The Apprentice - Lemonade

One way of helping yourself outside of reading good self help books is, to analyze what you see. Of course you need a bit of understanding of how to do things right.

A good example of this is The Apprentice show with Donald Trump. Here is what I wrote on one episode – in fact it was the very first one.

Lessons to be Learned from The Apprentice

 
Have you ever seen in the TV series The Apprentice.  It’s not it’s very worthwhile seeing and analyzing what you have seen.  If you haven’t seen it go, out and buy the DVD series of The Apprentice.

The lessons that follow is a self-help of how to do better business.  There was selection of 215,000 applicants 16 were chosen to participate in The Apprentice.  Now these are the best young people who have their own business or have degrees.  So let’s start with one episode.

In the very first series of the program the apprentice, the candidates were told to go out on the street and sell lemonade.  Donald Trump from had them start at the very bottom of doing business.  He had the teams divided up with eight woman on one team and eight men on the other team.  There was a mistake that Donald Trump himself may and that was by putting all girls on one team and all guys on the other team.  More about that later.

When the guys went out they bought frozen lemonade, cups and also got the display stand donated for free just for the day.  Now this was a good move getting something donated said they don’t have to use their seed money, which was $250.  Then they took their stand with their lemonade and one out in front of the fish market. 

Big mistake!

Why did they go in front of the fish market is anybody’s guess.  Think about this, who wants to drink lemonade with the smell of fish in the air!  Another big mistake they made was buying frozen lemonade!  Even bottled lemonade juice is a terrible decision.  What they should have done was buy fresh lemons and make their own orange juice and to use bottled water.  The great advantage of this would be that it would taste much better and people would be willing to buy it.  They should also advertise the fact that it is fresh orange juice made from fresh lemons using bottled water.  They should also have little sample cops so they could taste it before they buy it.  The purpose of this is to gain the customers trust why should they put out dollar or two dollars for a couple of lemonade that might be bad.

The guys to get to a new location where there was more foot traffic but then they wasted half a day and thus lost money.

The young ladies chose a different location probably, but they had the same type of lemonade that they were selling.  However they did better because they were in a better location from the very start plus they use their sex appeal to sell lemonade.  Now we all know sex sells.  Donald Trump should’ve known that to.  So here you have one team that had no sex appeal towards men because they all consisted of men, and the other team had sex appeal because they were all women which appealed to the men clients.

With this in mind Trump should have known this and divided the teams equally sex wise. To get a little ahead of my story, the man had lost four in a row.  In other words each time a team lost they had to go to the board room where one person was fired.  So the men were down to only four on their team versus eight on the other team.  The men had an additional disadvantage because they had fewer team members to complete the task.  It was only after they were down to four men that Trump did a reshuffle.  Then he put equal men and women in each team.

What we can learn from this is that location is only part of the solution.  In the beginning when the men started one guy said to another, ‘location, location, location.’  So, what did they chose? A bad location. The traffic was there during certain times, but what good was that, when most of it was cars plus there was the smell of fish in the air! Location is only one component of the equation the other parts are good service good products and anything else that might be needed to make your business successful.  So remember this when you start your business location is only one component.

Plus, you might have good traffic, but is it the kind you want? If you are looking for people who are more likely to buy when they are on foot, don’t look at the number of cars going by. Foot traffic and car traffic are two different things. Also, think about your cliental. If you are selling something that appeal to older people, don’t set up business in front a university. If the neighborhood is bad, or there is the smell of some factory nearby, don’t set up business there, even though it might have the right kind of traffic.

If you want to be successful you got to copy from those who are successful.  Copy every detail if you can.  If their retail cookie store in a mall in Dallas is successful the same type of business will be successful in Denver.  Do not try to reinvent the wheel however try thinking outside the box and this could create great fortune for you.