How do you start over in a country where nobody knows you?

What happened in to Iman when he Arrived to Canada?

Iman Aghay was a recent immigrant to Canada and woke one morning bleeding internally and was rushed to hospital, where doctors found he had lost sixty per cent of his blood. Losing twenty-five per cent puts a person at massive risk of a deadly heart attack. The doctors told him they would normally open him up to stop the bleeding, except that he did not have enough blood for them to do surgery. All they could do was give him a blood transfusion and see whether the blood going in was faster than the blood he was losing. He lay there thinking about his life wondering if he was going to live. Then he began thinking about his funeral. “I was alive but I never lived,” he says. That night he decided he was going to change that narrative he was going to make a difference. More specifically he decided to make a difference in the lives of 100 million people. He did not know how he just knew he was going to do it. The bleeding stopped on its own, and they released him on the eve of his twenty-seventh birthday. Iman calls it a golden ticket to the rest of his life.

Why did he decide to leave Iran?

He wanted to become an international professional public speaker, and two things stood in the way. “With an Iranian passport, it’s very hard to travel to a lot of countries,” he says. He also needed English. So he decided to move to North America, and he moved to Canada for a new passport so he could travel and to learn english.

What was his new life actually like?

He arrived in 2009, in the wake of the 2008 recession, with no job, no family and no friends. He went looking for work and could not land a single interview. He dropped off his resume, applied online, and did everything he could. “Not a single person got back to me,” he says.

What changed things?

One morning Iman decided he had been living the definition of insanity, in the sense of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. So he decided on a different direction and that it was either going to work or he was going to be homeless. The shift he describes is this. If you don’t give it to me, I’ll build it myself. That day he started a web design company, which needed zero money down and a laptop. He knew nothing about web design. His MBA was in online business, so he knew how online marketing works, and he learned the rest as he sold it. How he got himself known, rather than waiting to be hired, is the subject of How do you find work when nobody will hire you?, along with the Vancouver Business Network he started the same day.

What happened after his shift?

Three days in he found his first client, who paid him $1,800, and that money bought food and paid the rent for the month. His days ran from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon meeting people one on one to sell websites, a networking event from five until nine, dinner at home, and web design learned until three in the morning, with the next day the same again. Iman was determined to do what it takes to reach his goal.

What does Iman do now?

He builds platforms, learns and teaches skills that help people make a difference in other people’s lives, and he has invested in over 160 companies. The arithmetic behind his goal is simple enough. “I know I can help 10,000 experts who have the skills, the ability, and the heart to help 10,000 other people,” he says. He also teaches what he calls entrepreneurship rules, and the first three are make money today rather than waiting until everything is perfect, serve your customers with excellence once they come on board, and build systems into the business so it can grow past what one person can do. His own account of all of this is in our film A Second Chance at Life.