7 Lessons from 7 Years Running a Salesforce Consulting Practice

So this month marks 7 years since AFDigital was founded!

We've certainly been through a lot, starting as a digital agency - now we are one of the fastest growing Salesforce Consulting Partners in APAC specialising in Customer Experience across Sales, Service and Marketing Cloud.

Starting the business I never knew it would go in this direction, grow this big, or be this awesome. Thinking back, here are 7 lessons I have learned, hopefully you may also get some value from this.

1. Pick Awesome Technology

Under advice from our investor, we bought Salesforce licenses. At first we had no idea what we were doing, eventually we started learning how to use these tools to help our own clients, and Salesforce eventually started referring us business!

It was lucky timing I guess, Salesforce were looking for Partners to help them expand into ASEAN markets and with our office based conveniently in Manila, they asked us to become a Reseller, soon after we became an Authorised Services Partner, and 7 years on we are now a Gold Consulting Partner!

If we hadn't picked Salesforce, we'd just be another struggling digital agency. Because we picked Salesforce as our "horse", we joined an ecosystem that is naturally growing and needs skills and IP to service it. Salesforce is now the #1 CRM in the world and because we can up-sell digital marketing services to Salesforce customers, we will always have a stable and growing balance sheet.

If you're thinking of starting a services business, pick awesome technology - and build implementation and retainer services around them. If you start a business around any growing software product that already has a large number of customers, there will be lots of revenue opportunity.

2. Own Your Inner Weirdo

Lets face it - if you're an entrepreneur, you're probably a weirdo. All the big name entrepreneurs like Jobs, Musk, Trump have larger than life characters. When I first started the business I tried to be who I thought I should be - a responsible employer deferring to experts, achieving consensus and keeping a happy company and customer, yuck boring - at least for me.

I'm a weirdo in that I sometimes say inappropriate things, and have uncommon views on life and the future. I have a lot of passions from business to technology, design to skateboarding, philosophy, robots and music - all of which make up my unique algorithm.

When my business started aligning with my passions, and I stopped caring about people telling me how to be CEO, that's when things started flowing. When I started loving the industry I found myself in, then it stopped being work.

Make your inner weirdo congruent with your outer weirdo.

3. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

So many people scoff at the word "Agile" using their fingers in condescending parentheses. If this is you, you missed the point, bro. There are lots of different project methods that suit different scenarios e.g. waterfall, scrumban, kanban. Who gives a fuck. Agile is not really about the technical project management method, you can use whatever tools work for you - it's about being zen with the process of rapid shit happening with smart, focused people, in an iterative way, following a flexible prioritised list.

Agile for me means:

• Monitor your vision for the future, iterate
• Go to market rapidly, iterate
• Regular re-prioritisation of iterations
• Test early, test often, iterate
• Don't fingerpoint, iterate
• Focused team of omni-skilled unicorns, iterating

Making a method work for you is up to you, the concept of agile can be applied to any aspect of your business - it's not just IT project manager related.

Failure is a necessary ingredient into the Agile process. Failure in a business process feeds a backlog with new tasks and work to be done. The urgency of which is decided by the stakeholders. Failure of the agile process results in a new iteration that doesn't fail.

Iterate, iterate, iterate. It takes the emotion out of failure, failure is the process.

4. Learn Yourself

As an entrepreneur you have a lot to learn, this competency model helped me be more aware of my own capability and accepting that I don't need to be amazing at everything to begin.

"If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles" - Sun Tzu

There is a competency model I use that explains how to be more self aware. When I first started the business I was unconsciously incompetent. I didn't know what I didn't know, and I made a lot of retarded decisions, but I did think I was pretty smart at the time!

As you become aware of your own shortcomings (typically through failure) you become "Consciously Incompetent", then after much practice, "Consciously Competent' as you develop the skill, still requiring focus. "Unconscious Competence" is when you are awesome and in total zen, you don't need to focus doing the activity.

If you apply this framework to any activity and are honest with yourself, it can help you realise you may need to go back to the books and do some learning.

Self awareness is key in the road to becoming an entrepreneur.

5. Good Leaders have Good Habits

I know this sounds like a cliche - but your awesomeness as an entrepreneur is tied closely to your physical health. For several years I've been exploring "bio-hacking" a word almost as cliche-sounding as Agile.

For me it's really simple. Our bodies are wired to respond to the outside world as per evolutionary design. If we provide our bodies with the right nutrition, exercise and activity through daily habits, then we put ourselves in the best positions to respond to life in the most awesome way, and perhaps even live much longer.

These are some ways I *try* to bio-hack my body every day:

• Tidy my house (prevents procrastination)
• 9 mins Weights (Fitbit Interval Exercise)
• 2 km Run
• 20 mins Yoga
• 10 mins Breathing - see Wim Hof
• No Sugar (lowers testosterone)
• Intermittent Fasting (no food 8pm - 12pm)
• Cold showers
• Sleep >7 hours

If you follow an "iterative" model to bio-hacking, it makes a lot more sense for you to do a 1-2 quick workouts daily, than a long work-out 2-3 times per week.

There is also a "compound interest" affect you achieve by making iterative change, as you get the benefits faster and more regularly. Making all of these things part of my every-day habit helps me keep them sustainable.

6. Block and Counter

One thing I've started slowly learning is Filipino Stick Fighting or "Arnis". It's a specific type of martial art originating from the Philippines as a method of fighting against the Spanish during their bloody colonisation many centuries ago. The fighting style has become famous since being featured on movies like Bourne Legacy and The Book of Eli.

The fighting style has a simple principle of blocking and counter-attacking in the same movement. If you apply this to anything in life it helps you take advantage of any situation. For example - if you receive a customer complaint, you can remedy it so well the customer is really happy, and at the same time you can try to up-sell the customer with another service.

Have to do a late night task before a deadline tomorrow? Make whatever you do into a re-useable template, so the time spent will save you 10-fold in future for similar tasks.

Block and attack in the same motion. I'm very much a beginner, but watch the Bourne Legacy trilogy if you want to see some awesome examples!

7. Work Harder than Everybody

I've always worked really hard. Yes perhaps I'm competitive, but I really just enjoy learning and doing - this means I spend a lot of nights and weekends working on my business.

It's in my nature. The way I think about it is - if you renovate your kitchen over the weekends, then you're adding equity value to your property.. working on your business, or your skills is exactly the same, you're creating equity value.

Because you're adding equity, and it's your own business you have a much greater purpose and reason to work hard. Stop letting people make you feel guilty when you're building equity in something you are passionate about. Time waits for no man, stop working for the weekends. Yada yada.

I hope this has been of value, and thanks for reading! Please drop a comment if you have any suggestions for things that have really helped you achieve success.