This episode involved cake. And if there’s anything we’ve learned from the Great British Bake Off mania that swept the nation, it’s that Brits love cake. So the task should have been easy.
The quest for the candidate worth £250,000 continued at Tate Britain where teams Tenacity and Summit were presented with this week’s challenge. They were to come up with a range of premium desserts fit for mass market production and pitch their creations to Asda, Waitrose and Tesco. Roisin and Katie were project managers, chosen for their aspirations to enter the food and drink industry.
Both teams, however, struggled with one particular theme: do what you know. This is the first lesson for any aspiring entrepreneur. At AIM Startups we help and support new creative startups, and one of the very first things we discuss with each client is their previous experience and skills, and identify any skills gaps their team might have. No one can do everything, and everyone needs help.
Team Tenacity’s project manager Katie began with trying several flavours she wasn’t familiar with, which was her first mistake. The second was not looking at the price tag. She used so much saffron in her trifle that to make any kind of profit from the product, she would have to hike up the price. The product was also just too weird. One of the most common mistakes new startups make is trying too hard to avoid competition and come up with something unique. If a product doesn’t yet exist, there are generally two reasons for that. First, you may have genuinely identified a gap in the market and solved a problem for a lot of people. If this is the case, you will do brilliantly. Second, and more commonly, it’s because there just isn’t the demand for what you’re trying to do, and it’s going to flop. Instead of searching for unusual ingredients for the sake of it, Katie could have stopped for a moment to imagine the pudding she would want to eat.
Team Summit started off better by admitting being a little out of their depth with this challenge, and visiting a flavour specialist. They explained their idea and what they were trying to pull off with their tea-flavoured cheesecakes. The desserts won on the flavours, but the contestants didn’t work well as a team and stumbled at the pitch. Project manager Roisin bagsied her favourite jobs without any regard to her team’s strengths. She sent Solomon off to do product development despite his confession of being useless in the kitchen, and ignored anyone with sales experience when it came to pitching.
If a member of your team makes their living chatting to a room full of people and expresses a keen interest in pitching to buyers, you let them do it. For being so precious about it, accountant Roisin’s pitch was weak and delivered nervously, and the mood was lifted briefly when pub quiz whiz Daniel jumped in. Tenacity took a more democratic approach and everyone had chance to pitch. Salesman Mark surprised everyone by choking when it was his turn to woo the clients, yet it still went better than Team Summit’s disastrous battle of egos.
Results time: Was it down to the deliciousness of the puds, or the delivery of the pitch? Tenacity got zero orders for the weird saffron trifle, but the others did alright. It wasn’t enough to win though, as Summit’s “teascakes” pleased the palates more.
Things became heated in the boardroom when the trio started their shouting match to shift blame on to each other. I wouldn’t wish to hire any of these people. Mark was the only one to admit his fumbling and take responsibility for failing the pitch. Recognising your mistakes is the best way to avoid repeating them in the future. Katie and Sanjay both got the boot, and Mark stays. Although the final decision seemed to have little to do with the challenge, and it all boiled down to their business propositions; finally – in a prime time TV kind of way – it emulated how the real world works.
Matleena Halttunen is a business adviser at AIM Startups - a programme offering startup loans, training and mentoring for new creative businesses
Read more
Episode 9: More haste, less speed
Episode 8: Selling is like flirting
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