Mark Giles runs the London Marathon for Charity

Pareto Law employee Mark Giles ran the London Marathon on Sunday 17th April for Leukaemia Research, and St Peter and St James Hospice, in memory of his Mum who he lost in 2008 to Leukaemia. Having run the Brighton Half Marathon and the Bath Half Marathon only a couple of weeks beforehand, Mark Giles proceeded to the London Marathon 6 weeks later.

Training every week for 2-3 hour runs Mark set himself the challenge of beating his brothers time. His brother and Sister had run the previous year, where Mark was also due to run; but missed out as he was stranded in Australia due to the Volcanic Ash cloud over Europe.

Mark completed the Marathon in 4hrs 13mins, stating that the crowds were amazing on an extremely hot day making it an extremely tough run, especially 15-20 miles. Mark took almost a week to recover, struggling to walk up or downstairs. But this hasn’t stopped him, and he wants to continue his hard work and keep running in the coming years (and beat his Brother’s time!).

Mark has raised over £3k for his charities by running the marathon and he wants to better his time and continue raising awareness for his charities.

Apprentice Episode 3 - Hunt for a bargain

The apprentices are sent out to buy 10 products once again, this time for the Savoy in London which has been revamped and is set to re-open. Sadly the episode is the same as it always has been, the teams running round not showing any negotiation skills whilst at the same time not having a clue what they are doing. To give the boys some help after losing twice in a row, lord sugar decided to mix things up.

Suzie was nominated the leader for Venture and did show strong organisational skills in having her teams find the relevant products before they set out which allowed them to have a clear structure for the day. However there is always one team that just has no structure, Gavin (team leader for Logic) was still sat in the hotel at 11.00am, over 2 hours after Lord Sugar had left them, with no idea bout where any of the products where or what they were.

As you would expect from a top hotel, there were some strange items, both teams finding the Cloche and Physalis particularly hard items to find, probably because they didn’t know what they were.

The negotiation skills of both teams was very poor, Suzie’s team managing a total saving of 1p from the top hat. Suzie did however manage to negotiate the price of the Tea from £999 down to a bargain at £410. This was still £200 more than Gavin’s team paid which they managed to get for close to half price of the starting price of £450.

Gavin’s team only managed to get 6 of the 10 items on the list, whilst Suzie managed to get 9. The scores were still close mainly due to Venture paying over the odds for many of the items, but Logic did lose by the small margin of £8. Gavin seemed to have given up trying to blame other people and in the end had no energy to say why he should stay, he was shown the door and Zoe and Vincent managed to avoid the firing line. We did also notice that this was Vincent’s second time in the boardroom, and Zoe’s lack of input has meant they are both in the firing line.

In partnership with Lord Sugar

Big Al is at it again except this time he is no longer looking for an all singing all dancing sales apprentice, but someone with that entrepreneurial flair to become Lord Sugars business partner.

This, you would have thought would change how the show works, yet the show still includes some strong characters. Melody Hossaini claimed to have been mentored by Al Gore and taught personally by none other than the Dalai Lama. Lord Sugar is his boisterous self, shouting at how rubbish they are and how great he is, so all in all the show is still the same, lots of shouting and arguing mixed with a little bit of selling skills in order to impress the Lord himself.

And so the battle commenced, men vs women, the women’s team is named Venture and the men went with the exciting name logic. The task this week was to take the £250 (presumably pocket change found down Alan sugars sofa), and buy fruit to resell back to the public at a profit.

Venture initially squabbled over who was to be the team leader, get enough egos together and this is natural and in this show you’d have a hard time getting most of them through the door, Venture decided that the best strategy was to buy lots of different fruit and produce a fruit salad along with a their own pasta concoction, spending only £160 in the process showing their flair for negotiations already, they set about selling it at Euston station, which turned out to be a good location, as they sold the fruit salads by the bucket-load and soon ran out, their pasta did not sell so well....

Team logic led by Edward went for a different angle with the fruit, and bought a tonne of oranges and tomatoes. Their plan was to sell orange juice and tomato soup, interesting choices, there’s nothing more I want after soup than a glass of OJ...and they just about pulled it off despite Leon breaking the juicer (fool...), the soup even looked edible.

Then it was down to the boardroom, both turned a decent profit, but Venture was the eventual winners, and as such it was taxi time for Logic’s Edward.

Venture showed a lack of communication skills and planning, when initially squabbling over who was to be in charge and they could have done even better except for some short-sightedness, another £90 could have been spent on fruit to maximise profits even further but perhaps I am being overly critical! The men rolled with the punches as Edward like to say (a lot), but although they turned a good profit, unfortunately they were the losers and were sent to the deserted café whilst Lord Sugar decided their fate.

It was no surprise Edward received the boot, he has been trained at ‘one of the best accountancy firms’ yet still managed to ignore any calculations which he would have been best suited for, and just played it all by ‘rolling with the punches’.