Bhavnagar is not on most people's maps. It is a small city on the coast of Gujarat, known for a salt industry and a temperature that argues with you from April to June. I grew up there. The first thing I ever sold was dessert.
A couple of friends could actually bake. I could not, so I did everything else. I priced it, I found where the demand was, I worked out delivery before delivery was a button on a phone. It was not a family business and it was not a grand plan. It was the first time I noticed that I liked the machine around the product more than the product itself.
Towns nobody had heard of
Zomato sent me to launch small towns in Gujarat. Mahuva. Palitana. The job was to sign up restaurants so that when a town switched on there was something to order. I onboarded more than thirty a quarter. Over one quarter in Mahuva, monthly orders went from about 600 to about 9,000. That was a team result, and I am careful to say so. Supply was my part.
What I actually learned there was smaller and more useful. A new market is just a list of problems you solve in order. Trust first, then supply, then the boring logistics that decide whether any of it lasts.
Selling on a street in Toronto
Then Canada. I started on the floor selling phone plans and SIM cards, the most honest version of sales there is, because the customer can walk three metres to a competitor while you are still talking. I moved from rep to supervisor across three locations and a small team, then into business lines. I did a postgraduate diploma at the same time, mostly at night.
Floor sales teaches you to read a person in the first ten seconds and to not waste theirs. I still use that on every discovery call.
And back
Now I run growth for a design studio in Ahmedabad, and around it I build. An AI that grades my own calls. A dashboard that rebuilds itself. A library of every objection I keep hearing. The cities changed. The job did not. Find the right people, work out how to reach them, then build the machine so it runs without me standing over it. That is the whole story. The rest is just which city I was in when I was doing it.