This week’s Apprentice saw Alex Short become the fourth person to be fired from Lord Alan Sugar’s boardroom.
It came after another candidate, Amy Anzel, encouraged him to be this week’s project manager during the fish task, where they were required to catch and sell fish to high-end clients, and create a dish to be sold to the public.
Speaking to press including RadioTimes.com, Short said that Amy “jumped” on the idea of him leading this week, even though it wasn’t the “best” task for him, and given he’d just joined Infinity, he felt that someone else should have “stepped up”.
“Obviously I came from the other team, the winning team on the previous week, and then to step into a new team that I’d only worked with Akshay [Thakrar] previously, I didn’t really know anyone’s skillsets or how they worked,” he said.
“I think it would have been honourable for someone who was within that team to step up and be PM, but you’re under time constraints and someone had to do it, so I’m proud of myself in a sense of stepping up and putting myself up as PM and taking it on board, even though I probably would agree that it wasn’t the best task for me.
“There could have been a better task further down the line. But again, it’s just coming away with the positives on it.”
Asked why Amy was so keen on him being the PM, even though he repeatedly told her that it wasn’t his area of expertise, he added: “Obviously she jumped on the fact that she wanted me to be PM, but I suppose everyone has their ideas and how they want to go about things.”
Short made several mistakes as the project manager – the biggest one being that he forgot to sell their catch of the day, crab, to the high-end client, which resulted in the group making much less profit than The Apprentice 2022 candidates in the Diversity group.
He continued: “I don’t think anyone actually realises the intense pressure you’re under, and I can’t express that enough. I think that’s why it is such a hard process.
“In real life, you’d love to take a step back or sleep on a decision that’s really important, especially within business, but in there you have to make that decision swiftly. So definitely a different perspective of what I thought it would be. But it just goes to show why it’s such a difficult process to get through to the end.”
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