There are a few moments in every person’s life where they can look back on and know, for sure, that they are viewing one of their life-changing conversations or events.

Such has been my experience of this lottery project we have won.

For those of you not in the loop, we recently formed a new company, Ngikwazi, with Andre Grobler, one of our dear associates, and friend. Together, we have been on the ride of a lifetime: first doing the work to succeed in our bid; corporate jostling with our esteemed rivals along the way; high level, international negotiations with big-shot lawyers (we now have our OWN lawyers!) to conclude the contract; and then, of course, setting up the business of about 300 people to actually deliver on all our promises!

For those of you hardened businesspeople out there, you will know what I mean when I say it was MUCH harder than I thought it would be! Our launch date is 1 April, with absolutely no margin for error. Every team that has been set up to deliver parts of the project is working itself to the bone, putting in weeks of punishing hours on too little sleep as the hours and days tick away, getting closer and closer to D-day.

There are 3 things we have to do: find 8000 retailers who would like to sell lottery tickets on site, credit check all owners of each of those businesses, and then train their staff - a small number of 30 000 people! Oh, and did I mention? We have precisely 20 days in which to train the 30 000! We will deliver 579 training days in the space of 20 working days! The scope and logistics of this project feel completely mind-boggling!

But operations aside, I must tell you about one of the things that have made this experience so ground-breaking for me:

For the first time in my business career, I have had first-hand experience of how important it is to be skilled at managing people. We have assembled the best lottery brains South Africa has to offer. So technical skill is not an issue. But as people work harder and longer, and resilience begins to fail them, I am seeing the real performers begin to fly. And every single one of them has solid EQ and skills to be able to manage themselves and the people around them. Every single one manages to calm the people around them, refocus their teams, and generate fresh wind for their colleagues to fly with.

Through this experience I am seeing that the skills we teach at Avo are absolutely critical when it comes to high-performing teams: the ability to self-observe, and self-correct can give people the absolute edge when the chips are down. The bad news for you, if you are one of our clients reading this, is that our Avo team will be far more assertive in our claims in future: instead of quietly building our training content in a gentle business environment that sometimes seems removed from the real world, we are now new, improved businesspeople who have faced the hard-core business realities head-on with our cleverness and shining interpersonal skills. And come out delivering, confident and ‘bigger’ than when we began. We know this stuff really works, and we’ll want to help your people get better at it too.

Beware, precious clients and friends: the ‘relationship mastery revolution’ is on and we know where you work!