Exclusivity brings down Lindi
It was good to see Sir Alan giving the teams a rude awakening at 7:30am this week. Claire started the day as she meant to go on – appearing to be useless. The task was to create ice cream flavours that would be researched and developed for local farmers. Claire, as promised by Sir Alan, was one team leader. Lucinda was the other.
The first idea to come out of the research session was cocktails. Lucinda was very quickly slated by her team members and appeared to be coming across as too nice at the start. I did wonder if she was being serious when she suggested that she wanted people to have fun first and foremost…
Probably one of the funniest parts of the episode was seeing Alex and Kevin faced with the prospect of cracking about a thousand eggs for the ice cream, especially when it dawned on them how long they had actually spent doing it.
Lucinda’s team appeared to be unorganised at the start as they were still deciding on flavours when the other team had left. Avocado was their main flavour, which I have to be honest sounded absolutely disgusting. Yet it went down a treat! Her team managed to collect their ingredients much better and much quicker than Claire’s team, who were spending their time tasting ciders at a local brewery.
Maragaret, one of the aides, was correct about Lucinda. Lucinda was doing extremely well managing the team and was so obviously someone who was suited to managing a rather diverse team. Claire, in the meantime, had gone AWOL. Fortunately (or should that be unfortunately?) she soon turned up, but was rather rude when she did. She first of all labelled the countryside as “slow”, which she re-iterated not long after.
Jennifer did well on the sales and after a couple of successful appointments the whole team began to get going. I suppose the moral is to keep at it, but some of the appointments – for example, at ice cream parlours – were a little dubious. Claire’s team was behind throughout which made the end result all the more surprising.
Lucinda’s team were much more organised and had managed to co-ordinate a proper testing session for those in the village. Despite their ‘Cosmopolitan’ flavour being described as tasteless, the avocado was a big hit – as was the toffee apple flavour. Claire’s team had to rely on – as Nick put it – an entirely unrepresentative sample of two men from a pub.
Lucinda’s intention to mix her teams up was a good one. I liked it, because it would have given the sales team a better insight into the product. Jennifer, despite what she might say, was entirely against the idea. Claire’s “strategy meetings” appeared to be total wastes of time, and Alex was, prima facie, entirely correct to have doubts about the team’s capabilities.
Lindi, in all of this, was the deputy leader of Lucinda’s team. She appeared to do a good job but was just too vociferous and to an extent abrasive to get along with. They did, at least, have appointments to go to. “I can’t believe how good we are,” I think she said. To be fair, the ice cream flavour sounded that good that it would probably have sold itself.
The door-to-door sales were going slowly, but I think it was more frustrating for the viewer. Why did they have three people at every shop? They can surely not complain about not getting enough sales when every store is getting three people’s attention? Surely if they had split up they could have covered, well, three times as many stores?
Even Helene praised the work that Lucinda had done. That’s how good she was! But still, Claire’s group won, and how they did it shall forever remain a mystery. With £200 more than Lucinda’s team, they were victorious. The boardroom tussle was interesting, with each person trying to shift the blame to another. Lindi was the one to be sacked. Special? I think not. When the teams got back to the house, Jennifer told everyone that she had been described as “cold”. No arguments there, then.
Alex is still where my money is to win. He managed to avoid the boardroom again this week, and seems to be able to get involved at just the right time to take the credit, but not get involved too much when things are going wrong. Not great for business, but enough to win the competition.
