One night in 1996 Gary Brand was watching the National Lottery on TV and suddenly “it clicked” that he had won.

The lottery was still in its early days, and Gary, along with other members of his syndicate, was one of the first Essex winners.

That in itself made the event a newsworthy one, but the truly remarkable story lay in what followed.

Gary was one of a syndicate of eight, all working in the Basildon club scene. Between them they won £5.2million.

That week, Gary had been the syndicate member responsible for registering the numbers.

Gary’s main recollection of that incredible night is regret at a lost opportunity.

“The other guys began ringing me, very excited of course. They kept asking me: ‘You did remember to put them numbers down, didn’t you?’ “I should have said no, sorry, I’d forgotten. I could have really wound them up. Instead, I just told them, yes, I had put the numbers down, and yes, I knew we’d won.”

Oddly, that sense of a lost chance for a practical joke is the biggest single emotion Gary remembers from the night he got rich. Next day he went to work as usual.

“After that, though, I did start living it up,” he says. “I had two years of holidays and drinking too much. And then I got bored out of my mind doing nothing.

“The truth is, when you’ve got lots of cash and are just living life for pleasure, you get in a rut.

It’s as much of a rut, or worse, than when you’re having to go off to work every day to pay the mortgage.”

Gary’s plan for getting re-grounded involved the pursuit of a business idea. He set out to exploit his great passion – for new technology.

He says: “I’ve always had this love for gadgets and tech stuff, ever since I was a child. I remember the first thing I ever had in that line. I was eight. I was having an operation and it was a sort of bribe. It was a Casio calculator. I just thought it was fantastic.

“After that came digital watches. They were really cool for a while. Whatever the latest gadget was, I always had to have it.

“My latest gadget is a self-parking car, although I’ve never quite been able to trust it enough to try it out.”

In 1998, post Lottery win, Gary decided to implant his technical knowhow onto an industry that had remained slow to embrace progress.

Gary says: “When I left school, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, except make a bit of money. I’d done various jobs, including selling fruit and veg on a market stall, and one of the jobs was to drive a taxi part time. I really enjoyed it, and I picked up a bit about the business.”

In 1998, the chance came to buy the Basildon taxi firm A&B. In partnership with a friend, Steve Foster (another of the Lottery syndicate), Gary snapped up A&B. He then set out to turn it into one of the most technically advanced taxi firms in the UK.

Mike Horton, of the management team at the Eastgate shopping mall, has observed Gary in action since the start.

“Gary was just always ahead of the game in the way he used technology,” he says. “What he was doing 15 years ago, others are only just starting to catch up with now. He is really dynamic and imaginative, and he just has a knack for making technology work for his company.”

Gary’s first big idea was to harness the use of mobile phones.

“They were having a huge surge in sales at the time Steve and I bought A&B,” says Gary.

“You could see the time wasn’t far off when everyone would haveamobile. And one of the most useful things they could do was order a taxi.”

New (for 1998) tracking technology allowed customers to follow the progress of their cab from street to street, and also gave them a precise time of arrival, rather than a halfreliable guesstimate by a controller. Their peace of mind was guaranteed since they could also receive a photo of the driver, and a note of the taxi’s registration.

“It was stuff we tend to take for granted now, but it was pretty groundbreaking at the time,”

says Gary.

Gary, who now runs 200 taxis, 90 of which he owns, still aims to stay ahead of the game technically.

“I go to new tech exhibitions and keep up with the latest technology, and if I think something will be useful, I’ll find a way to make it work for us,” he says.

A&B was one of the first taxi firms with its own app, but Gary has alreadymoved on to a new technical wheeze. His latest “baby” is a device designed for places such as restaurants, hotels and dentists’ surgeries.

“If someone asks for a taxi, the receptionist just presses a button, once, and the job is done,” Gary says. “The device will let them know as soon as the cab is outside the door. We can provide them free of charge to anyone who finds it useful.”

While Gary’s firm is technically groundbreaking, in other respects it remains a very traditional business.

“We’re very much a family firm,” says Gary. “My mumdoes the book-keeping – and keeps me in strict order financially.

My dad looks after the vehicles for the big corporate events.”

Gary’s old pal and partner Steve died from a brain tumour last year. Gary had bought his share of the business not long beforehand.

“He’d had enough,”

says Gary. But Gary himself soldiers on.

Gary has no regrets about using his Lottery win to buy and run a taxi firm. “It has givenme an interest that has continued ever since,” he says.

One result of his zest for technology is that he can run his 200-strong fleet from wherever he happens to be at the time.

Sitting in a coffee bar at the Eastgate mall, he sips a cappuccino with one hand. In the other, he holds his mobile device and checks out the lunchtime cab scene. He is able to tell in seconds that everything is running smoothly.

“There’s no need to move from here,” he says.

In one respect he has now almost returned to the life of leisure he escaped from back in 1998. “The technology has made it almost too easy in some ways,” he says.

But while the technology runs smoothly, there is always the human element to engage Gary’s brain.

Gary’s current beef is what he regards as Basildon’s overstringent regulations for taxi drivers. Amongst other hurdles, it means a driver has to pay £700 to qualify to drive in the town.

“It means there are good drivers whowant to drive for me, and who I want to work for me, stuck on the dole, when they could be out there making money and paying taxes,” he says.

“It means that eventually, as drivers retire, Basildon could be left seriously short of cabs.

“In fact, things are getting so bad I am seriously considering licensing my vehicles with another local authority, where I won’t have that sort of aggro.”

Does this sort of hassle ever persuade Gary that he might, after all, be better off lying full-time on a beach in Barbados?

“No,” he says. “It just makes me even more determined to carry on.”