Right place and at the right time

Right place right time.

It was a lovely evening, in Hamburg and Mr S couldn't sleep.

He was tired after a spending the last two days walking from stall to stall.

The show he had attended that day was huge. Bigger than anything he had ever seen and he had an early flight home the next morning.

It's funny how you are often  too tired to sleep.

Mr S went down for a drink, and started up a conversation with a German businessman.
When he told the guy he was from Durban, the German dude said that he knew the town very well, as he had just come back from South Africa.

Apparently he worked for a huge multi national GSM technology company and they were spending millions preparing a tender for a service providers license, in South Africa!

Now suddenly Mr S was wide awake.

He told his new friend that they were approaching the whole matter wrong. That no tender  that didn't have a local, previously disadvantaged, partner could succeed in the new south Africa.

The new German friend asked Mr S if he would be interested in meeting the head of the GSM consortium.

Ticket rescheduled he went to the meeting the next morning, and by the end of the day he had secured a small stake in the tendor to be the "token" local man of colour to  give the venture a better chance of success.

Our Indian friend had up to this point ran a business installing alarm systems in houses  and sound systems in luxury cars.

He could talk the talk, and now he had a little stake in something big.

Win win.

Well this story is way not told yet. Not by a long shot.

Soon his name appeared on the list of directors of the prestigious European company, And he went along for the ride.

On 28 March 1994 a bomb went of Shell house, at the ANC head quarters and all foreign companies packed up to leave.

The German partners got nervous, and despite the investment of millions in research and legal work, they rolled up their tent and decided to throw in the towel.

Our friend Mr S approached them asking what they had in mind for him, and they said, they were "out".

And as if to make their point they transfered full ownership to him. It was at this point just an application and really not worth anything.

Then again the wheel turned, and our Mr S was the most surprised when he got a letter asking him to gp to Pretoria.

He went, and talked his way through a meeting where he convinced the regulatory body Satra that he was the brain behind the tender, and that the loss of the Germans was not a train smash.

He was awarded the tender,
And became one the few service providers in South Africa.

The company went on to sell for 50 million rands a few years later.

Talk about being at the right place at the right time.