On Tuesday, November 30, we spoke to Steuart Martens, the thirteenth contestant to be fired by Donald Trump on the reality television series, The Apprentice.  In this segment, "Driving Miz-rahi," Fortitude (now consisting of Brandy and Liza) and Octane (Clint and Steuart), were assigned the task of creating and starring in a live sales segment for Issac Mizrahi merchandise for the cable shopping channel, QVC.  At the conclusion of the task, the women's team earned about $800 more in profit than the men's team did.  In the boardroom segment, Mr. Trump clearly had a hard time picking between Steuart and Clint, and said just before he decided to fire Steuart that there were no losers between the two.

Here are the facts about Steuart Martens from his NBC Apprentice bio: Steuart Martens, 27 (Washington, D.C.), born and raised in Washington DC, was the successful owner of four companies. Unfortunately, as the economy took a downturn, Martens was forced to close down two of his companies and lay off his entire staff. A serial entrepreneur, he is always looking for the next big business venture opportunity. Martens attended Purdue University on a swimming scholarship and received a Bachelor of Science in business. He also made it to the Olympic trials for swimming and is heavily involved in DC government.

USTOWNHALL SPEAKS TO STEUART MARTENS OF THE APPRENTICE 10:

USTH: When you initially joined the competition and you're sizing people up and then as you got to know them week by week, is there anyone who surprised you in terms of how you thought of them initially versus how they performed during the competition? Anyone who you thought did better than you thought they would have done or did worse than you thought they would have done in the competition?

STEUART MARTENS: The person that surprised me most was probably James Weir. I thought he was going to be one of the strongest competitors there and it turned out to be the total opposite. I still really respect him. I'm not saying he's a bad guy or anything. It was just I was really worried about him at the beginning because before I knew him I thought just by looking at that guy – "All right, he's going to do very well in the challenge."

USTH: Is there anyone who you thought would not do well that really did well or at least better than you thought they would?

STEUART MARTENS: I definitely had a feeling it might be Clint. With Clint, I just didn't see him doing this well in the competition – very surprised.

USTH: When it came down to you and Clint in the boardroom, did you anticipate that it would be easy to convince Mr. Trump that you were the better candidate – perhaps underestimating Clint? Or did you think that he might be a formidable opponent for you in the boardroom talking to Mr. Trump at the end?

STEUART MARTENS: I knew Clint's a great talker and [does well in those] situations, but I really wasn't worried in the boardroom. [But] it was what it was, and I wasn't expecting a cat fight but I also wasn't expecting to roll over. In my opinion, when we were in the board room, we lost a project. Clint was the project manager. He made the decision on what we were going to sell [the handbag] at. And I just found it shocking when my portion of the task was virtually perfect, and everyone said I couldn't have done a better job – I'm stunned at the way things turned out. It's totally the opposite of what I thought going into this.

USTH: Have you become friends with any of the other contestants since filming wrapped?

STEUART MARTENS: Not really, but I still talk to Anand and Clint on somewhat of a regular basis. There's no one else I really keep in touch with.

USTH: What advice would you give to the next season of Apprentice, not the celebrity apprentices, but if they should ever do the "civilian" version all over again? What advice would you give to the next cast if you could?

STEUART MARTENS: My advice would be play the game to win. Stay out of the boardroom by winning. I don't like the manipulative way some people play the game where they might intentionally lose a task so they [can] get someone fired because they know they'd be saved – all those kind of games. I don't really like that. I really like playing the game to make sure we won. If you go your best every task versus try to play games, you're going to be very successful in the show, and you're going to go a long way.

USTH: What do you take away from the experience overall, and would you do it all over again?

STEUART MARTENS: Well, first, I would definitely do it again. I really loved the experience. It was great – great period of learning for me where I got to learn a lot about the entertainment industry and learned about a lot of other people. It just was a really overall phenomenal thing for me. And, the takeaways would be that when you're in that kind of a stressful situation, and you're working almost 20 hours a day for weeks on end, [you must] really learn to focus. And for me, that was the problem I had when I started four companies, and I was all over the place and doing tasks sometimes half-assed to say I was focusing on three other companies. That experience [of being on The Apprentice] taught me to slow down. It's really such a simple solution – just really stay focused on a couple things versus all of them.

USTH: You mentioned about learning about the entertainment industry. Has the entertainment bug bit you? Do you want a career in the entertainment industry in some way, shape or form?

STEUART MARTENS: No question. In some capacity I would love to stay in the entertainment world. I'm not saying I'm going to become Hollywood's next famous movie star, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of creating the show. Hopefully that'll transcend into something else in the next few weeks here for me.

USTH: Thank you very much for talking with us today, and good luck to you in the future.

The Apprentice airs each Thursday night at 10:00pm Eastern & Pacific / 9:00pm Central on NBC.

Use the image gallery below to read the other interviews in this series 

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