'I plan to take them on my journey," Bill Rancic says. "Talk to them about thinking like an entrepreneur . . ." and then his cellphone cuts out. Reception is pretty bad at the Trump Tower construction site in Chicago.
For many Canadian TV addicts, Mr. Rancic and his journey are etched into collective pop culture memory. He was the first winner of the once wildly successful Donald Trump television show, The Apprentice.
Today, he'll be in Canada's capital, talking to University of Ottawa students and alumni about his transformation from an on-line business founder to the Trump-appointed overseer of one of Chicago's biggest construction projects.
The success story goes something like this: Eight years ago, Mr. Rancic scraped together $24,000 (U.S.) to start an on-line cigar store. In a few years, the Web retailer went from a nickel-and-dime operation to a national, multimillion-dollar business. With the cigar store on his résumé, Mr. Rancic managed to make the list of hopefuls for the first season of The Apprentice.
Bill Rancic, the winner of the televisoin reality show The Apprentice. (Jim Ross/The Globe and Mail)
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The competition, he says, was intense. The cameras were on 24 hours a day and there was no scripting and no retakes.
Most contestants got two or three hours of sleep a night. For 16 weeks in 2004, millions of viewers watched Mr. Rancic outlast the 15 other contestants.
The prize is his current gig -- overseeing the building of the 92-storey Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago for $250,000 a year.
But when it came to cashing in on his Apprentice fame, the Trump Tower job was just the beginning for the 33-year-old. Shortly after he won, Mr. Rancic published his first book, You're Hired: How to Succeed in Business and Life from the Winner of The Apprentice. Then came Beyond the Lemonade Stand, a business book for preteens.
These days, Mr. Rancic spends much of his time travelling around the country giving talks and presentations. As his website says: "Like Mr. Trump, you also can tell Bill, 'You're Hired,' when you hire him to host your next event or speak at your business conference, university, or company function . . . ." Microsoft Corp., Coca-Cola Co. and Snag-A-Job.com have all been his clients.
"At this point, it's not a bad thing," Mr. Rancic says of his television-fuelled fame, adding that it gives him access to a variety of interesting projects and people. He counts dinner with Neil Armstrong as one of his greatest post-Apprentice experiences.
Whether he wants to live off his television fame for the rest of his life, however, is a different matter.
"Do I want to be known as the guy who won a reality show all my life? Maybe I can transition that into something else," he says. "I don't know. I honestly don't know."
For now, his dream is to partner up with Donald Trump on a completely new project, not one predetermined by his reality show victory.
Since its launch two years ago, The Apprentice has attracted a cult following of reality show fans and would-be Trumps. Now into its fifth season, the show still commands a hefty audience in Canada (although viewership has declined every season), fuelling small-scale local spinoffs and copycat shows. At Queen's University in Kingston, for example, students created their own in-house version of the show, Queen's Apprentice. Sold-out crowds packed a campus bar to watch the elimination process unfold.
The fifth season of The Apprentice began airing Monday. Mr. Rancic says there'll be at least one more season, scheduled to start shooting this June.
As for the advice he plans to give budding executives today in Ottawa, the former cigar salesman says he'll emphasize the importance of never giving up.
"So many people quit too early. There are people who, when the going gets tough, they get yelling," he says. "That's not the right attitude."
