In case you’re not on Twitter or LinkedIn, or close enough to me to hear me talk about it the last 2 months, I won a huge prize compliments of British Airways recently: 10 business class return tickets to anywhere in the world, valid for a year; along with 5 Regus businessworld gold memberships.  We were just sent the logos and approval to publish the info, so here it is!

The competition was open to South African small businesses who met certain criteria.  We had to submit business plans and goals for the year, motivate how business travel would support those goals, and explain why telephone or video conferencing wouldn’t suffice.  Fifty sets of tickets were on offer – and I was one of the winners.  I thought it was a scam when I got the mail congratulating me! It still doesn’t seem real, but I’ve started booking tickets so its real alright.  The prize runs from 1 April 2010 to 31 March 2011.

My plan was to attend every SharePoint conference on the globe, but at between R11 000 and R26 000 just to register per conference, that’s not happening – I am still a small business after all – so I’ll attend one and just jetset to meetings instead. I’m attending the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in Washington DC in August.

I’ve had some interest from overseas people enquiring on whether I can do training and consulting abroad lately.  This is your chance to get me without having to pay for flights, just my accommodation and daily rate.  If you are interested in doing this, please feel free to email me so we can discuss it.  I have plans to go to the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia already for business meetings so maybe we can coordinate schedules.  You can view all my services on offer here.

Pretty great prize huh!  I’ll be blogging all the way to keep you posted on how things are done internationally and bring all that knowledge back to my local clients and colleagues.

And no, the tickets are not transferrable, I can’t swap them out to take passengers, I can’t cash them in.  It’s use it or lose it.

While I am doing my utmost to use every ticket to support business growth, a year is suddenly very short.  I’ll do what I can, but one thing is for sure, one of those tickets is going to be for me – straight to the Amazon Jungle, my number one dream destination!  South America for 3 weeks.  It’s my present to myself. 🙂

These are all the other winners, click here to go to the website.

“Champagne madam?”

“Oh yes please!”