Everybody should definitely pay heed to The Profit!
It’s a show about a billionaire investor named Marcus Lemonis. On the surface, it’s another of those quasi-reality famous-guy-fixes-it-up shows, a genre which I rather enjoy anyway. Or rather, I enjoy a part of it. What often annoys about these kinds of shows is the fake “resolution” where things are great that these trend towards.
No so much, this one. Lemonis is actually putting his own money down and buys some level of ownership stake if he’s confident in the business, and is directly involved in putting the business in order. Much of his advice also makes perfect sense, and he’s not afraid to have cutaways where he explains the economics of a decision or break down some choices - whereas other shows often use these only for emotional reactions.
While he’ll yell at people, it’s also obvious he spends real time trying to offer constructive criticism, and he’s not afraid of walking away from a deal - or in a couple cases, running away as fast as possible. If you want an intro to modern business, you could do a lot worse. Lemonis also uses his connections to try to make real growth possible.
Which isn’t to say that some people are utterly dysfunctional. In fact, as a veteran of Kitchen Nightmares and so forth, there wouldn’t be a lot which might shock me. Then I saw The Profit. Well, a lot of this gets working, but some people seem to have flatly mad ideas about how to run a business, or let freakish character flaws blow million-dollar opportunities. It’s definitely an interesting show, and at the very least seems like it’s less edited to show some point of view.
At the least, make sure you watch WorldWide Trailer (S2, E4). It actually managed to make me feel sorry for an adulterous husband, which is amazing.
ETA: Also, the entire show is available for free on Hulu.
I like the show, but the actual deals always seem to be a bit murky. In the ones that don’t work out, we see Marcus hand over a check at the beginning, but it’s not clear what happens to that money when he walks away.
I like the Profit because Marcus Lemonis isn’t an asshole. I say this, because the standard on these sorts of shows is for the professional/celebrity to just be a jerk to people, and they take it because he’s the professional/celebrity. See, for instance, Gordon Ramsey or the Shark Tank people. Lemonis, on the other hand, hardly ever raises his voice, tends only to get pissed when the people he’s dealing with get extremely obnoxious, and his general facial expression is this shy little smile where you can tell he’s thinking, ‘My God, what did I get myself into?’ And, I don’t know if his suggestions are actually good ones, but they tend to seem reasonable…things like ‘Maybe you shouldn’t spend three quarters of your operating budget on fish for your office aquarium.’, or ‘I know its how your grandfather founded the company, but you’d sell more if you made something other than wax lips. Have you thought about candles?’
I liked the most recent episode with the candy store. The last couple episodes were lacking in resolution, with the nutty owners just driving Marcus away in disgust. (And whatever happens to those checks he writes?)
This time they managed to find sane owners, successfully ousted the useless partner, and started on the road to getting them into a more practical facility.
Resurrecting this zombie because I just discovered this show, and starting a new thread would just be repeating what’s already been posted here. Anyways, this show is awesome.
I am repeatedly amazed how far people can go in creating and building a business while seemingly possessing absolutely zero business sense whatsoever. Marcus is constantly needing to explain extremely basic, fundamental shit like how to calculate a per-item cost. I mean that’s not even Business 101, that’s literally 4th grade arithmetic, and these people cannot do it.
And I agree with Captain Amazing, the best element is that Marcus is not an asshole, even when the people he’s working with are. He’ll get upset, to the point he’ll literally say, “I’m pissed,” but he always remains a gentleman and stays on point no matter how insane the business owner gets. He’ll get frustrated and walk away to clear his head, but he immediately comes back and continues to try and solve the problem.
There are lots of other “fix-my-failing-business” shows like Kitchen Nightmares or Hotel: Impossible in which it really doesn’t take a genius to figure out what the problem is, but this show is a little different. Fixing these businesses, while some of them the fix is fairly obvious, but others it requires some advanced business experience and that’s what really sets this show apart.
