Jennifer's Story for Episode 1

The minute we walked pass the dining area before the task announcement, I was thinking of F&B Set Lunch Creation. Oh my gosh, how come it came that fast, the first task?! Last season, it was the Burger King task that had the same requirement. Looking at the team members I had, I was quite confident at first that Anoop would be able to share his F&B experiences due to the fact that he promoted himself heavily among the team members as a well rounder of F&B master background.

As a result, Boon Yew gave his suggestion to appoint Anoop as the team leader for Task 1. So, how about my confidence level in handling the task? I’m the type of person who would love to take one step at a time. Focus on the present task, not about how much more burden I’m gonna face in the next coming weeks with tasks like this. Come to think about it… if you really look THAT FAR, you’re putting a tremendous pressure on yourself, and it’s definitely going to be hard to manage. Looking at the task, what could I contribute for creating a satisfying weekend set lunch plus dine-in experience as the main objectives?

Come on, we need unique big idea - larger than life! So, there was a dispute between Dian and me. My idea started as a problem analyser - How many people know that The Carat Club has F&B to offer besides diamond?s How can we create curiousity among consumers and make them walk into the restaurant for us to satisfy? - Boom! Chef has always been a close tie to Food, duh! What does “Meet the Chef Behind the Diamonds” mean? Weekend consumers are basically families who care and selective about the food they eat and being able to bring the chef up to understand the consumers’ perceptions toward the food offered would make them ‘feel’ personalized and special. In other words, The Carat Club cares for us, and they take our views to enhance for the better. So, maintaining the prestige status of the restaurant, how can we attract the prospective customers, whether they know or do not know The Carat Club?



Hence, we have our team members dressing up in the the smart chef complete attire with long hat to reach out to Pavilion shoppers.



Dian - a strong minded person who wanted her own idea ‘Families are Forever’ to be on the table. At first, I did not agree with that. Reason being, do we need to specifically mention ‘Families’ in the tagline although we know that families are our target customers? Shouldn’t we be more creative? She defended that “Meet the Chef Behind the Diamonds” would not work because the chef is not a celebrity chef and hence it is not attractive enough. To me, as long as we could create a profile for the chef, it would be a good starting point for the chef and The Carat Club in the long run and things could work well. Never assume without checking first. Well, in the end I was alright cuz “Meet the Chef Behind the Diamonds” was seconded under “Families are Forever”… as long as we could arrive at a compromising line.


Working together, as this was the first task, everyone volunteered to do things at their best capacity. It was more like those who volunteered the most ended up doing the most, whereas those who didn’t would just being ignored by Anoop. This was quite unfair - cuz I thought equal task delegation should be planned by the leader so that everyone has equal chance of contributing. Apart from that, I was told to do the checklist for him, one night before the event and yet, the event flow produced by him was confusing and kept changing even till the last minute before the task started. So many emails flying around like nobody’s business. In other words, it confused the team mates cuz changes made at the last minute when three of our team members have gone out distributing flyers. So basically, changes were only brief to me, Masami, and Dian. How about the rest - Boon Yew, C.A., and Ridzuan? Shouldn’t they be briefed as well?



Despite the fact that we had problems with our team leader, but still the winning criteria was to produce the most satisfying lunch experience, which we, Team Equity scored that as the highest rating. However, taking into consideration of the profits and the crowd generated by the opposition team, Team Asset’d won. At the end, no one was terminated from Team Equity. Moving forward for the next task, Team Equity learned that communication is crucial for team work enhancement.

My favourite pictures during the ‘Making of Episode 1′.





Not as bad as you think, despite the problems we faced in Episode 1, we’re one step closer to understanding each other. Thumbs up!