I just wish I had hired Noah from day one in the business. He is incredibly intuitive and insightful about our business challenges.
- At 14
We left Tehran when I was 14: Mum, my two younger sisters and me. We spent 20 months in a detention centre before we were settled. There I learned guitar and English, and I earned points every week helping run activities for other young people. I gave every one of them to Mum. It never felt like a sacrifice. It wasn’t for me, it was for us. I started high school in Australia at 16, with English as my second language and two buses each way. My ESL teachers and friends in the same boat got me through.
- My first business
In my mid twenties I started Cohen Training Institute, a sales training business. I delivered most of the training myself, so it was really a job with my name on it. I sold it and saved the money, because I knew the next idea would need it. The next one, Cohen Sales Academy, sold sales training as four-minute video courses, and I taught myself Thinkific, HubSpot, Salesforce and Calendly to build it. That is when I felt alone and blind. I had nobody to show me what was around the corner.
- 15 years in revenue enablement
I spent 15 years in revenue enablement and coaching, including at Employsure, Tyro, Intuit and Docebo. At Intuit I built how new sales reps were trained over three weeks, and the Australian team was named Intuit’s best-trained sales team globally. But the more people I trained, the more I noticed the same gap: however well someone sold, they were still at the mercy of the offer, the follow-up and the way the business was actually run.
- 29 November 2023
I recorded this talking to the camera while I thought about what to do next. It is raw and about eight minutes long. I had built businesses alone and guessed a lot, so straight after it I started asking service business owners what they actually needed.
Captions are on by default. The video loads from YouTube only when you press play.
- 60 conversations
I wrote down what I would want if I were starting again, then took it to service business owners: coaches, tradies, consultants. I spent months on it. Sixty conversations, and the same answer every time: “I just want someone to walk me through it, help me build it, and still be there when the call ends.”
- revday
revday means focus on revenue, every day.
I named it that because revenue is the only thing that actually matters once the guessing stops. Every revday client is coached by me 1:1, with a team behind us. Nobody gets handed a login and left to work it out alone. One client started as a carer who wanted to run her own support business. She now has six carers, her son helps run it, and she is still with us.
