What an exciting time for us! Avo Vision, together with Andre Grobler from CanDo, have given birth to our new company: Ngikwazi Field Marketing (Pty) Ltd! And for those of you still out of the loop on this, we were recently awarded the contract by Gidani to help set up the new national lottery!

If you happen to pop by our Avo offices over the next few weeks, you’d be forgiven for not actually recognising the place: there are teams of people and PCs set up in every conceivable corner. All meeting rooms have been relegated to ‘garden venues’, and there are so many new faces around that not even the Avos know for sure who’s who!

All the Ngikwazi people are busily delivering on the Gidani contract: its a simple matter of finding 8000 retailers nationally who would like to sell lottery tickets; accrediting them by making sure they are fit and proper in order to operate the new lottery, and then training 30 000 retailers and their staff on how to operate the new machines. And all of this needs to be landed by 1 April 2007! Ouch - huge ask for the next 3.5 months!

But our team is all over it! We’re having the time of our lives, learning what it takes to launch a lottery.

Next year, Ngikwazi will move off the Avo premesis, and begin to operate independently of its ‘Avo mama’. We should be about ready to launch our ‘Footprint’ womens empowerment business by then. So Elaine and I go back to the task of running Avo, setting up Footprint, and applying all our new learnings as Non-Exec directors of Ngikwazi into how we run both companies.

Bongani Khumalo, Chairman of Gidani, charged us with using this lotto opportunity to build a sustainable, empowered business that we all can be proud of. That’s just what we intend to do. At last we have a vehicle that will help us make a sustainable impact as we build South Africa.