1999. I Visited Cape Town, South Africa, purchased property and decided to emigrate and create an internet tourism company.

2000. Back in London I purchased many “.com” domain names including www.CapeVillas.com. Launched my first Cape Town tourism website www.CapeTownHoliday.com (now closed)

2001. I Moved from Epsom, Surrey, England to Cape Town, South Africa under a 2 year Work Visa to start my internet business “CAPE GO”

Developed the world’s first Virtual Tour created in Adobe Flash.

2002. Read the words by Search Engine Guru Michael Campbell “Why bother with Search Engine optimisation at all. Just create an affiliate programme and let others do the marketing for you”. Started to research affiliate marketing programs, the key was exclusive stock or venues.

I combined my Virtual Tour technology with a web development company’s content management database and created Cape Villas.com

2003. South African international business VISA’s rules change, from a minimum investment of R1,000,000 to R3,000,000. I met with the Department of Trade and Industry and an exception was made. It was stated, “The DTI believe that Cape Go will be future leaders in the emerging internet industry”

Approached Multi Choice, South Africa’s only Satellite network and asked if they would air our product on their new digital channel, we got the green light.  I considered how to make revenue and researched on line bookings, my findings showed we needed to be connected to a GDS (Global Distribution System). Galileo were biggest in South Africa and they provided a Systems Architect that could make the link.

Teamed up with Dumani Mandela, Shuka and Moweaqua Sisulu, together we made an approach to attract Sabre (Another GDS) to come to Africa.

2004. Cape Villas emerges as the leading Villa Rental Agency in Africa.

Our accountants begin to introduce the Pastel Accounting software.

2005. Conceived our first affiliate programme, I took long leases on 5 Cape Town Villas & Mansions and offered them to international tour operators and local agencies.

2006. Finished development of the CAPE VILLAS open source line open access calendar and booking system, linking property owners, property managers, Tour Operators, Film Production Companies and Villa Rental Agencies. This was the first version of SIENNA’s affiliate marketing software.

2007. Our booking system holds the availability information of over 50 venues. Turnover increase and the affiliate marketing starts paying off, with about 40% of bookings made my by Travel agents and Tour operators.

We start to customise and programme PASTEL’s” ACT” CRM (Consumer Relationship Management) software.
2008. Attended 3 day South Africa tourism conference and had the idea for a pan African villa company “The Leading Villas of Africa” or LV Africa

August 2nd 2008. Decided to approach VIRGIN as partner and wrote the first draught of what is now this business plan addressed to Sir Richard. The first draught detailed combining my current company’s technology and affiliate marketing with a computer game based on becoming a villa rental giant. Combining our Virtual Tour Technology to add excellent graphics to a normal turn based management game would be appealing.  Interviewing and offering the best players global franchises would make the Game unique

Wrote a script about a TV reality show based around our business, celebrities that and the world cup.
2009. Launched the 140 page CAPE VILLAS glossy coffee table magazine. With 28,000 copies distributed with Conde Nast Traveller, soon after Bulgari contacted us offering close to £100,000 to be the main sponsors of our next publication.

Started work on the “Leading Villas of Africa” Coffee table book, after due consideration we decided to add hotels and safaris, we continued working whist we looked for a more appropriate brand name.
Read about Virgin’s new businesses committee in Sir Richards’s book.

Attended En Lighten customer service and branding lecture, VIRGIN were championed as the best example of branding. An interesting lecturer described the 4 evolutions of economics that lead to the current Experience Economy. I wanted to use the word experience in my new brand. I purchased the web domain www.ExperienceAfrica.com and change LV Africa’s trading name to Experience Africa and registered with the Tourism office. We started constructing the website.

Attended the lecture again with most of my Staff, then started twice monthly workshops with En Lighten. During these workshops we brainstormed how to improve customer service, promote our brand and improve customer retention.  Many of the original CRM (Consumer Relations Management) functions I want to incorporate into SIENNA were conceptualised during this process. We tried to incorporate these into the ACT CRM software but it became obvious we would have to programme our own CRM from scratch, started creating advanced CRM specifications.

2010. We realised installing the Pastel Software would take specialist programming. We asked BDO Accounting firm to properly install and customise PASTEL into my companies, this went way over budget at around £130,000. When installed PASTEL gave bottom line cost and turnover stats, which were useful but it could not give me my profit and loss standstill, which was vital. I realised like the CRM the only way to get the software to do what I wanted was to programme it myself, I started working on the specifications which were the foundation for the financial module.

In July the beta (test) version of the Experience Africa website was finished. At the same time Sotheby’s Realty Cape Town approached Cape Villas for a closer working partnership, they wished to offer their portfolio of properties to our clients and wished to capitalize on their clients that wanted to book holiday villas. I suggested we made an exact duplicate of the Experience Africa website for them to use, they were ecstatic and so AFRICA CONSIERGE was created, and soon enquiries started to roll in, when a bookings was made, we split the income. The knife cut both ways, we gave SOUTHEBY’s the functionality to upload their properties onto the system to appear on our Experience Africa website, If we had a client for their property we pass the client on and split the income again.

On August the 1st personal tragedy saw me leaving South Africa to spend time with my parents in England and travel to Thailand. This was a time of contemplation and soul searching. During my travels I had time to contemplate the effects of creating more duplicate websites for other companies and combing the various other modules and marketing methods.
I arrived back in South Africa and after a few weeks of settling I wrote up a proposal and approached various companies asking them if they would like a website similar to SOTHEBY’s all were excited and we agreed to start work when the tourism season slowed down.

Technical issues regarding duplicating websites sites and in internal bust up within the outsourced Experience Africa website developers saw the decision to restart the website with the web duplicating process central to its programming plus the addition of the CRM and Financial modules plus a link to the GDS.

At this point I knew I had the complete package and it was time to complete my proposal for VIRGIN.
Started work on Final proposal to VIRGIN

2011. Continue to work on proposal, which starts to develop into a business plan.

I add some of the marketing ideas previously considered such as the Magazine, Game and TV reality show.
Considered a connection with VIRGIN MONEY’s database to pull in payment information directly into SIENNA.
Consider free distribution of the software with new computers.

Start to work on Financial Forecast

Change the name from NRBS (Nick Ray Ball Systems) to SIENNA (Super Intelligent Engine for New Network Access)

Finished Financials

Created Executive Summary