Look before you leap
I’ve avoided watching The Apprentice for years now, simply because I really don’t approve of Sir Alan Sugar’s management and communication style as portrayed on TV.
No matter how successful he is as an entrepreneur, the words ‘you’re fired!’ delivered in such a brutal way just doesn’t set a good example of how to dismiss an employee.
Persuaded however by a close family member that The Apprentice is actually rather good viewing, I settled down one night to watch the now infamous face-painting and gardening episode in which the opposing teams, given £200 of Alan Sugar’s hard-earned cash, had just 24 hours to set up a business and make a profit!
I know that 24 hours is totally unrealistic, but the next hour of TV unfolded a story of setting up, struggling to make sales, desperate diversification and going under (insolvency) that is so familiar to me as a business advisor that I was aghast that you could go through a cycle in 24 hours that normally takes up to a year.
The same ingredients were there though, right down to the poor planning, the assumption that the market will exist (with no market research to back this up) the importance of location in business success, diversification (on this occasion from face painting to kissograms) the minute the original business idea started to fail and finally the impact of insufficient skills to manage and deliver the service. As these embryonic day-old businesses unfolded their disaster before our eyes the next horribly predictable stage began.
The leadership turned into bullying, a blame culture developed and in the final analysis in front of Sir Alan, the focus was not on what faulty business assumptions had been made in the first place, but on destroying colleagues in a desperate attempt for survival.
Sir Alan very early on pointed out the major flaw in the face-painting business model (which was that on a midday, midweek school day the demand simply didn’t exist) only to be shouted down by a chorus of blame about the location being wrong. Sir Alan’s point was, in my opinion, the most important lesson of the whole programme, and one which many start-up businesses overlook. The lesson is this: if you assume that the customer wants what you want and fail to think through and research the needs and wants of your target market, you are risking failure.
As the closing words of Sir Alan, ‘you’re fired’ rang in my ears, I wondered, why do so many organisations fail to do their research properly? Is it lack of marketing know how; is it that many entrepreneurs are ‘action’ people not ‘planners’; or is it simply that the pressure to get ahead of the competition forces people to rush headlong into an unfounded assumption that their chosen market does exist?
Either way I’m afraid I’m now hooked on The Apprentice. While Sir Alan’s style of advice is considerably more abrupt than you’d receive from Business Link Yorkshire, the message remains the same: before you risk your house or your life savings, find out if there really is a market for what you want to do before you make that leap!
