Tim Campbell on 20 years since winning The Apprentice
Two decades on, businessman Tim Campbell reflects on his journey from contestant to becoming one of Lord Alan Sugar's advisors.Just days after winning BBC series The Apprentice, Campbell began his job at Lord Sugar's company.Unlike modern-day winners who receive a £250,000 business investment, Campbell remembers finishing filming before being "invited to a conversation with Lord Sugar where he tells you what's going to happen next and then within a week, you're in his offices."Entering Amstrad's health and beauty department on a six-figure salary was a long way from where Campbell had been just a few months before."I was a very wet-behind-the-ears young man," he remembers. "I was living in a one-bedroom flat with a two-year-old child with aspirations of doing better."
Working as a recruitment manager, his now-wife had sent him the details of how to apply to the new BBC business show - and he applied on a whim at the last minute.Going to auditions for the show, he thought he might be wrong for the series. "I saw people in double-breasted suits with suitcases who were working in the city," Campbell says. "And I was just Tim from east London in a shirt and pair of jeans. I was so blasé back then."However, he laughs when he remembers wearing glasses that he didn't really need. "I just thought wearing them made me [look] more intelligent," he chuckles.Looking back, Campbell thinks the magic of the show comes down to the focus on hard work: "It doesn't matter how many contacts that you have. All that matters is how hard you're willing to work."Campbell certainly worked hard on the show. He volunteered himself to be a project manager on the first task, securing his team the first win - and he was on the winning team for seven challenges that saw him selling flowers on the street, inventing a new toy and convincing celebrities to offer items for a charity auction.
He thinks his background was an advantage. "Coming from east London, you had to learn how to work with all types of people because that was a survival tactic," he says."Plus," he jokes, "I have a Jamaican mother, so I wasn't intimidated by Lord Sugar!"In fact, he says his mother inspired him during his time on the series, adding: "This is a woman who grew up in Jamaica, brought up three kids, didn't finish mainstream school. "It was a big thing for me, knowing all the sacrifices she'd had to make as a member of the Windrush generation, to see her son go through this national process and come out of the other side successful."And Campbell and his mum watched every episode of the show together. "My mum wanted to throw slippers at the screen when people said bad things about her son," he remembers.
Over the years, Campbell and Lord Sugar kept in contact, with his former boss attending Campbell's wedding.And then, in 2022, he received a call from Lord Sugar saying: "I need you to come and join the show." Campbell adds: "I first thought it was a wind up, but it was the real thing."As one of Lord Sugar's aides, he says the hardest part of the job is keeping quiet when a team is struggling."My personality is to want to help people," he says. "I end up biting my tongue and swallowing a lot of blood because I know I can see the cliff and they're running towards the edge. You want to desperately grab them back, but sometimes they've already gone and jumped off."Campbell can empathise with the teams in these moments. In his first job after working with Lord Sugar for two years, he tried to launch his own cosmetics company which he says "collapsed completely".This, however, gave him the inspiration for his next venture the Bright Ideas Trust, which offered support and funding for business people from underprivileged groups. He was awarded an MBE in 2012 for services to entrepreneurship.And as an advisor, Campbell quickly became known for his expressive reactions to some of the exploits of the candidates."I'll need a lot of Botox to fill the frown lines from my reactions," he jokes. "My eyebrows get a workout every week!"
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