Apprentice Accounting

Some of you might have watched this week’s Apprentice (if you didn’t and you’re in the UK, you can watch it here). Now I enjoy The Apprentice, and I get that, despite the idea that it’s the ‘job interview from hell’, it’s actually just a game show with a strange prize. However, there are things that kind of get on my nerves a bit, and mostly they’re about the things that the teams do, and don’t appear to have to pay for, and therefore the notion of ‘profit’.

On this week’s show, the gist was the they spent one day filming the background for a blue-screen experience that they would then sell to people in Westfield in London, the main product being a DVD. At the end of the task, both teams spent, apparently £80-100, and this was taken off the money that they took on the second day selling the DVDs.

However, they didn’t appear to pay for either:

  1. The rental of the technical equipment for creating the blue-screen effect, or the burning of the DVDs (although the DVDs themselves, they paid for)
  2. The rental of the place they filmed their DVDs. The team that used a ski slope in Milton Keynes may well have paid, but I seriously doubt that the team that appeared to hire the whole of Brands Hatch and a couple of BMWs paid for that full experience.
  3. Staff costs.

And it’s number three that gets on my nerves the most.

Take the winning team. The spurious ‘profit’ they made amounted to £262.50. But since they didn’t pay themselves anything at all. Let’s assume you paid each of the four team members minimum wage (£5.93 p/h, which I imagine that absolutely none of them would be prepared to work for) across two 7hr days, then the additional costs would be £332.08, meaning they actually lost £69.58.

The losing team were much, much worse. Although the difference in profit was only about £40 (the losing team made £222.97) there were five of them, so their staff costs would be £415.10, meaning they lost £192.13, or about twice their supposed ‘costs’. And that’s without the various other things they didn’t pay for.

Again, I accept this is just a TV show, but since the aim is to make it vaguely like being in business, I would have thought that the ability to manage staff sensibly would be part of a £100,000 per year job.