVs , and there's even fewer. Deduct the plans that require more money and time than he wants to put in, and take out anyone who has multiple other interests. He then seems to go for the plan he is most familiar with , or the one that offers the best return for the limited investment - and most years that means you will you will end up with your Tom, or Leah, or, failing all else, Ricky.

I think Leah was more of a risk than Luisa. Her business would be more profitable if it succeeded, but Luisa's had more chance of succeeding as she had done that sort of thing before and Leah hadn't. But he went with Leah because he apparently felt like taking a risk.

No question Leah's was the more risky plan, particularly in terms of negative PR for Sugar if something goes wrong. I remain unconvinced it was a more risky business model, though. The final went through this in some detail - Leah had a modest roll-out plan in terms of opening new sites, the products themselves are both high value and high margin, and she had a clear exit plan - she wasn't intending to be "the biggest and best [insert business here] ever", but she had a plan to build the business to a certain size and then cash out.

There was the matter of scale with Luisa's business too. It was, ultimately, a wholesale business with a retail brand tacked on. Wholesale businesses rely on thin profit margins and therefore require large volumes to succeed. Even if Luisa had spotted a gap in the market, she would have struggled to achieve scale without a significant investment in warehousing, vehicles etc - much more than the £250k on offer.

It's impossible to say without seeing the detail, but the key to the plans is balancing risk with how quickly Sugar would see a return on his £250k investment. Given the business models involved, I think Leah's plan had a much greater chance of returning enough profit to repay the investment within 3-5 years. Luisa's might ultimately have been successful, but it would have been a slower burn.

I'd question Luisa's level of experience too. She understood baking as a market, but not the logistics side of running a large wholesale operation. That's not to say her market knowledge wasn't useful, but we're talking very different skill sets. I work for a large global manufacturing company and know our markets well, but I wouldn't have a clue where to start in terms of knowing the supply chain side of the business.

Ultimately we'll never know. and which plan you see as riskier depends a lot on exactly how you define risk and your willingness to accept it - no two people's risk profiles are ever the same.

Leah's risk was political - robbing the NHS of a surgeon to make himself money. I think she had passed the can she do it safely test, and her massive command of the figures was demonstrated at interview. He's just not qualified to intervene much in her business and it would add to his risk - so he hasn't got to do that much. Leah basically offers him a conveyer belt to new money with a high return for a limited investment. She;s also based in London which makes his involvement easier. Luisa posed other risks, and her plan might have required more money and faced problems he would have to get more involved in? Luisa offers him a business that might not have worked, even though she has experience in both baking and internet sites , or may make the £8 million she hopes for . Luisa may also need more set up money, advertising and supervision, and she may not look like she will do as she's told?

In the event both seem now up and running
http://www.drleah.co.uk/
http://www.bakerstoolkit.co.uk/
https://www.the-bakershop.co.uk/

Last week's task lends itself to arbitaryness more than most. He can decide the PM went to the wrong place and the wrong jobs, or allocated tasks wrongly. Thats a hiding to nothing as when they decide they can't trust anyone to do one task and another should be doable by anyone , he can turn around and say they should have done the opposite Zoe ran foul of this logic when she asked her subteam to just make a tasty biscuit. while she handled the marketing. . Lord Sugar can blame anyone - whoever made the advert, or the product, or the labelling, or the branding. He can ignore comments that one advert sort of worked and claim it was too dull to work at all - as he did last week. Last week also showed him claiming he could see no logic at all in Bianca's advert - when it was clearly trying to show that the product appeals to sportsmen, nerds and ordinary people alike. The issue was that it did it badly , not that it had no logic.

And, then, to top it all, he fired Lauren - because she wasn't someonefor him - which seemed to translate as lawyer, and ignored all the people who had nade the actual mistakes.