It did come back to bite her although actually she makes a valid point. In the real non-Apprentice world, project managers are often the least knowledgeable people when it comes to the tecnical 'how-tos' of a project - that's why you have functional experts on your team. Of course, it helps to have a basic understanding so you're speaking the same language as people, but I've managed large projects where I have had to rely on a technical expert, a finance expert, a marketing expert, a supply chain expert and so on. What I brought to the team was experience in managing project timelines, keeping sight of the big picture, communications and a willingness not to take no for an answer. Sadly Elle showed pretty much none of these skills herself.

My Metro review of last night's episode. Honestly, £10 an hour for three people?!?

I thought he was very unfair on Elle, she's a manger, her job is to recognise peoples skills and put them in the correct position, while keeping an overview. If I was her I would of turned around and asked LAS does he know how to build computers or crap HiFI's because he sells them?

I'd love it one year for someone to tell him to "sod off"and remind him of his utter failures (email phone anyone!!), he bangs on about how poor a product is etc, considering they've only had 24hrs to design and market it and aren't actually designers. While Amstrad backed by a wealth of talent, has often failed too!

It was interesting that his BP involves property and land purchasing, no wonder LAS what's to stay intouch.

Ah, was that covered on YF? (Haven't watched it yet.) That would make a lot of sense then, given that most of Sugar's business and net worth is tied up in property these days.

Our local bloke charges £25 an hour (just for himself) and he's well worth it. Mind you, he's not an idiot who doesn't know whether shelves are supposed to be straight or not.

Exactly - I've paid a similar hourly rate before too - sometimes more, sometimes less. While I wouldn't have necessarily expected our, ahem, unskilled candidates to have charged as much, equally farming themselves out for half the UK minimum wage was clearly underselling the service they were offering too. April's lack of awareness/common sense of what constituted a fair rate was poor, although far from the only or biggest mistake her team made. But I would have thought that £10 per person per hour (plus materials) would not have been unreasonable.

April? Lord Sugar has always been a sucker for rags-to-riches stories, and probably saw a bit of himself in Mergim. Arguably we saw the same last week when he commended Mergim for spotting a deal (selling books to the focus group).

But is this the problem with having such strict team formation. It doesn't take 3 people to fix a shelf, and if it did it certainly wouldn't cost £30, so to be fair she charged for the job which was £10 which is a fair price. But with the structure, the other 2 couldn't go off and do something else. Same for window cleaning, if they could of each cleaned a different shops window's at a tenner a pop it would be game on, but having to stay together dilutes the income.

True, but arguably they should have walked away from what was essentially a time-wasting job for minimal return and focussed on finding a job that was worth three people's time. Of course, it would have helped if they'd had some flyers to work with ...

^^ true, but by the very nature of the task and the fact they weren't skilled tradesmen, meant the only sort of jobs they were going to get were "bob a job" type jobs. There's very few of those type of jobs were you can charge decent money per person and have 3 people working on it. Face it takes 1 or 2 people to mow a lawn, your not going to pay £15-20 per hour per person.

Usually it's a set fee, and if they use more people, that's down to them, but the work will get done quicker, so you can do more jobs, and make the hourly rate per person more respectable,

Agree with that, and you're right that the constraints of the task rules that make life difficult. But touting your team around for half the minimum wage was a case of April setting herself up to be fired by showing a completely lack of common sense about what constitutes a fair rate for services. Although that really should have been something that Mergim, as sub-team leader, should have thought about first, and not put April in a position to make such a silly error.

Scott's impossible gardening job (where Vana had to "reset expectations") charged £25 per person per hour.

Off-topic: is "reset expectations" one of the most sinister terms in corporate jargon? It means agree a service, and then change the service terms for the worse.

Just watched the show on iPlayer

Firing with triple barrels this week, nice to see it

If people are not good enough, make too many mistakes, no messing about, just show them the door

Yep American Corporate Boll•x Speak, I have another word it's called "Welching" on your bet. Or in English terms "breaking your contract, and I'll see you in court"

Elle should have gone the week Jenny was fired. There was no way Jenny was going to win the competition but she deserved to stay just as long in the show as Elle has done.

Sugar should tell her to take her hands out of her pockets while he is telling them what to do.

When Mergim started his sob story I thought I was watching XFactor

Well, that was absolutely excruciating to watch.

It just goes to show, anybody can put on a suit and learn some jargon to fool people into thinking that they're a "businessman" but you absolutely cannot pretend to be a tradesman.

I've always thought Elle was a waste of space and this task demonstrated it perfectly.

Mergim was a good example of what's currently wrong with industry in the UK as well, I'm afraid.
Enthusiasm is no substitute for skill and knowledge.
It's all very well him being willing to pick up a screwdriver or a paintbrush but in doing so he's depriving a REAL handyman of a job and also depriving customers of quality workmanship.

Overall, though, this episode really showed that when these people are called upon to actually do something which generates immediate, tangible, quantifiable, results - most of them are utterly pathetic.

If I was Alan Sugar I think I'd have fired everybody except Brett, Gary, Joseph and Richard and then skipped straight to the part where I looked at their business proposals.

But she didn't manage. She made Joseph the 'foreman' and then spent the task looking confused. She didn't even make Joseph the sub-team leader, presumably because she wanted to keep him in her part of the team where he could do her job for her. She said that at work she gets a list of jobs people should be doing and it's her job to make sure they're being done, but if she has absolutely no idea what those jobs are how does she know they're being done? Is she relying solely on the foreman to manage everything and the building inspector to check the foreman has managed the job correctly? And if that's what she does, then what's the point of her role? LS may or may not know how to build a computer but he's the company owner, he isn't being paid to make sure the things are being done correctly (isn't that what he pays Claude for at Viglen?).

Her job is to get the right people for the right job at the right time, and act as a go between, between client and builders. It was stupid to suggest that because she works for a builders she should know how to build, hmm no she knows people who can build. Much as a said Sugar can't build a computer, but he knows a man who does.

And, without any knowledge of the industry, how can she possibly KNOW if she's getting the right people, if they're performing to a reasonable standard, if they have the right tools and if the job is being completed properly?

For every person in industry like Elle (and there are far too many of them), there's somebody like Joseph who could render them redundant in every sense of the word.

I have absolutely no sympathy for Elle at all. I meet far too many people like her and they're nothing more than oxygen thieves.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the construction company she works for is owned by her family.

Elle's job i think is more that of a secretary, make sure X has done Y as she doesn't even prepare her own checklists and she's probably done a basic h&s course and has a pink hard hat and steel toe capped high heels so is able to be insured to go onsite

Everyone knows she's just there to ensure boxes get ticked and if not pass that on to the people who will make them get ticked.

Is the UK that bad at diy now that companies will let in any idiot with a camera crew to wreck their shelving or wallop everything in paint? or is there a team of proper people hiding and fixing up their f-up's when they move on

Sugar says he doesn't set any tasks he wouldn't be able to do himself. I want to see it then and first of all I want to see him write a book in 24 hours. I didn't realise he was an expert in every single industry going.

I was impressed with Brett- to be fair people really doing to stadium job would have had more time and he can't paint wet steps.

I've read one of Lord Sugar's books and can easily believe it was written in 24 hours.

Seriously, he's a bright guy and assembling a satellite box or computer is not hard. Many hobbyists build their own PCs after choosing their own components. By the time Lord Sugar picked up a screwdriver, the parts would all be sitting in front of him like flat-packed furniture.

The Apprentice tasks are not inherently technically difficult -- and experts are on hand to do those parts that are (eg candidates design a phone app, but the app design company actually codes it). (Not to say that selling is not a skill, of course.)

What makes them hard is the artificial constraints -- daft deadlines; sleep deprivation and so on.