September 2025 - Diary of a Revenue Engineer
Quote of the month:
"Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to deal with a tough one."
- Bruce Lee
“I’ve also been lucky enough to see some incredible, driven and talented people aim high, and hit or come close on some seemingly impossible things.”
The struggle is real.
We live in strange times, with impossible workloads and lofty expectations - of ourselves, of our governments and communities, of our systems and processes.
20 years of experience in high growth, fast paced SaaS tech businesses has shown me the hardship of launching business and making change first hand. I’ve also been lucky enough to see some incredible, driven and talented people aim high, and hit or come close on some seemingly impossible things.
Q3 was insane for me from a work perspective, but September brought it all home from a personal perspective too.
Let’s see how we built strength to deal with the madness.
What I thought…
Daughter at school - seeing her go, progress, learn... struggle with the tiredness and then bloom with the learning. This world is tough, it’s one of the major lessons you look to deliver to your kids. But how you deliver it, and how you help them build the internal scaffolding to deal with its pressure matters a great deal.
Birthday - My 41st Birthday came and went... in classic 40-year-old fashion, I spent it at a rather excellent garden centre in the Cotswolds.
The madness of the global scene is fast becoming the ‘new normal’ - I can’t help thinking two main things about the current state of the political world. Firstly, how we seem to be being brow beaten into accepting the madness of it all. Secondly, how very few conversations are going on about our common ground. More on that later..
What I learned…
“Grief is such a strange emotion, and to mourn is a unique pain. ”
RevOps and Global Enablement - As my working life ramps as I work in the Global Enablement of one of the world’s most successful and fastest growing Fintech companies, I’m having to stay ahead of the curve with as much as I can in Enablement and RevOps. To that end, I’ll be posting about our quarterly work on LinkedIn on a quarterly basis. Also, I say cutting edge, but I find myself mainly using new AI Tools to help me learn:
Gemini - Unsure what the current rankings are, but Gemini felt on top of it all until relatively recently. I will say, however, Google’s approach to product, and the hustle of different tribes therein, has given way to some incredible tools her.
Deep research is good, but a bit basic, formulaic... which can sometimes be good and reliable, other times somewhat underwhelming.
NotebookLM may be the best tool to come from Google AI stack.
Guided learning is excellent to get structured overviews and quick learning on core subjects quickly.
Grok - I played around with it and it feels like it’s playing a little ‘fast and loose’ with potential ethics, playing with that grey line of what’s acceptable or not, in order to achieve quicker monetisation and scale. I’m not massively surprised, as it’s an existential battle for many in the big tech world.
Perplexity - clean, crisp, fast, reliable - the search and deep research functions help challenge or reinforce other learnings quickly for me too.
Suggestion: Use several AI deep research functions to bring together research from different perspectives on a given topic. Load it all into NotebookLM and use that as a platform to learn more / cover the different approaches and information.
Relationship communication: This may be geeky as hell, but I love my partner even more for creating a traffic light-like system for elements of our relationship communication. It helps know when we need space, when we want to spend quality time together and, ultimately, takes a lot of the hard work out of important communication during the madness of our professional and full time parenting roles.
Relationships are a discipline.
Just like eating well, exercise, sleep, hydration - the whole kit and kaboodle.
They require investment, they need clear communication, they thrive on regular touch points.
What I built…
“our average cohort size increased by 360% - no mean feat!”
Enablement and GTM vision: I’ve been looking into Centre of Excellence (CoE) models a lot lately and finding them very interesting.
This helped me build my vision for onboarding and training for my part of the Sales Enablement world at Revolut.
Onboarding process: I worked a LOT with stakeholders across the whole onboarding lifecycle for our new hires. We brought on a lot of new people this quarter, our average cohort size increased by 360% - no mean feat!
I’m lucky to have such an incredible team around me... they put the care and due diligence into the actions we define through strategy and direction.
I owe them a lot and I hope they see my respect and thanks for that daily.
AI workflow for learning and development: I worked closely with our instructional designer (who is exceptional) to build out an AI flow which may help us create an entirely new onboarding programme in 4 weeks.
We are indeed in the golden age of learning design.
But I still feel like we’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible.
AI workflows are hands down the best use of the technology in our space right now, creating human review and ensuring accuracy through the process.
I’m going to start looking into flows and methodologies like Six Sigma to help our work here and continue to Engineer Revenue.
How I lived longer…
“Yes, there is need for improvement and optimisation, but we are INSANELY lucky to have something to improve there in the first place.”
Struggling here: Between a drastic increase to the quantity of focused work i’ve had to do as part of our lofty goals, my fitness has taken a back seat.
It always does when I’m busy and stressed and it just compounds to make things worse.
I’m committed to getting back on the wagon... I have too many goals and too much to do to be ill or infirm.
I don’t think I’m ever going to retire, which means I have to stay active and healthy way past whenever it is I stop working for other people and really build something for myself and my family.
Doctors: The NHS in the UK is amazing. Yes, there is need for improvement and optimisation, but we are INSANELY lucky to have something to improve there in the first place.
There are some vying for power who would take it a part. And I’m not surprised... after selling bad food to people, the next biggest money earner is pharma.
Moving to private structures is just a new revenue stream for a series of already affluent organisations.
It’s an excellent example of how the ‘Fair Market’ doesn’t always have the people’s best in mind.
I had my own run ins and needs with the NHS of late, some of them great, some of them frustrating... but I didn’t pay a penny directly, didn’t see my premiums increase on incur insane costs as a result.
COVID hangovers: I had a bit of a cough for a while, which may have indeed been COVID (certainly the test I did seemed to think so) but I’ve also seen a LOT of people with some pretty hardcore bronchitis of late too.
Are these hangovers from COVID?
Is it a problem still, is it going to get worse or is it just something that happens in the background?
How I stayed happier…
“We love each other dearly, and are all now fathers too, we’re lucky for that.”
Friends night: I saw my good friends in Cheltenham, guys I’ve known and been friends with FAR longer in my life than without.
We’ve all travelled different paths, an entrepreneur, a government worker, a photographer, old school work for an employer routes...
We love each other dearly, and are all now fathers too, we’re lucky for that.
I don’t know what I’d do without them as a regular part of my life.
We celebrated just knowing and loving each other by going to an amazing restaurant in Cheltenham called KIBOU - highly recommended.
We ended the night with Whiskey and Cigars - something I deeply regretted the next morning.
Family events: I got to hang out with my family in a garden centre (as stated... i’m over 40 now so this is what nights out used to be) and had a great time.
Daughter: I just booked off Half Term with my little one, so that’s something to really work towards and feel good about.
Partner: As mentioned, we’ve been working on communication and, as cliched and frustrating as it may be, it really is the key to pretty much all the solutions.
Final thoughts…
We should all perhaps better prepare ourselves for tougher lives.
We should not seek to fight the universe in a never ending struggle for comfort, but find ways to boost our resilience and, in the process, seek gratitude for the things that are going our way.
Through that process, I think we can focus more on ourselves, our own progressions and, by doing so, better look after our loved ones and our communities.
Thanks for stopping by, stay happy and healthy in October!