When your distribution model needs to do something it's never done before, the margin for error is zero.
I built the infrastructure that powers agent and advisor productivity at one of the most complex distribution organizations in financial services. I can do it for yours.
You've hit an inflection point.
You can see the opportunity — or the threat — clearly enough. The market has shifted. A competitor is moving faster than you expected. The board has approved a strategic initiative that everyone knows is important and nobody is quite sure how to execute. Or growth has stalled in a way that incremental improvements aren't fixing.
There's a gap between where you are and where you need to be. The path forward requires that the business do something it's never done before.
Your existing team is good at what they were hired to do. But what needs to happen next is outside their experience. The obvious alternatives don't work:
The person you'd promote has never done this before. A high-stakes initiative isn't the place to find that out.
The search takes months you don't have, and the learning curve in a new organization is a risk you can't afford.
You get impressive meetings and a detailed slide deck, not ownership of delivering outcomes.
Meanwhile the clock is running. Every month without progress is a month of competitive ground lost, a month of board patience eroded, and a month of internal momentum that's harder to rebuild. The people around you are watching to see how this gets handled. The cost of getting it wrong is much more than just financial.
What you actually need is someone who's been down this path before — who can get up to speed fast, make sound decisions in the face of ambiguity, and take real ownership of delivering outcomes. Someone who understands the specific complexity of insurance and financial services distribution, where regulatory constraints, intermediary relationships, and the particular economics of agent and advisor-driven businesses make this kind of work genuinely hard in ways that someone without deep field experience simply won't anticipate. Who won't spend the first three months getting up to speed on how your distribution model actually works.
And who will still be there when things get messy.
This is where I come in.
I embed in your organization and take ownership of the outcome. Not as a consultant who hands you a plan and walks away, but as a senior operator who stays until the work is done and the results are delivered.
The pattern I've seen repeated across every engagement in this space: a field force or distribution model that needs to do something new, a leadership team under pressure to move faster than their internal capability allows, and a technology or operating gap that's bigger than it looks from the outside. The better part of two decades stepping into these moments in financial services and insurance teaches you exactly where to look first.
In a distribution organization, the first conversation is usually about technology or strategy. The real conversation, the one that determines success or failure, is about adoption. Who in the field has to change their behavior, why haven't they already, and what it will actually take to move them. I've seen enough of these initiatives stall not because the technology was wrong but because nobody designed the operating model around getting the field to use it. I talk to your key people, get into whatever exists already, and orient quickly around those questions, because getting them right early is what separates initiatives that land from ones that quietly die six months in.
Sometimes that's a defined sprint with a clear deliverable at the end. Sometimes it's an embedded fractional role for a longer period. Sometimes it's both — intensive early on, transitioning to ongoing advisory as the work matures. The goal is always to leave your organization with something it can run — a functioning team, a platform in production, a capability it now owns — not a dependency on me. Engagements typically run from a focused diagnostic or defined sprint through to a multi-month embedded role. The scope depends on the challenge, and we agree on what's appropriate before we start.
I'm deep enough across digital product management, marketing, analytics, and sales infrastructure that I can assess and diagnose personally and stay hands-on through execution rather than directing it from a distance. In insurance and financial services distribution, that means I know what to look for: how field adoption actually works, where digital initiatives typically stall, and what the technology stack decisions look like from both a home office and frontline perspective.
Who I work with.
I work with organizations that are facing a genuine inflection point, where there's urgent pressure to move forward quickly, but enough complexity that the existing team can't close the gap alone.
That typically means one of these situations:
You're launching something net-new.
A new business unit, a new product, a new market, a new distribution channel. In insurance and financial services, that might look like building a direct distribution channel when you've only ever sold through agents, launching a product line that requires different field capabilities than you have, or standing up a digital selling infrastructure from scratch.
You're scaling something that's stopped working.
Growth has plateaued. What got you here won't get you there. And the gap between where you are and where you need to be requires real change, not incremental improvement. In distribution businesses, that often means the economics of agent productivity, channel mix, or lead conversion have shifted in ways that the existing operating model wasn't built to handle.
You're modernizing something that's fallen behind.
Competitors are moving faster, your infrastructure is showing its age, and the cost of continuing to underinvest is becoming visible in your results. For field organizations, that often surfaces as recruiting pressure, when the technology story you can tell an agency owner or prospective agent is worse than what they can get elsewhere.
The work, in practice.
Who I am.
I'm Ross Cohen, based in New York. I spent nearly a decade at New York Life as COO of Field Productivity, where I built the digital operating infrastructure for a 12,000-person agent and financial advisor organization — from a field force running largely without meaningful digital support to a modern, integrated six-platform ecosystem adopted across the full organization.
Before that, I ran the P&L and growth for Capital One's Secured Card launch and served as VP of Marketing & Analytics at Frontpoint Security. I've also built and exited two businesses alongside full-time executive roles — both from scratch, both profitable, both sold.
I trained as a lawyer at Harvard before moving into business, which shapes how I think about regulatory environments, contract structures, and risk. I earned my MBA at Wharton.
Cohen Advisory is newly launched. The engagements I can point to are from my operating career, which is also the experience you're hiring. I currently have active client engagements and am selectively taking on new work.
Let's talk.
If your organization is facing the kind of inflection point this site describes, I'd welcome a conversation.
Here's what that looks like: a 30-minute call where I'll ask you about the situation you're navigating, share an honest perspective on whether and how I can help, and give you something useful to think about regardless of whether we work together. No pitch, no follow-up sequence.