Episode 12: Goolshun Belut Salesforce Career Conversation with ROD. Listen to Goolshun talk about his career journey, from working at Carphone Warehouse to now running his own Saleforce consulting company, including the toughest Salesforce project of his career.

[Below is a transcript for your benefit. Please excuse any typos.]

Lee: Welcome, Goolshun Belut. Did I say that right, mate? 

Goolshun Belut: Yes, that is correct. 

Lee: Good you asked him before the recording. Welcome to the podcast, mate. Very nice to have you. Theresa is also here with us. 

Theresa: Hello. 

Goolshun: Thanks both for having me. Pleasure speaking to you after such a long time. 

Lee: I know. It has been a while. I don't know how long, but I think it's got to be a good few years and probably one of the last world tours, but been a long time. You've done a lot since we last spoke, and we will get to that, obviously. I don't know whether you've listened to any of these before, but we'd like to go back to the beginning of your Salesforce career if you like, and then. 

Goolshun: Back to the origins, right? 

Theresa: Yes, absolutely. 

Lee: If you can remember that far back, mate. Then we'll go back to where we are today, and what the future looks like, and all that sort of stuff and the journey you've been on through this. Without further ado, I'll let Theresa ask the first couple of questions, and then we'll just jump in. 

Theresa: Oh, okay, fantastic. I suppose the biggest question or the most important question, I should probably say, is how did you get into Salesforce in the first place? 

Goolshun: That's a million-dollar question, that one. I never planned to go into Salesforce at all. It's just while I was finishing my degree at university, and we had one module around CRM. I think it was saying we had to interview Carphone Warehouse about their own CRM system, but I've never imagined that I'll be working on CRM for my whole career. I think during the last year of my degree, I had a temp job at a company called Truphone. I think they were implementing the Salesforce CRM at that time. I had a basic job at Truphone. My job was literally putting SIM cards into a phone and testing them, and then shipping them. That was quite a mundane task; I was frustrated, and I told people how frustrated I was; I had more talent. One of the directors called me into the office. I thought I was going to lose a job today at that time. 

Lee: Really? 

Goolshun: Yes, because I was already here looking for a job, and I had a temp job, and I was venting at the office. They called me in the office, and they said, "Okay, what do you not like about this job?" I said, "I could do more stuff." He asked me to bring my CV to his office the next day, and he said, "There's something called Salesforce. It's a CRM system. We would like you to try it out and see if you can work with it. If you can work with it, then you have a job." I had two weeks of heavy Googling. Back in the days, there was no Trailhead; there was no heavy training. It was the initial days of even the certifications, so yes, and more Googling. 

Lee: Sorry, mate. Sorry to interrupt you. Where are we?  

Goolshun: That was 2010 probably. Just 2010 or 2009. Just approximately about that time. 

Theresa: Sorry, carry on. 

Lee: I'm just curious how long ago that was. Another question. What were you studying? What was the degree in? 

Goolshun: Funny enough, my degree was a bit odd. I was studying multimedia computing, but the whole idea of my degree was to do with filmmaking, multimedia side, and creative side with a couple of modules about IT. I did study computer sciences during my A-levels, which helped a lot, certainly because we did some programming before. Anything that I've learned at university was - probably I wouldn't disrespect my degree - but a lot of things we've learned during my A-Levels itself, especially again, I was brought up in Mauritius, this is where I did my A-Levels. It was a tougher A-level at that time. We had to learn very old-school programming languages like Pascal, Fortran, COBOL back in the days. Funny enough, when people ask me, how do I know these languages? I said, "Yes, I did some work on them when I was in college." They ask my age; I'm not that old. It's just we were using very old-school systems when I was growing up in Mauritius. 

Theresa: Good foundation, though. 

Goolshun: Indeed. It does help a lot. I think you understand the foundational aspect of programming, so it does help. 

Theresa: Okay. Going back to this first job then, you've been told, "Yes, I can give you something." Your boss said, "I've got a job for you." Talk us through what happened after that. 

Goolshun: Again, it's good that Google existed, or else probably I wouldn't be able to pick up Salesforce. Looking at help files, find ways to learn the system. They managed to put me as an admin on the system, even though I didn't know how to even use the system. The directors themselves didn't know, so they didn't hire anyone to do the work externally. It was all done internal, so a lot of people didn't have the right skills, including myself. I had to learn it fast. Salesforce is such a system that -- it's a very interesting story because the first version of Salesforce or the initial version of Salesforce was based on an Amazon type of interface. 

You've probably heard about the whole story about Marc Benioff; he wanted to create a CRM system, which is as easy to use as you would shop on Amazon. He created the whole system. It's true because it's free, easy to set up, easy to use. The back-end system at that time was not that useful versus the front end or the UI where people use the system. I had a baptism by fire, really, because I managed to delete the whole database in the second week of using the system. Then, I thought I would lose my job again, but then I've managed to see a recycling bin in the system. I managed to undo what I've done. It was a scary time, having to play around with a system that you never heard of, with not much help around. That's how it started in Salesforce and how I fell in love with the system. 

I did some CRM systems before, which is open-source CRM like Vtiger 5 before, and anything to do with custom CRM because I used to do a lot of web design stuff. This one was so perfect. Funny enough, I think it was my third month. One of the developers in the company was working for the billing department and asked me, "Can you create a filled-in Salesforce?" I said, "Yes, I can." They said, "Okay, how much time is it going to take? Is it going to take about three weeks?" I said, "No, it's going to take me five minutes." He was so confused. He says, "You're joking, right?" I said, "No, it's going to take five minutes." Because they’re so used to the back-end heavy hardcore systems, they never heard about Salesforce properly. I was a Salesforce guru. People loved me for that, but he wasn't really behind it. It was just Salesforce is such an easy system. 

Theresa: I was going to say he didn't even realize that included the logging on time. 

[laughter] 

Theresa: It really is that quick. 

[laughter] 

Goolshun: It was. 

Lee: It does seem crazy that that was the norm back then, wasn't it? The simplest little change could literally take weeks. 

Theresa: Yes. 

Goolshun: Yes. It's amazing how cloud computing changed the whole landscape of business. Before, we used to have coders to program in mainframes and even to create small files. In a small enough organization, it takes some time, and then the testing and all of that. In Salesforce, you create it. You don't like it; you delete it. 

Theresa: Yes, I love that. 

Goolshun: It is not as straightforward as that is now, especially if you work in a big organization, but the system allows you to scale very fast and make changes very quickly. 

Theresa: Fantastic. I guess the question would be, when did you know that Salesforce was for you or that you wanted a career in Salesforce? 

Goolshun: Interesting question. When I was researching on Google about what Salesforce is about, I watched a lot of helpful videos. Then I started to discover Marc Benioff, what he was saying, the whole history behind Salesforce. I thought, even though I'm a technical person, I do consider myself to be a lazy person as well because I do remember when one of the journalists ask Bill Gates, "What type of person you would like to hire?" He says, "I would like to hire the lazy ones because the lazy ones will really work harder to make things simple because they don't like to work that hard." 

Lee: I like that. 

Theresa: [chuckles] Why is that? 

Goolshun: I had the same mindset. I like to keep things simple. The system allowed me to play around quite a lot with it, and it was all cloud. You could do it on your phone, on a laptop, no software required. It was so easy to just create a process, for example. I think I liked that idea because I became the Salesforce internal guru without much knowledge about Salesforce myself; I thought, "That's quite a powerful system." Because people don't know about it, I'm the only one who knows about it. I just dug deeper and trained myself online, and after a couple of months, I've managed to get myself on a Salesforce training. That's about six, seven months. 

Theresa: It's important to remember that Trailheads didn't exist back then either, so most of the learning-- I self-taught as well. Most of what I learned has come from YouTube and places like that. 

Goolshun: Exactly, that's the best repository of learning. To be honest, even though Salesforce does great training, all these trailheads, it's all brilliant stuff. It's gotten me further; it's getting people more interested in the platform. At the end of the day, what you want to know is that you want to be solving a problem.