It hasn’t quite sunk in yet that I'm a finalist in The Good Entrepreneur Competition, despite an intensive 4-day filming schedule with a CNBC TV film crew who were in Malta before I touched the ground of my homeland after a 5-week Himalayan expedition.

My disbelief that we made it so far in the competition partly stems from the fact that the application was put together frantically and only submitted in the nick of time.

The story goes something like this:

I was informed about the Good Entrepreneur competition by a French journalist who suggested that I should have a go at it, having just won the France 5 Report Terre 2009 award for the best environmental project in 27 EU countries. I thanked him for the advice and casually looked at the Good Entrepreneur website and skimmed through the application. ‘Ok, this is not too demanding’ I thought to myself, completely missing the small print which says that applicants have to submit a 1-minute video. I jotted the competition’s deadline (31 July) in my diary and decided to work on it at a later stage. I got caught up with work and only revisited the site on the day of the deadline. That’s when I first read about the 1-minute video requirement. It was already 2pm and I had no visuals. I wondered then whether it was worth making the effort. Was it possible to put something decent together in such a short time?

I made a quick phone call to Jo my wife, whose friend Bella is quite artistic and practical where it comes to graphical design, photography and the like. Can she produce the video within the 10 hour deadline? 15 minutes later we were all on the road, driving towards the site where my demonstration project is located – on the other side of the country – but given Malta’s size is only a 30 minute drive away. I met with Bella and Jo at the site and drafted the video’s script in 10 minutes. We collected bits of miscellaneous footage on the way (dry reservoirs) to put the project idea into context but ran out of battery charge after only getting some 15 minutes of footage (Bella did not have time to charge the camera batteries).

We had no option but to work with what we had available. Back at the office I dug out whatever visual documentation I had about the project (the opening footage with water sliding under a sheet of ice is from a trekking expedition in the Altas mountains in Morocco); Jo and Bella sorted ,edited and put together the footage while I busied myself filling in the application. The clock was ticking and the midnight deadline loomed. 11pm and we realise that the microphone we have doesn’t work. Speed limits were ignored as we sped back home to look for a microphone. Recording the voice-over was impossible with two barking dogs in the background (the dogs were excited with all the activity) so it was back to the office for the recording of the voice-overs, putting everything together and then pressing that ‘submit’ button. The video uploaded with seconds to spare.

There was a great sigh of relief as the uploading bar disappeared, but official acknowledgement that our application had been accepted only came 3 days later (after the weekend), leaving us in suspense. Nevertheless, we went off to celebrate a job well done at the closest bar.

It is simply amazing that a video-clip that we managed to produce from scratch in less than 10 hours has managed to put me in the finals of such a high-profile competition, and has scored more than 1,000 hits. Great!