The Apprentice 2015, week 4: Ruth Whitely fired by Lord Sugar after Team Connexus fail to sell enough cat towers
'Here we are in a sales task and you failed miserably'
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Your support makes all the difference.She may have shown courage wearing the same tartan suit that warranted a bombardment of Twitter abuse last week, but that wasn’t enough to prevent The Apprentice contestant Ruth Whitely from being fired.
Her team, lead by Scott Saunders, failed to sell many cat towers, raking in only £1,807.20 compared to the £2,462.12 their opponents made selling dog sofas.
“You were representing cats in this task but I’m afraid you don’t get nine lives in this process,” Lord Sugar said to Team Connexus.
Along with Ruth, Scott decided to bring Selina Waterman-Smith back into the boardroom to receive another grilling.
Lord Sugar eventually revealed his decision: “Scott, you were the project manager, you made some errors here, you put the wrong people in the wrong place and not being able to assess what people do is bad news in business terms.
“Selina, there’s an old saying, no smoke without fire. You are a different person on task than you are in this boardroom and I’ve seen it before…people with two faces.
“Ruth, I don’t dispute your enthusiasm but you claim to be a sales person, you claim to train people how to sell. Here we are in a sales task and you failed miserably.
“And Scott, you come across as a very nice chap but business is all about how you manage people and you needed to be a bit more ruthless in choosing your high end sales division and I’m not using that as a pun because maybe less Ruth would have been the best thing so Ruth…
“You’re Fired.’’
The teams had also been selling pet accessories, Team Connexus making £1,221.20 while Team Versatile, led by David Stevenson, made £1,589.50.
Next episode of The Apprentice will air 4 November, 9pm on BBC One and BBC One HD.
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