Sachee Perera

Then retention, where something clicked that I still use today: the stated reason someone leaves is rarely the real reason. Discovery changes outcomes more than persuasion ever will. And coaching (real coaching, not just feedback) is what turns individual performance into team performance. Four of my team members got promoted into management during my time.

At Accor Plus I got to zoom out and design for retention at the programme level. I took on an underperforming loyalty programme and rebuilt the sales strategy and team culture from the ground up. It became the programme’s highest growth period in a decade, with a 71.67% renewal rate, the highest in APAC. The lesson wasn’t the numbers. It was that retention and expansion compound when the customer experience is designed deliberately, and that good coaching only scales when you build the system that makes it repeatable.

At UberEATS, I was on the Perth launch team. Cold outreach, in-person visits, selling a vision that hadn’t been proven locally. I personally closed 117 restaurant partnerships, 39% of the entire platform at launch. Not because I’m some sales genius. When you’re launching from zero, there’s nobody else to do it. You just show up every day and figure it out.

At Sidekicker, same thing. First boots on ground for the WA market. Building the team, the pipeline, and the GTM from scratch.

Both taught me the same thing: proving a market is different from optimising one. Zero-to-one growth happens through buyer behaviour and direct contact, before there’s anything to systematise. You do the work first. That lesson became a belief with its own name.

I picked up a camera and got serious about photography. Travelled across Western Australia shooting landscapes and eventually moved into model photography. It taught me visual communication and creative storytelling that quietly showed up in everything I built after.

Perth is OK was one of the most fun things I’ve ever worked on. It started organically. I was a regular at Perth events, constantly posting and promoting the city. Eventually the founders, Luke and Blake, asked if I could help them win commercial clients. As their BD and campaign strategist we landed IKEA, Buy West Eat Best, Captain Cook Cruises, and a bunch of others. The real work was taking something genuinely grassroots, a community built on people loving their city, and making it commercially sustainable without killing what made it special.

Austal Ships was a completely different world. I led product marketing for MARINELINK Fleet, a system that gave ferry operators a live, integrated view of their fleet’s performance, schedule, comfort, and fuel. The challenge was making deep technology make sense to traditional buyers who cared about uptime and cost, not dashboards and AI. COVID killed the industry before we could scale. But bridging complex tech and conservative industries turned out to be the perfect warm-up for what came next.

This era is the bridge: technical products and traditional buyers, community and commercial sustainability, visual language and operator language. That range is what I took into CorePlan.

Alex Goulios had started Springtech with a vision to digitise the mining industry. Springtech had products, relationships and technical credibility, but no clean customer, category or commercial story. When Alex and I came together, I talked to anyone and everyone in mining to understand what was really going on. And then it hit me. We had to reposition and rebrand the whole thing. Focus on the drilling contractors first (bit like ‘save the cheerleader, save the world’ from Heroes 😅) and build from there. Alex drove the technical foundation while I drove the repositioning, early product strategy, and the full commercial engine from zero: sales, marketing, customer success, hiring, RevOps. We shaped the overall business direction together, in an industry where trust matters more than features and relationships outlast contracts.

The commercial engine had four distinct pipeline channels, each built from zero. Inbound qualification (MQLs), outbound sales-generated leads (SQLs), customer success expansion leads (CSQLs), and a structured referral programme. Each channel had its own scoring model, routing logic, and handoff process. On the enterprise side, I developed Account Based Marketing playbooks for mid-market and enterprise accounts, learning how to navigate the buying patterns of tier 1 mining companies and drilling contractors who had never purchased software before. The combined engine grew to a seven-figure qualified pipeline.

Over five years we grew to $7M ARR, 100+ customers and 50+ people globally. We found a super large (and super loud) gong and banged it every time a new customer came onboard. We threw legendary company parties (the CorePlan Bogan Bash being a personal highlight). And a silly line I wrote early on, “help people in mining work better together in the modern age,” somehow became the actual mission statement.

But the part I’m most proud of is the team Alex and I built. A crew of eager, smart, and quirky people who were unusually passionate about the business. Watching them grow into roles they didn’t think they could do. That was the best bit.

The thing CorePlan taught me: the product, workflow, market, brand, revenue system and people system are not separate problems. They are the company.

Now I write The Markdown and build software through Lovabo, mostly for operational industries like mining and construction. I advise a few founders. And I invest when I like the people and understand the problem.