The Value of Personal and Professional Goals
Meet Josh Sangster, the Director of Product Management at Conga and a true go-getter in every sense of the term.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Inside the Ohana.
I'm Dan Darcy, Chief Customer Officer, qualified,
and today I'm joined by Josh Sankster.
Josh, how are you?
- I'm doing great.
I'm still confused why I'm here, Dan.
You said you wanted me to talk about
what I've contributed to the ecosystem,
and I was like looking around, and I was like,
I don't know, not too much.
But if Dan wants to talk to me, I better go talk to him.
- Well, I mean, I'm just really excited
we're gonna get into it today.
So I wanna dive right into our first segment, Ohana Origins.
Josh, how did you discover Salesforce
and start your journey?
- It's a great question, and it's a fun one,
and I think it's relatable to a lot of folks.
I was working at a midsize company,
and in the space that they were in,
they're like one of the largest,
dental laboratory.
So if you go to the dentist,
you get an impression made of your teeth.
They send the impression to a lab,
and the lab creates the teeth,
sends it back to the doc.
Doc drops it on your tooth.
Out you go, right?
Most of these, like, dental labs are like six person companies
out of like Jim's garage, you know?
And it's like, well, that's sanitary, you know?
Like, okay.
But I worked for one of the larger ones.
And so we actually had a sales team and a budget
and, you know, a reason to need a CRM.
And we were using ACT.
Oh man.
This thing, like, it's an on-prem,
and we had servers in the building,
they were like downstairs,
and somebody's gonna be like,
you had what in the where?
Like, just go with it, okay?
They were on-prem in the building,
and like ACT is running on a central database
in the building,
and sales reps are running a local version
of the database on their laptops.
And so what they would have to do every night
is have to go home,
sync their laptops so they could get their notes in,
and then hope that nothing bombed out
because if it bombed,
it had to restart completely.
There wasn't like a pickup where you left off.
It was like, start over.
And so you can imagine like, their life was hell,
which made my life hell as the marketing coordinator.
And so I started doing some research,
and I was like, we desperately need like a modern CRM.
And we went with Salesforce.
I did some research.
I put together a business plan.
It was X dollars, and I said,
but if we're going in and we're more informed,
I think this will help us work better with our customers,
we'll know where their cases are.
Reps are going into offices to see a doctor
take a lunch,
and the doctor's going,
you've effed up my last four cases, get out.
And so we were having some embarrassing situations,
and I figured this will resolve it.
And so that's, we endeavored.
And I think that was the first lesson
about the ecosystem.
I think many people have joined the O'Hanna in this way,
which is like, I have a problem.
I'm resourceful enough to figure it out.
So I'm just gonna keep going with that method.
- Let's actually talk through what year was this
when you brought Salesforce into that dental company?
- Ooh, well, goodly.
It would have been 2015.
- Okay, that's incredible.
What other things did it help you do?
I mean, it sounds like you were more efficient,
you know, with your daily job,
but it obviously brought a new set of challenges,
which is becoming an administrator.
I mean, so what was your initial impression,
just kind of getting into Salesforce that way?
- Well, I mean, you know, I looked at it and I said,
okay, well, this is definitely challenging,
but I gotta be honest with you Dan,
like I wasn't really loving being a marketing coordinator.
Like, I got a marketing degree because I felt like
I was gonna talk to people.
Like, I didn't know, you know,
and then I wasn't sure exactly where that was gonna lead, right?
I wanted to go to Nike and be the next, like, big,
you know, product marketing guy at Nike.
That was my life's goal.
And then I realized, you know, what that looked like was
starting that career path was like writing these articles
about dentistry work, and I found that I hated it
to be completely honest with you.
I really liked solving problems and seeing the results
right then and there, and I really liked driving
towards outcomes.
And for me, it felt like with marketing,
I was just kind of like shooting things out into the wind
and looking at like click metrics and going,
that's a win, but feeling very empty about the result.
And so what Salesforce did for me is,
while it may have made my job like a little bit more technical
at that company, to be completely honest,
what it did was make me go, okay, that's that.
That's me right there.
That's what I wanna do.
This is awesome.
I like solving problems.
I'm good working with computers.
You know, this is what I wanna do now, now that I know.
So like, while, yeah, sure, it made my day-to-day life easier,
but that company wasn't like, it was like I said,
it was a smaller company.
This was a big change.
I learned a little bit about enablement, right?
I learned some good lessons and those were things
I took with me, but I think the biggest takeaway
was personal, which was holy cow,
this is what I wanna do for a living.
- And now we're gonna get into your career progression
and everything there, but you know,
I want this time right now for you to brag a little
because of, you know, since 2014,
you've been working with Salesforce.
You know, what would you say is the biggest success
you've had while working with Salesforce
or something that you're just really incredibly proud
of thus far?
- One of the world's largest apparel brands
is one of our biggest customers on the product
that I manage today.
And most recently, a Conga's customer and partner event
called Connect, like last week, I was surprised.
They, like the customer got on stage
and gave me and the account manager on their account
and award for customer excellence.
And I think for me, that has to be it.
That's the pinnacle right now, Dan.
Just like so for me, like my approach has always been,
I wanna win on merit.
Like I want you to wanna work with me
because like the work we did was good.
And I want you to enjoy working with me,
which it's hard to not 'cause I'm kind of a goofball
and you know, whatever.
Pretty good self-deprecating humor as well.
So it keeps people nice and happy.
You know, and I wanted to, you know,
this is a huge enterprise account
and having them, you know, tell everybody,
you know, hey, this is awesome.
And you know, these folks were part of it
and why we're here.
And that's been the pinnacle, I think.
And it was just last week.
So I'm kind of, so just kind of riding high
on that one to be honest with you.
- Still on the hike, well, huge congratulations
on that award.
And it is always nice when you're recognized
for the hard work that you've put into something.
And I mean, even just, even what you just said
a few minutes ago of you being a complete problem solver.
So and seeing that come into action.
So on the opposite side of the spectrum though,
what would you say is your biggest lesson learned?
- Oh man, there are quite a few.
Think with the biggest lesson is kind of like
a combination of lessons.
So like as a young admin and then like as a young consultant,
your job is to learn how to do the platform.
And to be, and if you're a consultant,
it's how to take notes.
Like if you're a new BA and you're a young person,
learn how to take notes and I'll hire you like tomorrow.
Like if you know how to take notes,
you're indispinsibly like valuable.
And so Blue will have did a great job
of like teaching us how to take notes.
And then the technology side,
you just have to like digest it, right?
You just have to like take as much as you can,
start adding things to your toolkit, like flow, right?
When flow first came out, right?
Stick it in your toolkit.
And that's hard.
But what's interesting is like it's easy to over rotate
on solving things that with like a brilliant technical solve,
but maybe you've gone too far.
And so what you've done is you've created
like something that's hard to maintain,
something that's hard to adopt, right?
So like these are all things that I saw myself make mistakes
early in my career as a consultant where I'm like,
no, yeah, I can solve that problem.
And it'll be badass.
And then I lost track of just solving the problem.
Just provide a result.
And if it's not good enough, if it only gets 60% done,
good news is you're not, you didn't only get 60% done,
you got 60% of the way there, right?
And so like it's a mindset change of like driving
towards outcomes in an iterative way is probably,
from what I have experienced, the better way to go about it,
right?
Waterfalling puts too much pressure on you.
And typically it's wrong and you got to start over.
And you know, over building over technical stuff
just ends up with suffering, right?
So I think the biggest lesson I've learned
is, and the biggest mistake I've made
is just solve the problem first.
Worry about the rest of it later, right?
Start with the people, train them up, teach them,
learn from them, then go to the process, right?
What do we need to do differently to make this work better?
And then only then do you go to technology and go,
now let's customize it, let's change it, let's build it.
And that's not a principle that others haven't said before.
But for me, it took a few years to learn it, you know?
And I love that lesson.
I mean, in other ways I've heard it say,
said is like launch and iterate.
So, you know, just to your point, solve the problem,
launch it, and then iterate,
'cause things are gonna continue to pop up
and go from there.
Now, if you could go back to Josh
just starting out with Salesforce,
what advice would you give to yourself?
- God, I think I'd give him a hug.
Probably be like, "Whoa, buddy, you went in for a night
or two, you don't even know yet."
And the other advice I would give would be just like,
calm down a little.
Now, this old boy, you know, I think mental health
is really important.
This old boy has some struggles with it
and I've done a lot to kind of move through that.
And I think I would have told myself
to address my personal stuff earlier in my career.
I think I sacrificed a lot of my personal health
and my sanity sometimes as an early consultant.
So to be completely honest,
the thing that I would tell most people
is not about Salesforce, it's not about
how to do something better and would be more technical.
It's like, you cannot perform at your best
if you are not your best.
And for me, I was not at my best when I was working
till 4 a.m. huffing down a pack of cigarettes
outside my apartment trying to hide it,
you know, from my partner at the time, you know,
like, that's not healthy.
Like, don't do that.
Don't do that young Josh or other young people
in the ecosystem.
Like, get your opportunity and maximize it,
but don't do it at the cost of your health.
- Sage advice.
So I want to ask you about the meaning of O'Hanna
and I ask this of all my guests because, you know,
I feel like everyone describes it differently,
but I'm curious, how would you describe the O'Hanna?
- Yeah, so I think, you know, this is such an interesting
concept, and I remember when they first started talking
about O'Hanna and I did, so I like, you know,
I did a little Googling and I said, okay,
well, what does it mean, right?
So our friends at Webster define it as,
it's a Hawaiian word which refers to a person's
extended family, which can include friends
and other important social groups.
But I think I sent you an email, I bolded,
refers to a person's extended family.
You know, I think for better or for worse,
we spend a ton of time with the people that we work with.
And the people that we support as clients
or the people that are vendors, right?
I spend an ordinary amount of time every week
with people that work at Salesforce
or customers of Salesforce or mine.
And one of the things that I think that's so interesting
is that without really even like going out
and preaching it and saying like, do this,
like, but the environment that Salesforce created
is this extended family, right?
I'm in a Slack channel called the O'Hanna Slack channel,
right, I got invited and I watch, I think there's like,
I don't even know how many members in there,
I might be five figures with the people.
I watch these people help each other
solve problems all day long.
And I think that for me is really the crux of this community.
Like our users, our beneficiaries, our business stakeholders,
our executive members, they see the results.
They see the front end.
A lot of times they don't have the opportunity
to see what's going on behind the scenes
and how we get there.
And I think this community does a really good job
of providing that behind the scenes support.
And to me, that's what it means.
Is like the unsung heroes, the trench warriors
are getting love from the rest of the unsung heroes
and trench warriors in the community.
- It gives me chills, I love hearing that.
- You like the trench warrior part?
You're gonna make everything combative, right?
Everything goes bad.
- It's bad.
- It's like, you know, I hear about these, you know,
elusive Slack channels that you get invite onlys
and it's like, you know, you know, only one day
by getting, like, how do you get involved
and how do you get invited to one of those?
And I think it's to your point of like getting involved
in the community and getting out there.
- I was helping someone solve a problem
and they said, hey, you should join the Slack channel.
There's a Konga channel on there
and I don't think anyone's paying attention.
And I was like, well, hell, I better pay attention.
Like, it's my job to be like the product person leading
our Salesforce product initiatives.
I better be in that damn channel, right?
(laughs)
- 1,000%.
Now, before we get into our next segment,
are there any special stories or O'Hanna moments
that are a little behind the scenes
that you would wanna share?
- I can share my first ever deployment story.
How about that?
So my first ever deployment was for Carfax
and we had been building this extremely complex system
where everyday Carfax goes out and grabs from there.
They have an executable service that lives on the computers
of all the car shops in America
and beyond probably at this point.
Every day that thing is running and grabbing
and they're paying for it.
Carfax is paying that shop for the data about their cars.
So it goes out, grabs that data
and brings it into a data warehouse.
They wanted to then populate that data information
into Salesforce so it could be used by different reps
to be able to call on different shops, et cetera, right?
It was for the shop side of the business.
And a project of that scale and that complexity,
there was a ton of code, a big batch job
that was running every night.
And we were fine in the old adage, right?
Or the old story of like it passed
in UAT with flying colors.
And during the deployment, we kept getting a deployment error
and it started 8 p.m. on a Friday night.
And 9 p.m. came and 10 p.m. came and 11 p.m. came.
And then midnight came and my teammate at the time
who I'll never forget, he looked at me and he's like,
I know you're new.
He's like, but this is ridiculous.
And I think we should just go to bed
and figure it out tomorrow.
And I looked at him and said, no way in hell, brother.
We are finishing this thing tonight.
Like we're, you and I are gonna get in the trenches
and we're just gonna finish this
because this is my, you know, this is our first deployment
with this customer, we gotta make it go right.
And I think, you know, that, like,
we talk about mental health and staying up till 4 a.m.
to get a deployment done.
That's another conversation.
But like, the fact that my teammate and I just looked
at each other and we're like, okay, like,
we just gotta do this thing.
I think that for me is probably the defining moment
of like what it meant to me to join a team of people
and like jump in on teamwork.
- Yeah. And you guys are in the fox hole
and get it done together, right?
- We gotta deployed.
Yeah.
- Awesome.
- We went through and we slept great that weekend,
but boy, for a while, it was rough.
- Well, let's get into our next segment, What's Cooking.
So Josh, you are now the director of product management
at Conga.
Talk about how you got to where you are now
and what your journey has been like
to get to your current role.
- Yeah, I mean, I made a little bit of a joke
about an eluded to it before, but I owe so much of my life
and my success to Blue Wolf taking a chance on me.
Their interview process was amazing.
Back in the day, they needed consultants
and the guy by the name of Lou Fox
came up with this program called Blue of Beyond
and the idea was how do you put recurring revenue
on services that isn't managed services, right?
'Cause there's a connotation with managed services
that it's maintenance, right?
That it's about maintaining.
The Blue of Beyond program was about taking very skilled
consultants who are both good at strategy and tech,
loosing them upon your organization to find projects
to work on and then building out those projects
in your Salesforce environment.
And to be 20, whatever the hell I was
and to be going in and learning that stuff,
that's insane.
Like looking back, I'm like,
they gave me the case of the kingdom
and I'm not sure they even knew
if I didn't have to drive yet.
Like that's crazy.
But I think that experience in and of itself,
despite being very hard,
was a very defining experience because the thing
that I learned at a very early age and consulting
and has always served me well is driving to outcomes.
I learned that Blue of folks were really heavily recruited
so I didn't stay there very long
because I had recruiters just knocking down the door.
I went to a software company for a little while,
was kind of did a lot of things,
learned how to do, you know, technical presales,
traveled a bit, built some partnerships,
had a very interesting role.
But ultimately my heart was just dumping to go back
to Salesforce and to be back in the ecosystem.
And so I took a job out here in Denver.
Came out here to work with a company at the time
called Statera, now called Globeint.
They went through two acquisitions,
so it wasn't an avid, now it's Globeint.
And that's when I really got plugged into CLM.
And so I took the same methodology and mindset
and said, "Yeah, let's go figure out problems."
Lawyers are an interesting group to solve problems for.
And so you're working with GCs and you learn very quickly
like what the word, like what the tigest language
sounds like when things aren't going well.
(laughs)
You're like, "Wow, I think I just got walked
into a contract dispute."
But you know, I think the GC and the legal operations group
has been a really interesting space to live in for me.
And it's really built my career because I just said,
"I don't really care what I do as long as it's on Salesforce,
I'll figure it out from there."
And now I walked into a specialization in a niche
that seven years later, it's in high demands.
And it worked out really well.
And now I'm helping chart the course for Congress products
on Salesforce and beyond.
And I think it's an incredible experience that I've had.
And I think it came from, the thing I would say, Dan,
that I think is most important to recognize is like,
I've been very fortunate in my life.
And I've definitely, there's definitely privilege
that I have as a person.
But that privilege results in an opportunities,
but I chase the opportunity down.
And if there's anything that anyone in this,
in the O'Hanna needs to hear,
it's that the O'Hanna lets that actually happen.
I haven't worked really anywhere
that is such a merit-based community.
In terms of advancement, recognition, skill sets, right?
I mean, just look at Trailhead,
is anyone else have anything like this?
Does anyone else let you talk about who you are
on a standardized level about how good you are
than like a basic certification?
It's a revolutionary.
And so I think, you know, when I look back at that,
I think of just how fortunate I was
that I picked Salesforce over sugar,
or like, you know, what could have happened different?
And I run from it.
I'm like, I'd rather not think about it
'cause I love my life now, right?
So yeah, I think, you know, the beauty
of going through that consulting, I guess,
maybe I'm biased, but I would every young person
that's getting an ecosystem, I'm like,
go be a business analyst at a consulting implementation firm
and cut your teeth 'cause that's what I did.
And I think it's the best way, right?
But maybe not, but I think that there's a lot to learn
about that outcome driven.
And I think thinking about that, whether consciously
and knowing it or not, because I really didn't start
consciously digesting that outcome thing until recently,
that was seen by leaders, and that's what ended up giving me
the opportunities that I have.
- You are certified, and you also have been part
of the Trailblazer program.
I mean, why don't you talk a little bit about
your certifications and trailblazing?
- Yeah, thanks, Dan.
Thank you for this opportunity to pump this up.
This is something that's near and dear to my heart.
So first off, I used Trailhead to teach myself
everything I know about initially about Salesforce.
So I sit here today because Trailhead exists.
Otherwise, I would have never been able to figure out
what to present in the Blue Wolf interview process
'cause their interview was like,
build something and tell us why it matters, right?
So that's huge.
And then the Trailblazer program is new,
and I've been very fortunate.
I signed up to be a mentor, I was selected,
and I've got to work with a few people.
And I've seen of those people, two of them,
or one of them works at Conga, got his admin cert,
and I'm so freaking proud of him for making a giant life
change in his mid-30s.
He just completely said, screw this, I'm done doing this,
I wanna do this.
And he got his cert, he did Trailhead,
he got into our technical support group,
and now he's in our professional services group at Conga.
And I'm like, it's amazing to see how that works,
and it does work.
And if you're out there and you're thinking,
maybe I should pick this up.
If you got even two, three, four years of experience,
you are a Trailblazer mentor, this is a young community.
Please, this is very passionate to me.
This old boy would not have this job, this life.
If someone didn't take a chance
and offer up some mentoring, some coaching,
whatever it might have been.
If you look at me on paper prior to Salesforce,
I'm very unimpressive.
- Very unimpressive. - Come on.
- I don't know, brother, I don't know.
I don't know, it wasn't great.
I put myself through school by working at McDonald's,
you gotta do what you gotta do, kind of thing, right?
So it wasn't great, but like, you know what?
Blue Wolf said, I think there's some soft skills there,
and they gave me an opportunity.
So take some people under your wing
that sign up for this program,
teach them what you need to know about the ecosystem,
tell them your story, give them examples
of how you got to where you are,
and let's bring more people into the ecosystem,
into the Ohana, because to be completely honest,
now that I'm in a role where I look at hiring,
it's very, very dry.
And if your friends and family are asking,
"How are you doing this?
"How are you living of this sustainable and great life?"
And like, 'cause I know, like,
I live a wonderful life now because of it,
help bring some folks on their journey.
You know, I think it's life's greatest joy
to see people grow from where they,
you know, what station they may have been born into,
and their life and see them go somewhere else.
To me, that's life's greatest freak in joy,
is to watch people grow,
and get to be a part of that with the Trailblazer,
and the program is pretty sweet.
- That's one of the special things
that why I love Salesforce in the entire community
is the way that people help lift each other up.
And you did talk a little bit about the mentor program,
but give us a little bit more around what exactly is it?
Like you said, there's an application process.
If I were just listening to this, you know,
and I'm sitting there in a different role,
not in Salesforce, like, how would I take advantage of it?
- It's a great question.
I think, you know, what I think you can do is you can go
right to the Salesforce website,
or type in, you know, Trailblazer mentorship program,
and your favorite search engine,
and it's gonna bring you to a landing page
to walk you through getting to be a part of that.
And I recommend giving it a try.
There's no commitment other than trying it,
and then being a good mentee by showing up
to the calls with your mentor.
There's an entire program that Salesforce has put together.
It's not like, they're not just a bunch of me's running
around just free, you know, just freewheeling it
and doing whatever we want.
There's a whole program, there's a feedback process,
there's lessons, there's stages.
And so you get a great plan of how to get into the community,
that's just like a nice template,
but you also get the personal touch of a mentor
who can help guide you through that process.
- Yeah, and I love hearing your story, Josh,
because, you know, just like you, you know,
I didn't come from much,
and I didn't have Trailhead back then.
I had what was called help and training back in the day
when I started to learn Salesforce, you know,
as a young budding admin,
but it is incredible what has been built
for a lot of people out there.
Now, going back to your role, you know, at Congo,
what challenges are you seeing now,
and how are you applying what you've learned
from Salesforce to those challenges?
- Over the last five, six years,
we've gone from working with the GC
and a paralegal to the VP of legal operations and their team.
And that's a different change.
And I think what's happening in the ecosystem
is specifically in the legal spaces,
what people have realized is that this,
there's actual, there's a lot of value
to be gained and lost in the contracting process.
And people are starting to see more and more of that.
And what they're realizing is,
there's a systematic way to approach this thing.
And if you do that, you can really reduce risk,
but what has gotten harder is what do I do
once I have a contract?
What people haven't done yet, and man,
I know, Siri, and that somebody,
any of my competitors out there,
you can come and get it now,
but I'm gonna go ahead and share a little love
here for you, maybe give you an idea,
maybe you can catch up, I don't know.
The thing that I'm seeing is that we don't do a great job,
anyone, of like, what is actually in the legalies?
And that's the challenge, because once we figure out,
and we're, we're scary close,
I know y'all watching, Siri, I see you, boy,
we're scary close on being able to understand,
delete the legalies and extract those obligations.
And now you're not, now we're talking about some different,
that's where it's gonna go,
and that's what's gonna be really interesting in our space,
because you're gonna see the ability to quantify the value
of what we're doing at a much bigger rate.
And I think you're gonna see that more prevalent soon.
- What is next, and how are you shaping the future?
- You know, it's so important to me
that all these people I meet in legal ops,
like the clients that I've met,
these folks, like, they work really hard,
and like, their jobs aren't easy, right?
Just ciphering what lawyers have said in a contract
and then arguing about it is just not an easy job.
And I want to see that work,
the value that comes out of that work
kind of come to the forefront.
So my goal and what I'm working on is
really just making sure that that middle office stuff
is not missed.
Salesforce can solve so many challenges.
So many people look at it and like they go, you know,
sales force, and I'm like, well,
contract is part of the sailing process,
but I don't care.
I have built a budgeting app,
a personal budgeting app on a trailhead
or at one time just for fun, right?
You can solve all sorts of problems with the platform.
So really what I think I'm doing
is just trying to be a good evangelist for like,
hey, this is a great place to solve problems,
to have a single system that solves as many problems
for a business as possible.
And I think the other contribution I'm gonna make in time,
over time will be this,
we'll call it the concept of an obligation in a contract.
I think I might, that might be where I,
this old boy strikes a goal, to be honest, we'll see.
- Awesome.
Well, let's get into our final segment, the future forecast.
Now, what do you envision as the future
of the Salesforce ecosystem?
- So what I see is like,
what I'm trying to do and what I'm seeing out there
in the ecosystem with like this Monday.com
is the second biggest value prop is
that there's 200 plus out of the box
potential business process templates
that you can just use at your own leisure.
And I think that's what you're gonna see more of
is this middle ground between like Salesforce code
and then a managed package,
which has managed package code
and you can't touch either of them, right?
You can't really mess with it.
But what I might see in the middle is packages of a flow,
some fields, maybe some Conga product in there,
to be able to drag and go, you know what?
I am a Salesforce CBQ customer.
I think it'd be nice to know what Conga recommends
is the out of the box contracting process.
So I'm gonna click a button
and that's gonna deploy metadata, templates,
all the things that I need for a full solution.
And then I could just plug in my template
and now I've cut my implementation time down three quarters.
And I did it in a sandbox so if it doesn't work,
I can uninstall it or just delete it and start over.
Or if I wanna customize it,
there is a place for me to start from.
And I think this is what we're gonna see more of.
- It's like more componentization of like use cases
and flows if you will.
So I love that.
I love that vision.
Now, can you give us a prediction
of what you think the Trailblazer community
is gonna look like in the future?
- I think we're gonna see more in person kind of events.
The other thing I would say is,
I think we're going to see the rise
of the individual contributor.
Most other ecosystems have seen, you know,
think of fiber.com, right?
Think of like these kind of methods.
I think soon enough,
you're gonna start seeing individuals
on the app exchange or in the Trailblazer community
who have their own process charts
or their own, what I just said, right?
Their own deployable out of the box methods.
And I think the individual is going to have the opportunity
to maybe revenue, make some revenue with that.
Or to build their personal brand, right?
I don't think everyone's gonna have to be a consultant
at a consultant shop anymore.
And my SI friends are coming at me.
I can see them running towards me, but.
- I love that vision.
I think that's an incredible vision
for even Trailhead to think through.
Now, what advice would you have
for aspiring individuals?
- Like I said at the beginning,
first and foremost, be the best version of yourself, please.
I can't watch any more colleagues go through hell.
Like, I just can't stomach it for them.
And I don't wanna, I can't do it anymore.
I can't watch any colleagues go through
this 60 to 80 hour work week and call me crying
and, you know, a cigarette hanging out of their mouth
and they don't even smoke, right?
Like, I can't do that anymore.
Please don't do that to yourself.
Take care of yourself, number one.
Number two would be ask for opportunities.
Be as hungry as you can
and don't be afraid to make a mistake.
I got the opportunity to blow off
and had no freaking idea what I was doing, all right?
I had no idea.
I stepped up four AM, rip and six.
Here we go again.
Four AM, rip and six building like this demo for them
and just going on Trailhead going, yeah, that'll work
and throwing it into the environment
and trying to figure out how I make it work
and make it come together.
If you get an opportunity,
stay up to four AM, ripping six.
No, I'm kidding.
Go full in on the chance to get into this ecosystem
and don't hold anything back.
You know, a little bit will go a long way.
Now, before letting you go,
let's have fun with a quick lightning round.
Yeah, I was looking forward to this one.
Okay, you ready for this?
All right. Let's do it.
Favorite Salesforce product.
Ooh, flow, by all means.
I built my whole career on it.
Classic or lightning?
If you say classic, you're wrong at this point.
Lightning.
Favorite Salesforce character.
I can't remember the name of the bear,
but we called him Swimmy Bear
'cause in like, sorry?
It's Cody.
Cody.
Yeah, Cody was like, we called him Swimmy Bear
'cause in the summer when he was like paddling around.
That's awesome.
Favorite brand of anything besides Salesforce?
Ooh, now.
My number one shoe brand is Nike, always and forever.
I love my shoes.
That closet right there behind me
is literally a shoe closet 'cause I have a problem.
Secret skill, not on the resume.
Ooh, I am a mean, mean, smoked barbecue chef.
I'm from the Southeast now.
I was born with it, so.
I mean, one day let's do it.
You just won front row seat tickets to your dream event.
What is it?
Oh man, I think I answered this in the email
and I don't even remember what I said
'cause I was like, oh, it's so good.
I sat and cried at the fact
that I wasn't gonna get to do it, right?
But no, it's sitting at the green side,
front row of the green side at 18 at Augusta
during the Masters.
And if I could do it at any time,
I'd like to go back to when Tiger came back in one.
It was on my 30th birthday when he won that
when he came back for his last Masters.
I wanna be right there in the front
so I can cry like a baby in the front row
and watch him do it.
Josh, I mean, this has been so much fun,
but before I let you go,
can you let the listeners know where they can find you?
And is there anything else you'd like to plug?
Yeah, I think, like I said,
the trailblazer thing is my biggest
and most important thing that I can plug,
the ecosystem needs more people
and I want to meet you and I look forward to it.
Oh, and you can find me on LinkedIn.
I don't do Twitter stuff,
but you can find me a dream force.
If you see me, just say hi,
I'll probably be wearing an obnoxious shirt
with birds on it and making bird noises.
And yeah, find me a dream force,
find me on LinkedIn, I'd be happy to talk to anybody.
Thank you so much, Josh, for your time today.
Yeah, thank you.
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