Gerard Cilliers

This site's name is about as simple as it gets — g for Gerard, 73 for the year I was born. For most of my working life, discipline was the job itself. Six years at Standard Bank in Johannesburg taught me how banking — and process — actually works. From there, five years in London, deep in the back-office treasury departments of banks like Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, Credit Suisse, and JPMorgan. Daily reconciliations. Zero tolerance for error. Not glamorous work, but it teaches you something that stays with you: precision matters, and so does simply showing up properly, every day.

I brought that discipline home and spent the next twenty years building a digital agency, Sterling Web Solutions, from nothing — eventually selling it to a Johannesburg ICT group.

Then, in 2024, I stepped back and asked myself a different question: what do I actually want to spend the next chapter building? The answer was Making-A-Difference NPC — an organisation with one simple job: make sure verified care facilities looking after vulnerable infants, elderly people, and people with disabilities never have to struggle for life's basics. Unglamorous, essential things — nappies, feminine hygiene products — that too easily fall through the cracks of the system.

This site, and the odd article I share here, is a smaller, more personal expression of the same instinct that's run through everything I've built: show up, do the work, and try to leave things a little better than you found them.