The Apprentice 2011: winner Tom Pellereau – ‘I still think the emergency biscuit is a great idea’
Winning Apprentice candidate Tom Pellereau tells Chris Harvey a £100,000 job is ‘small fry’ compared to what he hopes to earn with Lord Sugar.
Congratulations, you’re likely to be a very popular winner. But I have to ask you, as the brains behind the Emer-crunchy emergency biscuit, how on earth do you think you won?
TP: “I’m the products guy. I’m the one who comes up with ideas for products and actually have also brought them to market and I’ve run my own small business. Whilst I made plenty of mistakes and I was on the losing team a record number of times for a finalist and a winner, I think I did show that I did know what was going on quite regularly, the fact that we were doing the wrong thing. But I didn’t speak up enough or I didn’t manage to persuade the fairly big characters around to listen to me.”
Did you find it hard to resist some of the more forceful personalities? Jim, for instance.
TP: “Jim and I didn’t really work together that much, but Jim is incredibly persuasive and a very good seller of ideas and gets really enthusiastic about it and that’s an amazing trait in him. I’m not so good at explaining the ideas or why we should be doing this. Which is something I need to work on.”
Do you think that’s because people thought a lot of your ideas were a bit bonkers? Do you think that a lot of them were?
