Your usual 10-a-penny failed business plan. Candidate will have a passion for a product and think they can make it work just because they have a passion for (in this case) healthy ready meals.

Their passion and people blowing smoke up their arse will make them blind to the obvious flaws in the business plan.

Claude mentions Sid using his influence to help Roisin in the bit where the interviewers talk to his Lordship Claude says I cannot believe, even with your influence she's going to go to one of the large supermarkets and immediately open the door - its not clear if he just means put her on the shelves, or support the producer too . Claude clearly does think Sid has some influence, but Roisin may assume too much.

From what we see, its not that she doesn't know there's a hole - she comes straight back at Claude with the argument about getting credit - it seems to be part of her plan . Its then that Claude tells her thats nonsense as no one will give her credit . She then starts looking for other sources of money.

True, we don't know why she assumed money would flow in to fill the gap. But there's only a few assumptions she could have made . One is that the product was so good , people would be keen to make, sell it, and support it ,That fits what she says, and the interviewer's comments that she thinks it will "storm" the market. Another is that she thinks his Lordship actually does have influence - and would get people to help her. Both may be an unrealistic assumption- but its not that she had failed to spot the problem - she just had an answer to it no one else believes in.

How was she going to get "credit" from suppliers if she was getting a 3rd party manufacturer to make the meals (as setting up a high-care foods factory can cost millions). No manufacturer would give credit to someone with no credit record.
Supermarkets take ages to pay up for goods supplied, so they would have gone bust before seeing any revenue come in.

She probably also missed the "overriders" that suppliers have to pay supermarkets to just get their products on the shelves.

This is the thing that Tesco over-estimated in their results by 250 million.

You would also need a VERY experiences Sales Director who had years of experience in dealing with the UK retailers, just to get your product onto shelves.
And you would not get much change out of the 250K just for their salary and perks (Probably 100K salary, 50K for half decent company car, expense account to travel to the big retailers etc etc)

I was really surprised and disappointed in Roisin's plan; it wasn't a market she had any experience of, she hadn't done much research of her market or competition and her financial expenditure seemed insane. It was very like Helen of Series 7, she was most credible candidate up to that point and then drops it all in the interviews allowing much weaker task performers to take the helm. It was a sham that Daniel was fired after her though; Daniel, as has been repeatedly brought up in You're fired and even by himself, he should have been out weeks ago. I was also surprised at Solomon's business plan, or lack there of, I imagined he would be really methodical and concise but it portrayed him as a complete idiot.

Indeed she's (badly) under-estimated the difficulty and the costs.. On those figures she has no stock, the money has gone, and she hasn't developed it, or advertised it. Claude might have added your points about other costs .She's also got difficulties proving now, she can, then, produce something thats going to be so tasty and desirable that it will sell liek hot cakes.

I think she just thought its such a good idea that people will support it. She may think that Lord Sugar could make it happen - either by forking out more money to set it up, or influencing someone else to do so. Her problem is he isn't going to try and do anything that large , risky or difficult. I think she ventured into an industry where she didn't understand the politics and economics, and she bought into the Sugar hype.

If you havent realised by now that The Apprentice is a reality show in both name and substance then really...dude...why?

Its not an exagguration, its not a conspiracy, its the world turning. Remember Frank? Remember Scott? Remember Claudia? No?.....Remember Luisa?

It was very poor from a so called accountant. She assumed she'd get credit, she won't for at least 6 months with a proven track record of paying her bills on time at the very least. The people she supplies will expect credit of anything up to 90 days and some will want maybe 180 days.

The big chains will also expect sweetners, such as Sale or Return, BOGOF (in which the supplier, will be expected to honour that, not the retailer). POS and a large marketing campaign.

Working with supermarkets is a nightmare. I print for a local, quite large local, family owned bakery (25 stores). He's in a sort of Bakers Union for want of a better word and was telling me of one member who got a contract with a large supermarket to supplier doughnuts, he was over the moon. Until they told him that he needed to supplier x amount for free to cover BOGOF's etc. He still went ahead, he fell foul when on one order one tray of doughnuts was defective and they rejected the entire shipment, 100,000s of doughnuts unsold because of 24 or so.

Given how crowded the market is for Daniel's and Mark's business plans the criticism of Roisin when it is clearly an emerging market seems somewhat false. The reality is that Sugar struggles to justify the level of investment required. I would also imagine that Roisin has a significant amount to invest in to the business as well (unlike the other business ventures) but did not want that side of the finances being disclosed on the programme.

It is, and I say that as someone who used to work for Tesco in their head office marketing function. As the programme indicated, Roisin was naive in thinking she could get credit - in reality most supermarkets work on 90 days' payment terms (i.e. it's they who get credit).

The way she had structured her cashflow, she would have gone in effect from 90 days' credit to 90 days' negative credit - that's 6 months' worth of cashflow misaccounted for. Even if she had been profitable, there was a severe danger she would run out of cash first and go broke. (A note: most small businesses go under not because they aren't profitable but because they can't manage their cashflow to keep their heads above water.)

There's also the matter of listings fees (or, as another poster above refers to them 'over-riders', which is the same thing). To get on to the shelves of the big supermarkets, it's common to be asked to guarantee an up-front sum just for the right to be given space on the shelves - it varies from brand to brand and category to category, but middling five-figures per annum is a reasonable assumption.

One final thing that was never touched upon. Walk into any of the big supermarkets and you'll find their chiller cabinets consist primarily of own-brand products. To get space on the shelves as a brand, you either need to be very big or niche enough that the supermarkets can't be bothered to develop an own brand equivalent. Now Roisin might well have fallen into that latter category, but it's an indication of how competitive the space is. No supermarket is going to give her chiller cabinet space at the expense of their own brand product (those typically being high volume lines which generate beaucoup profit).

It might of been something had she invented a food product (like Levi Roots) and done a licensing agreement, with an already large and established manufacturer, but to think she alone could do it, I think is very wishful thinking.

It's the same problem I think Bianca will have. Hard to break into, if it does sell, another company will take the idea, and throw money at it, squeezing her out.

It's not though, there's already a product out there, made by an established manufacturer and hardly anyone's heard of it. So why did she think she would be better.

I got the feeling that she thought she'd discovered some amazing wonder food, while back packing in the deepest darkest Amazon rain forest, and was going to bring it to the west.

I was completely surprised by her total lack of knowledge, she claimed no one else made the product, it's then presented to her, so she then backtracks and says "yes I knew about that, but no one does it as a ready meal"...oops

The one shown in the show was a bit deceptive as afaik it is not a readily available retail product. Other ones are emerging on to the market, which supports it being a potential growth area as you currently cannot walk into the main retailers and purchase the products.

But then ask yourself why, you can already buy it, some people on here have tried it, it's apparently awful. It's out there for established manufacturers/supermarkets, but they don't seem that keen to stock it.

Ok it may end up on the gluten free, lactose free, bit in Tescos but as Slouching says to make it into the mainstream will be very difficult and require several millions.

Peter Jones might disagree. He invested in a supplier of this stuff in 2013 on Dragons Den and it's already available. The trouble is it's very niche. It's for people who want zero carbs food who don't care how awful it is to eat.

Even if the other competing products aren't in store yet, Roisin's version is further behind still. .

The most basic thing is that its going to cost probably 250k just to produce the first batch if not more just to get on the supermarket shelves and what happens 14 days later when you need to swap it out for the next batch as its going out of date and you haven't sold enough stock and new products generally have a high return/being reduced rate so LS's money in the first month would probably of been spent!

LS wants a nice simple product thats has low stock count and can basically be run from a room with perhaps a broom cupboard for stock storage, tights are not a bad thing as they don't expire and its versus SEO which is as much a luck based thing in someways so it looks a nice balance

The trouble with tights you need several hundred thousand pairs, just to get to market. So you need distribution, warehousing etc, you can't run it from a spare room.

The bigger issue for me is not so much the volume of product that Bianca needs as the breadth of range. How many different colours, how many different sizes/weights/finishes etc - could be dozens if not hundreds of variants. Is a retailer really going to have the space/desire to stock all of them?

Not a show-stopper but definitely a big concern for me.

Which again supports what I am saying. It is a growth market if people are trying to get in to it.

Well thats my point about volume, each outlet will need at least 1000 pairs, 10 colours x 10 sizes x 10 of each item, thats a minimum.

Now if she gets 100 shops, thats a minimum manufacturing run of 100k if each pair costs lets say £1 to make there's 100k, now I don't know much about tights, but to an established manufacturer 100k is not a lot, so she's going to have to pay up front, and then runs the risk of an established supplier of tights coming along and insisting their run is done first, so she may encounter supply issues.

Now she has the tights, now to package them, I'll take a stab at 10p, thats another 10K, shipping and warehousing another couple of thousand, depending where their made.

Now if she approaches major retailers like JL etc, their going to want 90 days credit, POS, marketing etc, bang there's goes another 100k, she's now basically out of money.

If she approaches smaller independents, are they A; going to take that much stock in one go, and B: they may take longer to sell, so again she runs out of money. The only benefit would be she'll get her money straight away. But even they may want 30 days or Sale or Return.

It can be done, but it will take millions.

I'd say the numbers are smaller - you need only 3-4 sizes (S, M, L, XL) and probably fewer than 10 units per item, but I do agree with your general point. I don't think she'd need as much money as Roisin to set up and I don't think it's millions but Sugar's £250k may well not be enough.

Personally, I think the way to start this might be to try to start small with a web business and smaller retailers, and then scale up once the business is up and running.

On last night's "why I fired them" I saw Roisin had 30k for product development.
A Development chef who knows ready meals will be on minimum 500 per day, probably more if they are using their own facilities.
This is only 60 days work, but you would have to show products to retailers from larger batches, not from a test kitchen.
So either factory scale up trials, or hire a commercial premises to make bigger batches.

For costings you generally work on doubling your labour cost for product development to cover trial raw materials etc, so that would be £1000 per day.

@Slouching do tights just come in s,m,l etc thought they would be by dress size? If they do, can I add then your suggestion of , thick, thin, patterned, silk etc etc.

A web based business may be better, and if she can find a manufacturer already making these type of tights and she could be "golden"

I'm starting to get dangerously out of my depth here, but ...

I think they usually come in sizes like T-shirts, i.e. S/M/L/XL. Then there are the different 'deniers' (weights or thicknesses) and also you get them with different finishes (e.g. matt/plain vs glossy/shiny). At least, that's what my 10 minutes of research yesterday morning told me before the men in white coats came to carry me away from my PC ...

By the time you've multiplied that up by however many colour variants Bianca is planning, you're easily looking at over 100 different product lines. That's a lot of shop space.

Agree with this. I think I saw konjac products before.

LOL and I always had the impression from your posts, that you were male.