Mark is the founder and Managing Director of The Poker Room, a company that is described as “a unique and out-of-the-box environment that uses the metaphor of the strategic art of poker as a business training and teambuilding tool”.

Mark did a Business Science degree at the University of Cape Town and graduated with double Honours in Finance and Economics. When asked about business successes, he spoke to me about an early enterprise he started with a friend in the second year of his studies, when he worked as a barman in a corporate suite at Newlands cricket ground.

Called The Twelfth Man (the twelfth team member traditionally brings the drinks to the players), and offering a barman service to the corporate suites at Newlands Cricket Ground (in Cape Town), the business grew over two years to feature five permanent and 250 temporary staff, and was awarded a tender to run State Banquets for the then President of South Africa - Nelson Mandela (they ran two: for Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat’s visits).

After the successful sale of this business in 2002, and after completing his studies, like so many young South African graduates, he left for London.

He enjoyed working for Investec in the UK for just less than 2 years, in the Private Bank, but soon realised that the corporate world was restraining his creative, entrepreneurial side.

Upon returning to South Africa in 2004, he set up a Tanzanite (a rare blue/purple variety of gemstone) wholesale business selling the polished stones to about 70% of the retail outlets in South Africa.

Mark is quick to point out that the element of luck cannot be denied as playing a role in business, and confesses that this was a case of being in the right place at the right time, as Tanzanite was the number-one-selling coloured stone in the world between 2003 and 2007.

This ultimately led to one of his biggest American suppliers, a multi-national conglomerate, buying out his business in its entirety, and saw Mark spending the next two years running a management contract for a succession plan.

The year 2005 found Mark considering what direction to go next.

In his own words: “I was playing in a poker game one night – I’ve played poker for many a year – and something happened in one of the games, and to be honest with you I wouldn’t be able to put my finger on it, but something happened…”

He went home excited about the potential link between business and poker, “because there is a lot of strategy in the game and it’s really all about sales”. Google searching (‘poker and business’ resulted in about 10.5 million hits), and resultant reading, led Mark to a book called The Poker MBA, putting forward the idea that the only difference between a boardroom table and a poker table was the felt.

The book outlined how the skills that separate the best poker players in the world from the rest of the pack are the very same skills that separate the best business people in the world from the rest.

Mark captures it succinctly: “You know, essentially poker and business share a common goal, which is to make money”. He also came across From Good to Great by Jim Collins, a number-one-best-selling businessbook – dealing with the principles that took good companies and made them great – that seemed uncannily to mirror the principles in The Poker MBA.

“It was at that point in time,” says Mark, “that I realized there really was a product here, and something that had legs”.

Communication, Motivational,