Announcing Robots & Pencils - Salesforce Practice

Today I have an exciting announcement to make. I’m starting a Salesforce Practice at Robots & Pencils!

In January I took a leap of faith and resigned from my job. I went on a fragmented Sabbatical with a lot of work sprinkled in. I did some traveling to Colombia, India, and Croatia which was a great chance to get some new perspectives. I also took on some sizable independent consulting projects which came my way via word of mouth. I’ve been working a lot since January, more than I ever expected I would be—considering my goal was to take a break.

Doing independent consulting work has its pros and cons. It is a great way to get exposure to a variety of work, and a certain degree of autonomy over what you do. But it does not scale well. It is just one person. It has been a challenge to provide a high level of service for my clients while performing the overhead needed to run a business on my own. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to be spending my time doing things I’m not best suited for, or don’t particularly enjoy doing. I should be spending as much time as possible building tomorrow’s Salesforce solutions and helping other people to do the same.

I am so fortunate to have seemingly unlimited opportunities available to me in this booming Salesforce economy. Which is exactly why it so important I say ‘no’ the things that don’t make sense for me to do. I need to be really intentional about maximizing the value I can create. This year I’ve talked to more Salesforce customers and partners than I can even keep track of about potential roles for me. And none of them sounded liked a perfect fit. After solving the challenges of building an ERP system at Kenandy, most other Salesforce roles seemed sort of trivial by comparison.

Until I started talking with the leadership at a very different company with an unusual name, Robots & Pencils. The name comes from the way they blend the sciences with the arts (think programmers and designers). I had several meetings with the President, Tracey Zimmerman, and the CEO Michael “MJ” Sikorsky. They flew some team members out and I met with them as well. At first, I thought this company sounded too good to be true. And to be honest I was a bit skeptical. They told me about their talent-first culture, and their Follow The Talent (FTT) business model. MJ shared his revolutionary 100-year business plan with me. Ultimately, I became convinced that Robots & Pencils really has something here. They are building a company architecture which is unlike any other I have seen. I believe this architecture will dominate in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. As technologies such as artificial intelligence continue to automate commodity work, people will need to move further up the stack to add value. Through years of hard work, Robots & Pencils constructed a home to house a disproportionate share of the talent that will be needed to be successful in the future. I believe their long-term vision will be the one that wins. R&P embodies the Steve Jobs quote “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” It’s not just lip service with them, it is how they operate.

I’m incredibly excited about this new chapter for several reasons:

1)   R&P has already built and continues to build the coolest projects out there. For example, I pulled up TechCrunch the other day and two of their projects were on the front page! Their missions.ai product was acquired by Slack, they are helping to disrupt financial services with mobile-only banking. They are working to build decentralized ownership of human data on blockchain.

2)   Robots & Pencils has a powerhouse of existing, non-Salesforce talent I am excited to tap and introduce to the Salesforce world. Sometimes a customer needs an innovative user interface, or back end solution to something that needs to be part of their Salesforce strategy, but just can’t be done with the native Salesforce offering. R&P has teams to do any of these things without needing to bring in additional consultants. What an opportunity for innovation!

3)   This will allow me to scale capabilities beyond what I can do myself. As an independent consultant, I was extremely limited by the number of hours in each day. Joining R&P I will get their company infrastructure for all of the day to day stuff like HR, and also get the ability to build a team to be able to take on new projects!

If we’ve talked about working together in the past, but I haven’t had the bandwidth, let’s get the discussion going again! Whether you are looking to have us “create what’s next” or you want to join a team to help “create what’s next” on Salesforce, I’d love to hear from you.

Aside from being excited, I’m also extremely grateful to be part of this ecosystem, for everyone who has supported me, and for this new adventure I’m about to embark on!