Rachel Woolford reveals secret to winning The Apprentice

Rachel Woolford has revealed the secret strategy which helped her win 'The Apprentice'.

The 28-year-old gym-owner bagged Lord Alan Sugar’s £250,000 investment prize on the BBC reality competition after a showdown with pie-maker Phil Turner in the final episode and she has now explained her plan to ensure victory involved keeping her "head down" for much of the series - insisting she wanted to prove that you don't have to be loud and brash to succeed in business.

She told The Sun newspaper: "I went into The Apprentice promising I would just be myself, and not turn it on in any way in front of the cameras, throw anyone else under the bus or be bitchy. I wanted to prove you don’t need to be the loudest voice and screaming at the others.

"For that, people saw me as a bit of an underdog. But my main value in business, and in life, is that you don’t have to shout to get your point across.

"I wasn’t getting any airtime in the beginning because I wasn’t talking over people. But it worked out, as I was instead busy making little actions here and there to show up in the task and impress Lord Sugar."

Rachel added: "You can’t be a wallflower - you do have to know how to speak up and defend yourself. But keeping your head down and working hard is the key."

She is now hoping to use Lord Sugar's money to expand her gyms across the north of England. Rachel previously told Mail Online: "It's an honour to have been chosen by Lord Sugar and for him to invest in my business which at the end of the day is my baby and something I have been working on for almost five years now.

“For him to see something in me and think my business is investable is just an incredible and overwhelming feeling. “I am really looking forward to working with Lord Sugar for a number of reasons.

"He is investing a lot of money into me to enable my business to grow to open a third site and potentially a fourth. "