I was truly gutted to see Duane Bryan fired from The Apprentice last night.

First and foremost because he was my guy in the sweepstake – and that’s about the fifth year in a row my candidate has not made it into the second half of the series; secondly because it was nice to see a bit of honesty in the boardroom for a change.

Dignified Duane accepted responsibility for his ideas without passing the buck, even though they ultimately cost his team the task, and it was the first time I can remember in ages that the three unlucky candidates who were brought back into the boardroom didn’t all shout over each other like a gaggle of squawking geese.

Regardless of whether Duane was ever likely to win the show, he had a lot of ideas during his five week stint and always seemed to fully immerse himself in the tasks with great enthusiasm and energy.

Now, you might wonder why I’m writing a blog about The Apprentice. Or why I have mentioned football in the title. What’s that got to do with new business or marketing (aside from the aspects of the weekly tasks that involve these disciplines)?

Well, it was because Duane said something to Dara O’Briain when he was being interviewed on You’re Fired afterwards and it struck a chord with me:

“Being an entrepreneur isn’t about being the one man at the front, it’s about how good the team works and how good the team can pull together.”

This is my tenth year at Alchemis and I know that above anything else our single biggest asset is our team. However good our data is, however sophisticated our bespoke contact management software is and however expensive the coffee we have here is (OK, I’m exaggerating about this last one, although it is pretty nice), all of it is secondary to the ability of our new business managers to actually just get on and do their job – which is ultimately ensuring our clients get a decent return on investment from attending high quality new business meetings.

Hand on heart I can say that if the skillset, dedication, motivation, camaraderie and drive between the management and staff could be transposed to a football team then they would be winning the Champions League each year.

Oh yeah, and they’d also have state of the art training facilities to hone their skills!

Dan Shearman, one of our most experienced New Business Managers, has spent every spare waking minute recently organizing a phone photography exhibition in aid of London based charity Kids Company.

Running from the 29th November through to the 3rd December, it will be held at The Gallery on the Corner, Battersea Park. Admission is free to the general public, but any donations to the charity will be most welcome.

The opening night will be Monday 28th November from 6.00pm onwards and there will be an auction night on Friday 2nd December from 6:30pm - with none other than yours truly as the auctioneer- where some celebrity phoneography along with top work from the exhibition will be sold to raise money for Kids Company.

If you would like to attend either of these nights please send an email to info@createhive.org with subject header – “Auction night” or “Opening night” (or both if you can make it) along with your name and company name.

It’s in support of an amazing charity reaching 14,000 children across London providing practical, emotional and educational support to vulnerable inner-city children and young people, in particular those with severe emotional, behavioural and social difficulties, resulting from significant experiences of trauma and neglect.

Please feel free to bring along friends and partners and do forward this invite on to everyone and anyone, the more support the better!

Thanks, and I hope to see you there!

 For further details on the exhibition please click here.

Some of you who have read my previous blogs will know that I like to have a bit of a rant sometimes. I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily a grumpy person, but with a fair amount of research experience over the years (ultimately earning me the nickname “Robbie Research”) I do like all business matters to be conducted with an acceptable level of care and attention.

A lack of professionalism when trying to win new business is one of the cardinal sins in my book. My previous blogs on customers for life and the difference between new business and business development will give you an insight to my way of thinking.

So picture the following scenario.

Before Christmas, I get an email from a “new business agency” – and I use the term in the loosest possible sense – offering me business development services for Alchemis.

Perhaps they sent it by mistake. I’ll just ignore it and we’ll say no more about it.

But a few weeks later a follow up email arrives – they’ve tried to get in touch with me but to no avail, surely I would be interested in their business development services for my company. This time, I couldn’t let it lie. I sent a polite reply to the sender which simply said “Gemma, please have a look at our website to see what we do as a company and then decide if we are likely to need a new business agency to help us.”

Surely this would do the trick – a two second check of our website would have shown the sender that we are, in fact, a new business agency ourselves. They could put me on their do not approach list and we will all be happy. But alas, my words fell on deaf ears as a while later I received another email from the same person – albeit this time into my junk email filter as I had marked the previous one as such.

Then last week I received yet another communication. Here is an excerpt:

We aren’t about sending over a high volume of poor quality appointments, we will create highly qualified meetings to make sure you are only meeting prospects that have a genuine need for your services.

Robert we would love to come and meet with you to discus in more detail how we can help you get in front of prospects and get you on track to fulfil new business targets. If you would like to arrange a date for a brief meeting then please do not hesitate to reply to this email or call me.

A few terms jump out of me from this. “Poor quality”; “highly qualified” (not) and “genuine need for your services.”

They also claim to provide a recording of every call they make – which is great except it is illegal unless the prospect is made aware that they are being recorded (and how would you react if you received a cold call from a company you didn’t know and were told they were going to record it)?

I am the only person at Alchemis who is not actively involved in a “sales” role of some description. But even I know that the key thing to any new business approach is to know a bit about the company you’re approaching (like, for example, what they actually do), listen to what the prospect is actually saying and only then are you in a position to know whether your services will be of use.

I’m not going to name and shame the person or company who keep sending me these unqualified approaches (despite my reply advising them to check what we do first) but as Mr T would say “I pity the fool” that would take them on to help with business development if this is an example of their attention to detail.

Companies like this give the more respectable agencies a bad name. And if the company in question happens to be reading this blog, please – for the love of god – practice what you preach.