Yahoo News 'I invited Lord Sugar for tea after I was fired on The Apprentice'
The Apprentice's Sam Saadet was the latest to be fired
The Apprentice's Sam Saadet was the latest to be fired as project leader. Her team lost after failing to wow clients with their Arctic-themed tropical fruit cereal for children.
However, Saadet left The Apprentice with a "fire in her belly" to launch her pre and postnatal fitness Mummy Movement as an app. Here she shares her story with Yahoo.
Of course I’ll stay in touch with Lord Alan Sugar - we'll be down having lunch in Sheesh!
Lord Sugar was round on the weekend and he sat right there in my kitchen with a cuppa. I make a good Earl Grey. Jokes aside, we are both from the same neck of the woods. He literally lives five minutes down the road. We only get to speak to Lord Sugar in the boardroom on The Apprentice and in the initial meeting I did make a point to say I’m actually from round your way. He asked, "Where?" And he was like, "Yeah ok!"
From the offset, he thought, "I’m a local Essex bird". We had a mutual understanding. And I think that’s why at the end I said, "Make sure you come round for a cuppa!" I’m not gonna lie, I completely blacked out. I forgot I even said it before it got aired. And I thought, "Oh, my God." I blurted it out but do you know what? That's me. So at least I got my personality out there in the end.
Lord Sugar gave me such a positive firing and I couldn’t have asked for more. But it’s still unclear to me to this day why I got fired. What it boiled down to was purely the fact I was the project manager. First and foremost I thought "we’re gonna win" and I didn’t even think about losing. So when I lost, I thought, "Oh God, what are we gonna do now?"
You saw in the boardroom, I found it really hard to choose who I was going to bring back. I couldn't think.
Can I be honest? We had loss after loss after loss. I was fuming that we lost again. I thought, "I'm tired now, just send me home." I took awhile to make up my mind on who to bring back into the boardroom. I could see Lord Sugar was like, "Come on babe, hurry up! I haven't got all day."
I had to think logically. I thought, Phil get in the boardroom, you're doing my nut in! And then he slipped through the net. Snaky! I absolutely love Phil to bits and on a personal level, I get on well with him. We had a mutual understanding that we cannot work together. It's like when you live at home with your husband and you could never work with him because you clash so much. I brought back Phil for the flavouring and being a bit destructive while I was trying to get stuff done. I went in a bit on him in the boardroom but it wasn't all shown on screen. We clashed so much... But it was in a fun way.
Being sub team lead and coming up with that polar bear, Maura had to come back into the boardroom. But it did her the world of good because she hadn't been project manager yet. So she fought her case and it gave her the opportunity to go on and be project manager. Everything happens for a reason.
Being away from my two girls was a massive thing I thought about before even making my first application to The Apprentice. But I've got an amazing support unit at home: I've got my husband, my mum, my mum-in-law, they're really close with the girls. I coped with it just by keeping busy.
We were doing 12-hour filming days. We do genuinely get up that early and you're constantly here, here, here. You're so busy you haven't got time to think. Getting home at nine o'clock, having a bit to eat and then going to bed. The odd down day between tasks I'd be able to FaceTime home. The girls were living their best lives with my mum.
I kept myself busy around The Apprentice house doing the cooking and cleaning. The girls would be like, "Sam just relax between the tasks!" I couldn't rest, I didn't want to think about home. I thought this was gonna be a nice break from mum life but then I was a mum to 17 grown adults! So I shot myself in the foot with that one. If I did have a wobble, I thought about my girls and told myself, "No I've got to keep going."
Of screen, we all became friends on The Apprentice. Luckily the people I worked with were all very good at leaving business at the door. We had the maturity to know what's said in the boardroom was business and coming back to the house was real life. We all had such different personalities but all got on well so we were really lucky.
Karren Brady and Tim Campbell play the part well as Lord Sugar’s left hand man and right hand woman! They're brilliant. Behind the scenes, Tim is great and he's so down to earth. He's a right geezer. He'd always look the part. I'd say, "You're looking fly mate" and I'd chat to him about his kids. He's really, really, really cool family man and businessman.
Of course Karren is the most glam businesswoman. She's iconic for women in business. In Jersey, we had lunch at the winery place and I popped to the loo and as I'm coming out the loo - Karren is in there. At first I was thinking, "What do I do? What do I say?"
Then I said, "Karen, I must say, you always look so glam." She turned around and she was so humble, so down to earth, so lovely telling me I looked nice. She said, "Sam, it takes years of practice. I've got my glam squad." I said, "Honestly you smash every outfit." Then I thought, "I'm not gonna push it now." She wished me the best of luck. It was that moment when you're out and you make best friends in the girls' toilets. It was one of the key moments of the whole show for me. She's a real softie and a real woman's woman.
The bucket list moment of the whole experience was when I got to pick up the phone. I thought, I don't even care about the investment now. I was so happy. The whole experience I was doing things I'll never do again in a million years.
I came away from The Apprentice with a real fire in my belly. My business idea was to launch pre and postnatal fitness Mummy Movement as an app. Since I've finished filming, I went away and did it myself. I really want to make it a real success. I'm really excited to see where it takes me. I've got two young girls and they want them to see a strong woman. I had that myself with my mum so I wanna make sure I repeat it. I want to show them to really go out to get everything they want in life.
Sam Saadet told her story to Lily Waddell.
The Apprentice continues on BBC One at 9pm every Thursday.
