What ‘Apprentice 3’ Applicants Should Have Learned

There is a corollary to this rule as well. The flip-side of being loyal is that when you have the opportunity, you should surround yourself with the best people. This means people who will be loyal in return, but it also means capable people. Before the casino challenge, Troy and Kwame had Bill join their team even though they had disagreed about the way to work in the past. But they knew Bill was valuable and loyal, and indeed his idea of courting VIP gamblers ended up winning the challenge for them. Then, in the final challenge, Bill picked Amy, Nick, and Katrina, with whom he’d had good success. Kwame ended up with Omarosa. ‘Nuff said.

6) Focus on the Long-Term

Short-term thinking may win you individual challenges. But winning the challenges may not mean you win the show – just ask Amy from the first series. The challenges are short-term, the job is long-term. Always keep that in mind.

So, what does that mean? Well, for one thing, sex sells, but it also could mean you’ve sold out. Trump is not looking for the Shooters Girls, nor is he looking for a woman who would strip off her skirt in the middle of the street just to get twenty bucks. Do you see Carolyn walking around in a too-tight t-shirt and a mini-skirt? The lesson here is not to compromise yourself for short-term gain.

Many of the challenges are one-shot deals, where you try to make the most money and then move on. But in the first series, we saw that some challenges later in the show actually built upon the earlier ones, such as the rickshaw challenge in which Versacorp got previous companies they’d worked with to buy ads. In his book, Bill Rancic said that it was easy to sell ads to the companies since they already had relationships with them. If nothing else, they didn’t have to spend as much time explaining to them who they were, why there were cameras, why the ads would only be on the rickshaws for one day, and so forth. Having built good relationships with those companies allowed them to sell more ads in a shorter period of time than if they’d been starting from scratch.

Similarly, Nick was thinking along the right lines when he refunded the money of a company whose ads had fallen off during that same challenge. If his team had lost because of that, would they have held him responsible? Maybe. But I’d like to think that Trump would have seen that he did the right thing for the long haul, even if it was the wrong thing for the immediate situation.

The challenges can show Trump some things about contestants. For example: Sam was nuts. But failure at a given challenge does not mean you will lose; success at a number of challenges does not mean you will win. Many viewers expected Amy and Troy to be the Final 2 the first time around. Troy showed himself to be an excellent salesman and thus helped his team do well in challenges. Amy won every challenge she was in for weeks on end. But neither of them were what Trump was looking for, long-term.

Taking a look at the Final Two from Apprentice 2 also gives some good insight about long-term thinking. Kelly did win far more challenges than Jen. But more than that, Jen had a very narrow outlook, focusing more on doing what it took to survive each round than on showing she would be a good person to hire overall. She attacked other players whenever she had the opportunity, and it got her to the finals. But it was obvious that it would not get her any further. Kelly, on the other hand, focused on his own abilities and on showing why he would be a good pick rather than on why somebody else would be bad. He won.

7) Think Outside the Box, But Not Too Far

There is a fine line that applicants need to walk for this rule. Trump is not looking for an applicant who is too conservative, too stuck in the usual way of doing business. Applicants need to look at what they are asked to do and see how they can do it in ways nobody has thought of before.

Think of Protégé’s advertising campaign for the jet company. The men went conservative and lost. The women went bold – maybe even over the top – and won. An even better example is Troy in the Trump Ice challenge. He had the idea to write long-term purchase orders and court distributors rather than just trying to sell a case or two at a time. It was a big idea, and it won. Similarly, in the rickshaw competition, Versacorp didn’t limit their thinking to how they could get more riders – they focused on how they could make money in other ways, in this case by getting ads. It was a brilliant idea and easily beat Protégé.

On the second series, Ivana’s team succeeded in the Levi’s challenge with their Fit Wheel idea; Kelly took his team to victory in the Pepsi challenge with the well-designed Edge bottle featuring a hole in the middle.

Sometimes, you can go too far, though. Sam’s idea of selling lemonade for $1000 was crazy. But he didn’t get fired that week. Trump thought Sam could have some potential – he liked the outside-the-box thinking. Eventually, Sam showed he wasn’t just outside the box but outside Earth’s orbit, and was fired. But he was an extreme case. If you try something big once and it doesn’t work, Trump will likely still appreciate the effort. Just don’t overdo it, and don’t do it too near the end of the show, when there aren’t many people left to go. On the flipside of the Pepsi challenge, Andy led his team to dismal failure in that same challenge with the geography idea. Sorry, but like it or not, geography is not cool and edgy. That was too far outside the box.