We had our first Footprint strat session yesterday.  It felt like breaking new ground to build a building or plant a tree.  We started to articulate the vision of what this new company can become!  My job is to start telling people what we’re busy with: so here is my first deliverable, Bilaal!  (Bilaal is helping to keep us honest and stick to deiverables and timelines)

Footprint is going to be a company that offers training at grassroots level: LSM1-5.  Our difference is that we will be able to offer it at the unbelievable price of R450 per day (or thereabouts)!  Ummm, that’s not per person, thats for the facilitator!  Period. So if you had 10 people in the room, it would cost you R45 per head!!!!!

At last, companies who couldn’t afford to train their blue-collar workers in basic life skills like managing their money and managing their health, because that kind of training has been too expensive to deliver nationwide, can now tap into our national training footprint and make it work!

Our offering: Only 2 courses to begin with - “Manage your Health”, and “Manage your Money”.  The course will be run with LSM 1-5 needs in mind.  Learning materials are picture-based, so there will be no language or literacy barriers.  Trainers will be sourced and enabled in local communities so the training will take place with local flavour and languages. We envisage building a team of over 1000 trainers nationwide to cover the nooks and crannies of South African enterprise.

We need: Some customers to start with!  Our programes will be very appropriate to support banks and financial institutions with their consumer education needs. Mines are also very involved in helping miners live healthy lives, and overcome the scourge of AIDS, TB, Heart disease and others.  Municipalities may be interested in talking to us about skills development and employment opportunities within their local areas.  There are many more spaces where companies have workers spread out across South Africa, and we would love to chat to them about how we can train their staff, or their consumers. (Getting a new customer is also on my list of deliverables with Bilaal - please help me or I’ll be in trouble again!)

We are in the process of planning our resourcing going forward: very soon, I’ll publish the roles we will be needing to recruit to.  So for those of you wanting to be part of this magical new company - dust off your CV!  It’s going to be a fantastic ride!  We’ll be building South Africa, one person at a time!