The Young Apprentice is back on our screens and teaching us a thing or two about wholesale buying.
The Young Apprentice has been aired during the past few weeks on the BBC and sees a bunch of candidates aged between 16–17 battling it out for a £25,000 business investment. The format of the show follows the popular series The Apprentice, which sees candidates (over 18) competing for a £250,000 investment.
Dressed up in their business suits, the candidates have to complete a task every week set by Lord Alan Sugar. The winning team of each task is rewarded and the losing team face a possible firing.
The first episode of this series kicked off with a wholesale task – one Alan Sugar is probably familiar with. Lord Sugar, as covered in our wholesale success stories, started out by buying electrical items from wholesale suppliers and selling them on to the public for a profit.
The tasks he sets the candidates often resemble his early career days – finding stock at cheap prices and ‘flogging’ them on to the public for a good margin. The first episode saw the candidates head to charity shops to find bargain clothes and the challenge was to sell these on to the public. Each team had a pitch at a market stall and in a shopping centre and using their skills they had to recruit members of the public and entice them to buy.
The winning team definitely demonstrated why they beat their competition. Firstly, the ‘accountant’ in the team was very careful with the purse strings and did not spend a lot on alterations of the stock – therefore it was easier to turn a profit. The entire team was involved with the selling of the products and talking to customers too although the losing team spent more time folding stock and working on displays. The losing team also decided to pack up their stock at the busiest time of the day to relocate – missing the busiest time of day for customer interaction.
The wholesale lessons learned from this show? Pick stock carefully, stay within budget, maximise on busy shopping periods and sell, sell, sell!
