Jonathan Berman.

I lead end-to-end market-entry work — product-market fit, regulatory navigation, partnerships, and the unglamorous business of finding the right people in the right rooms. The work is half regulatory, half relationship, and almost never about the product.

Most engagements run six to eighteen months — long enough to set the GTM in place, short enough that I leave behind a local team who can run it without me.

My role is commercial: open the right doors, qualify partners, and sit in the difficult meetings. The product is technically beautiful and operationally invisible — those are the hardest to sell.

Going on four years, mostly part-time. The work has been a useful counterweight to the consumer-facing chapters.

Built the go-to-market, raised the seed, and helped frame the product roadmap. The interesting part of the work has been convincing two very different industries — beauty and robotics — that they speak the same language.

I sit on the board now. The day-to-day is led by the team.

Started with three flavours, two distributors, and a phone full of restaurant managers. Six years on it is a six-figure business that runs itself, which is the only kind worth founding part-time.

I do GTM and partnerships. The actual cocktail people make the actual cocktails.

Built the commercial pipeline from scratch and steered through eighteen months where every football pitch in the world was empty. We closed deals anyway, because we sold the season after next, not this one.

Left the company in better commercial shape than I found it.

Managed accounts that included Amazon, Vodacom, Cell C, and VUbiquity. Closed eight figures personally, found 40% cost savings by realigning the team to what they were actually doing well, and built a new business unit from scratch.

I learned what a large institution can move and what it cannot. The answer was: more than I expected, slower than I wanted.

Spent half my life on planes. We grew revenue 50% year-over-year by treating channel partners like co-founders, not vendors.

The pipeline I built held up after I left — which is the only honest measure of a sales chapter.

Did the unglamorous work: distribution agreements, co-sell programs, reseller mechanics. Closed millions in software deals across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Cut 20% of operating cost by removing duplication that nobody else wanted to look at.

I came in to build new-media business development and ended up running content partnerships across North America. The deals were with people who had never heard of our acronyms — which forced a kind of plain-English selling I have used ever since.

Six years across BD, sales, and new-media leadership. Three job titles, one continuous arc.

Contracted with key operators across the region for equipment trials. Most of those trials never became commercial deployments — but the relationships I built then are people I am still doing business with twenty years later.

Sometimes the value is not the deal.

Generated immediate sales by partnering with leading European integrators. Adopted direct channels into Asia's leading mobile operators — the same operators I had been meeting at Com21 four years earlier.

Eight months. Done. Some chapters do not need to be long to count.

Established sales channels across Asia through integrators and vendors. Closed multi-million-dollar agreements that became the company's reference customers.

Created the regional strategy that outlasted my tenure — and ran into it again, in different shape, a decade later.

Managed the existing APAC sales teams and chased global MSOs both directly and through distributors. Won multi-million-dollar contracts and qualified new sales channels.

The market doubled while I was there — and most of the operators in it were learning the technology at the same time I was.

Co-founded, built the plan, recruited the early team, raised the seed. Then learned that founders disagreeing about strategy in month three never agree about strategy in month nine.

Four months. The most expensive lesson in my career, paid in time, not money.

Moved the company away from end-user retail toward SOHO and large enterprise accounts. Eighty per cent revenue growth in three years, mostly because we stopped chasing the wrong customers.

I went home every night and wrote down what I had learned. Thirty years later I still do.