As digital adviser to Media24, Africa’s leading media company, I am ploughing back the 33 years of rich and rewarding experience in the digital and media industries as we work towards ensuring that 24.com is a sustainably profitable publisher of quality brand-safe content making a meaningful difference in the lives of its readers and advertising clients.

Working with an extremely talented group of people whose dedication has made 24.com the leading digital publisher in South Africa and expanding into the rest of Africa. The company also has a services business, Red carpet Travel with LIA, a mobile self-service travel solution aimed at the corporate market. The focus is on mobile in everything we do.

My focus is very much on how to assist the divisional CEO's in making their businesses more data-driven. Big Data is what it is all about, but without the hype, very focussed and very measurable in terms of results. This is what gets me out of bed with a smile each morning. The world is changing in the most wonderful ways and the opportunities this open up for retail are at the same time extremely challenging and very exciting. Roles are changing - retailers are becoming media companies and media companies retailers. It all makes for a brave new world.Responsibilities also include a group-wide SAP ERP platform, Infrastructure, Architecture, etc, etc - all the basic stuff that comes with this kind of job. And again I am working with great people, who love what they do.

Media distribution, eCommerce fulfilment, warehousing, digital media fulfilment. As CEO, the biggest challenge at this company was to strategically postion it for growth into a future where printed media circulation - its core focus for many years - will continue to decline in line with international trends, while the potential income from digital media fulfilment showed no indication of filling the gap. eCommerce warehousing and fulfilment did however. This stint in logistics proved immensely interesting. In the end logistics is retail, which is always challenging and always rewarding - and an industry with a very large proportion of dedicated, hard-working people, prepared to swim against the tide of conventional wisdom to chase goals most would shy away from. I was blessed to have worked with such a team at On the Dot. Part of the job was also to lead a team that implemented a wall-to-wall SAP ERP platform in the larger Media24. This took me away from On the Dot in 2013, and led to me taking up the CIO role at Media24. Back to IT . . . and guess what - in the end it is retail.

TopAdShop came about as a means of dealing with a business problem: Eroded yield from the selling of advertisements in the group's newspapers. The then current advertising sales- and management systems did not make real-time yield management possible. That meant that managers could only see the effect of discounts granted by sales staff after the fact. So, I devised a web-based ad booking and management system, and got a great team together, to deliver this. Once visible, the culture of competing on price, could be managed.The sales teams then argued they were powerless in the negotiations with the massive retailers and basically price takers. To change that perception, I had to step up and lead the teams in these negotiations. We dramatically improved the yield. Thereafter the sales teams understood the position they had in these negotiations and did well from that point forward.In short: Developed and deployed a web-based advertising sales and sales management solution;Negotiated new advertising rates with some of the large food retailers to improve the yield from selling them advertising spaceTopAdShop was replaced as part of the Group's move onto a new SAP ERP platform. In that process, I also had the opportunity to lead a great team. See above.

Established an e-procurement company that provided purchasing and sourcing services to the Naspers Group of companies and to clients external to this groupStrategic sourcingNegotiated and ensured compliance to procurement contracts