Donald Trump’s dramatic, “You’re fired!” on the reality show “The Apprentice” is just entertainment to most people. To teams of summer interns at PQ Systems Inc. in Dayton, Ohio, however, it meant a challenge for the ensuing work week.

The young interns, faced with the tedious task of contacting the company’s customers to verify contact information, saw a long summer ahead of them when they began in May. Cleaning up databases is a notoriously neglected job. And with the repetitive script, the mountain of names, and the difficulty of making a dent in the task, it’s neglected for good reasons.

That all changed when Larry Knight, a sales representative who had been a PQ Systems intern prior to his graduation from Wright State University a year ago, helped the six interns to develop a team approach to the task. Ultimately, they adopted the model of Trump’s popular television series.

Every two weeks, teams would gather in the company’s conference room and present the results of their activities with respect to numbers: contacts made, fax numbers gathered, e-mail addresses verified, database changes made, etc. An additional category—sales generated—was added after the interns discovered that some customers wanted to talk about the company’s products.

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