The Profit, which airs on CNBC, of all sad places, stars investor Marcus Lemonis, as he travels around offering to buy up pieces of struggling businesses — if the owners agree to do things his way. Spoiler: After hemming and hawing, they mostly agree. Lemonis puts up his own money — dude’s a billionaire, so … he can — and then becomes a part owner of the company, sometimes buying 25 percent, sometimes 50, sometimes somewhere in between. I won’t say that The Profit is realer than its brethren, but Lemonis does seem more, er, invested. He repeats, often a few times per episode, that he believes in “people, process, and product,” and then, throughout the course of the episode, we see him put it into practice: If he thinks the people from the company are crummy, he sometimes straight-up fires them, but he also sometimes brings in a team psychologist to help people work through some issues. If the processes is broken, he buys new warehouses or machinery and inventory systems. And if a product is bad, he insists on revamping the recipe or upgrading the fabric or whatever. So simple, so straightforward.
Many, many of the businesses he invests in are run by “personalities,” but Lemonis is weirdly calm during most of the proceedings. He tells the head of sales of an ecofriendly cleaning-products company that she’s terrible at sales; she shouts back that she’s great at it, and he just stands there, steadily repeating, “No, you’re not.” (He’s right. She is extremely bad at sales, or at least extremely bad at sales on TV.) He stares blankly while people explain the weird love-triangles that have ruined their businesses partnerships, and then tells them he doesn’t actually want to know their personal drama, he just needs to know if they can work together. (I want to know their personal dramas. People are so weird, all the time!) He has no problem telling people they’ve invested poorly thus far, but he’s not scolding or punitive. He’s sort of chill and patient and lets the weirdos tire themselves out, until they return to their senses and agree to his terms. People get into it, for sure, but there’s less of the pervasive nastiness and acrimony than you’d expect.