A short series revisiting the previous Apprentice winners.
Won: Season two (2006), beating Ruth Badger. During the series, she was dubbed ‘Silent Assassin’ and ‘Steel Pixie’ by the press.
Pre-Apprentice: Having started out on the checkouts in Kwik Save, Dewberry worked for a number of different companies before becoming a self-employed global telecoms programme director.
Post-Apprentice: Dewberry was given a job within Amstrad looking at the launch of Xenon Green, a venture specialising in the environmentally-friendly disposal of computer equipment. In July 2006, The Sun reported she was pregnant by fellow contestant Syed Ahmed; she miscarried a month later. Dewberry left Amstrad after 11 months.
Post-Sugar: Dewberry has run her own motivational speaking and business transformation consultancy, Michelle Dewberry Ltd (MDL), since 2006, and released an autobiography, Anything is Possible, in 2007.
She is also the founder of two web enterprises. Chiconomise, set up in 2008, is a deals aggregation website targeting women who want to maintain a stylish lifestyle for less. The Daily Chic, launched three months ago, is a similar group buying aggregator which consolidates deals in a consumer’s local area.
Dewberry also writes a weekly ‘work and money’ column for iVillage, the UK’s leading female lifestyle portal, and a regular monthly feature for Business Matters magazine.
She is the only Apprentice winner whose photo does not feature in Alan Sugar‘s autobiography. In a recent interview, Sugar told the Digital Spy website that Dewberry is the only apprentice he regrets hiring:
[Picking Michelle over Ruth Badger] is the only one where you could say that there is some regret. And the regrets really were very much that she decided that what my company had to offer was not for her.
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Tomorrow, find out what happened to season three winner Simon Ambrose.
Whatever happened to the Apprentice winners?