Ben McCarthy joins to talk about how to start a Salesforce consultancy.
Ben is Founder & Co-Editor at SalesforceBen.com, and Co-founder & Chier Revenue Officer at Nymble.
Main Points
- Ben’s self-introduction
- Ben’s prior working experience before
- How and when did Ben receive the managing director role of the UK in the company?
- The importance of industry focus
- The importance of engaging with Salesforce
- How to hire and keep talent in the company?
- Why does Ben think the company culture is the most important point for a successful consultancy?
- The difference between Intrapreneurs and building up a company from scratch?
Links
Video Teaser on Salesforce Consultancy
Contact Me
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Take care, until next time :)!
Transcript
AI-generated, unedited.
[00:14] Hey everybody! This is Xi Xiao. This is yet another episode of Salesforce Way podcast. Today I'm sitting with a great guest with me. His name's Ben McCarthy. Hello Ben. Hello, how are you doing, Xi? I'm doing great. Hopefully, I pronounced your last name correctly. Yeah, perfect. So Ben, would you like to introduce yourself before we jump into our topic today? Sure. So my name is Ben McCarthy. I'm a Salesforce MVP. I'm the founder of Salesforce Ben, and I'm also the managing director of Empower, which we're going to be speaking a lot about today. Which is basically a consultancy based out of London, but also a few other places around Europe as well. There's the famous Ben in the ecosystem, Salesforce Ben. Is that you? A little bit, yeah. It is, yeah. I'm Ben McCarthy by day and Salesforce Ben by night, the superhero. So, I think a lot of a lot of people in the ecosystem definitely see your website, use the service over there. So, one of the most famous blog, Salesforce blog, over there in the internet. A really great service supplied by you. Yeah, it's very cool to see it helping so many people. Yeah, but today our topic is different. So we want to talk about how to start a consultancy firm from scratch. That's what you have done. What you have experienced in your past. Yeah, exactly. It was it was something that
[01:44] wasn't necessarily on my my career path, but something that came came along as a as a as a massive opportunity and something that I've been doing over the past four years. And it's been really exciting, and it's given a lot a lot back to me in terms of my growth as an individual and as a as a professional. So yeah, I'd love to talk about that today. So you said it was not planned in your career path, but you get the chance. So would you still tell a bit the background? So what did you do before that? Yeah, sure. So this is my my eighth year as a in the Salesforce ecosystem, and directly before joining Empower is actually working for Conga, which a lot of people might might know about because. Because it's a very very large ISV. I think the second largest ISV in the world. So back when I was at Conga, they did document generation only with well, yeah, basically just document generation. But now they've got an entire suite of projects, products which includes e-signature and contracts, CLM and things like that. But I left back at. The start of 2016 and joined Empower. So Empower is a Salesforce consultancy that focuses on startups and hypergrowth companies. So essentially companies that have a lot of investment and they they're on a hypergrowth trajectory, which is growing at a rate of something like 30-40% a year. But quite a lot of them are got 100% growth and even more than that. And I was I wanted to get to consulting because I felt like it was a very natural step for me. So I
[03:14] used to be an admin. I used to be a consultant as my very first job, but I was a graduate, so it was nothing nothing to. Too serious, but I felt like it was very logical to to get back into consulting, and it was something that I was actually quite nervous about because you know I I was used to being an admin working with one client and being consultant you're working with many you're you're expected to be the the very top of your game the expert so it was something I was quite nervous about but I was very thankful to find Empower which was a company that was Yeah, folks on startups and hyper growth companies, which I was very passionate about, very interested in. Yeah, so that was how I landed at Empower. So in Empower, you help the company to build up the London branch, right? Yeah, exactly. So, so I joined as a business analyst slash slash consultant. You know, kind of that generic role, implementing, getting people's requirements, implementing Salesforce, being the being the technical expert. And there was about three of us when when we joined. So there was myself, another consultant, and and the managing director of that office. A few months into a few months into the into my role at M Power, the managing director left to go pursue other opportunities. So I was given the opportunity to step up and become managing director of the UK office, which at the time we didn't really have a presence in the UK. No one knew about us. We didn't have very many projects. We were we were losing money, and
[04:46] yeah, I got the chance to step up and kind of become the person to lead the growth. Lead the sales, lead the lead the strategy, hire people, and all of that kind of thing, which was very nerve wracking. A lot of responsibility I felt to to have something like that, but also very exciting and something that I was really I really loved having the opportunity, and I'm very thankful for Empower for for giving me that opportunity. Exactly. That was kind of unique opportunity. If the company already established a a stable branch, then maybe you won't have a chance to get that managing director role, right? Because the company was growing in the UK and you were growing, so there was a match. And the company, I think, the executive managers, they really trust you. Yeah. Then they give that a role to you. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, just to set the scene, something that I might have missed out. So, Empower already had a presence in Berlin, so they were headquarters out of Berlin, with a couple of other offices in in Madrid and Barcelona. But and they saw an opportunity in the UK market, so set an office up, employed some people, and yeah, I suppose just through my Through my kind of network in in Salesforce and and having the Salesforce Ben brand, they obviously thought I was I was quite suited to that. So the CEO at the time, yeah, had a chat with me and and decided to to go along with myself coming the managing director. That's cool. So,
[06:16] before we jump into your storytelling, could you tell us where did you start? You said it was the revenue was even minus at the beginning, right? Where we are now for the company. So, we are doing. Last year, we hit revenues of two million in the office, and this year we're looking to do about two point seven million. And it was minus at the beginning. Yeah, minus three hundred thousand a year. I think that's a lot of money. Quite a big difference. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Definitely, that's a success story. So, you know, what's the greatest the value to tell the listeners? So, from where should we start? Yeah, if you're looking to set up a Salesforce consultancy, there's a lot you need to need to take into account. So I suppose the different topics we can dive into are the industries you're going to focus on, the products you're going to focus on, what your USPs are generally as a as a consultancy. And also your engagement with Salesforce. So, so I think those four things are are extremely important. So I guess where we can start is is. Maybe maybe the industries because Salesforce as a company now is is very verticalized. So over the past four years, it used to be that you would only kind of verticalize the top tiers. So for
[07:46] anyone that doesn't know, you have kind of enterprise, then mid market, then SMB, then emerging small medium business. And you would fit into one of those brackets. So you know if you're if you're just starting out, most likely you'd be you'd be in one of the smaller tiers, dealing with the smaller customers. But if you've perhaps I don't know you you've run a lot of enterprise product projects before or mid market projects, then you might be better suited to actually work with those those kind of customers. So that is that is one of the most important things to start off with, and and that kind of links in with the engagement with Salesforce as well. So if you're looking to be a successful partner, engagement with Salesforce is absolutely crucial. So you you obviously want to diversify where your leads come from. So your own network, great. Go out and do your own marketing. But a lot of our leads come directly from Salesforce, so we're supporting them with their customers. You know, whenever Salesforce sells a deal with with licenses, they want to recommend the partner to go in there to do the right implementation to ensure it's deployed correctly, and try and tempt the customer away from going down the self implementation route, where they might not have the experience. They they might They might not know how to roll out how roll out Salesforce properly, so yeah, that's one of the most important things I'd say to start off with. That's interesting. Before talking to you, I've thinking about this. Like, if I
[09:16] start a consultancy, what would I focus to? Like the most important points. I thought it was customers, which is what you just mentioned. The categories, and then it's the employees, like the talents I'm gonna hire. But I didn't really think about the relationship with Salesforce. That's crucial, right? That's one important point I'm missing. Yeah, and and they um they will will help you a lot as well. You know, Salesforce are very incentivized um to bring partners in because you know we've all seen the. the the IDC report that said how much sales the Salesforce industry is going to grow and unless Salesforce has these partners coming into the ecosystem that all have their specializations and actually sorry I was starting to talk about industries which we can come onto in a second but unless Salesforce have these partners of all different levels they're not going to grow. So they are actively looking for people to become Salesforce partners to specialise in certain products and industries and and sizes of organisations and you know be onboarded and yeah grow their consultancies with Salesforce. Okay, that's a good point. As a consultancy firm, you're supposed to find your niche, right? How about your company? Which which category of customers you are focusing on at the moment? Yeah. So yeah, as I was starting to explain earlier, so Salesforce are now very verticalized. So all the way from enterprise down to down to SMB,
[10:47] they all have teams in telecoms, in retail, in financial services. And what Salesforce don't like is a partner coming along and saying, we do absolutely everything. Because then you're you you kind of you're kind of saying you don't have any knowledge in a particular vertical, and when you're speaking to so one of the one of the verticals that we focus on is financial services. And we've done a lot of projects now. You know many success stories. So when we go in to speak to a financial services company, we can reference other successful projects. We can speak their language. You know they can use acronyms and abbreviations and financial terms that we can understand, which gives them the confidence that we're going to deploy the the project successfully. We also focus on retail, business services, real estate, as some other verticals as well. But something that we've chosen to focus on is is more of a horizontal, which is startups and hypergrowth. Which are companies that are growing very fast. They need a very scalable system. They're quite unique in the way that they don't want a huge project upfront. They'd rather phase it and you know deploy an MVP, get it up running very fast, and then incrementally improve it with other products or features or things like that. So this was yeah. When we started off, Berlin already had a USP of hypergrowth and finserve and fintech. So we used that
[12:17] experience into the UK to kind of sell ourselves to Salesforce and the rest of the market as well. But if someone was looking to to start a A Salesforce consultancy from scratch. I'm sure they're going to have some industry knowledge from other other jobs, you know, wherever they've been in the Salesforce ecosystem. And I would highly recommend to use that industry expertise when you're setting up your consultancy, because that will be your USP. Excellent, excellent. And also, I think it's good to also for Salesforce when they have the leads, they need to send those leads to the partners. They know who to send to, right? If you have a specialized aspect, otherwise, as you said, if I know everything, then who is gonna get the leads from the Salesforce? Yeah, exactly. That that's um extremely important because when it comes to you know if if if Salesforce are going to bring in a certain partner to to support them with the um with the implementation, the most important thing for Salesforce and for the customer is that that deployment is successful. And how do you how do you prove it's going to be successful from other projects, from industry experience, and all those kinds of things? And then when you prove yourself with that. You know, Salesforce are gonna are gonna love you as a partner and and continue to work with you, and if you haven't done any projects before, if you're if you're going as as a fresh partner.
[13:48] The expertise that you've got from other industries, maybe you were an admin in an insurance firm or something like that, that gives them the confidence that you know what you're talking about. And as soon as you go into a meeting with Salesforce and the customer, you can add value by speaking about your previous project. You know, it might be a full time job, but it's still a implementation that you've worked on. Excellent, excellent. Thanks for sharing the knowledge. So now, if we shift into another aspect of the companies, that we need people working in the company, right? We need to hire the talents, and we need to train them. As you building the company from scratch, you mentioned the company was like nobody know about it at all at the beginning. And the UK, I would assume already there were more than a hundred consulting firm like the Salesforce consulting firms. Yeah. So so how do you make sure that you can really get the chance to hire talents? What what was your like a weapon? Yeah. So we. And this is something that I think is extremely important to focus on because Salesforce Salesforce talent can go absolutely anywhere they they want at the moment. You know, Salesforce professionals are so in demand they can really choose wherever they want, and they're only going to go to the best kind of companies. So I would say that that yeah this topic is so so important. You know, having a good USP in a company where people can grow
[15:18] is very important. With us personally, we took a very Unique kind of unique way of getting our name out there when when we were speaking to people. So as a company, we are extremely focused on culture. So culture for us is the number one priority above anything when we're looking to to hire an employee. So more than their skills and more than the role that they're going to going to go into. So the actual way we divide it is we look for sixty percent culture, thirty percent skill, and ten percent the role fit when we're evaluating an employee. And of course, that's not to say that we, you know, we if someone's the coolest guy you've ever met, but they're terrible at Salesforce. You know, that's not like we're gonna we're gonna hire them. But you know, we would rather hire someone that is the right kind of fit for the company than than anything else. And the way that we we attracted talent and we still do attract talent is we are we we have a very flat hierarchy and we we use a organizational operating system called Holacracy. And we've chosen a modified version of it. So instead of having a classic hierarchical, you know, CEO, exec, senior management, right down, this is very flat, and it's. I won't go into it too much, but it's kind of divided into circles as opposed to a hierarchy. And there's a very and this kind of it's all centered around self management and because we're we're kind of a self management focused company this has
[16:48] a lot of benefits that come with it so one of them is unlimited holiday which obviously quite a lot of people get get very excited about what is that so so maybe I shouldn't call it unlimited but uncapped holiday. Okay, so we we don't have a so essentially means that there's I mean most other companies in the UK have probably twenty five days holiday that you can take a year, and any more than that would be unpaid. But we don't have a cap. So people can take forty, fifty days holiday, paid holiday, so unpaid paid holiday, yeah, paid holidays. How does it work? Then I will ask for fifty days if you allow me to take. Yeah, it's so it's it's a bit so. I don't know if you've read anything about companies like Virgin and Netflix because this is other companies are doing this, like like Virgin and Netflix. Okay. So it's it's not a it's not a new thing, but it is quite unique in in in consulting because obviously people people bill by the the time. So you know people people don't abuse the system because they still have to hit targets like this. But you know people do take more than they they take as much as they need essentially. You know some people take 40, some people take 25 days, and yeah, and and it has over the past four years, it's worked really well. You know people respect each other's time. They don't just
[18:18] take off. You know. Three weeks and ignore their projects. You know, if if they've completed their projects and it's the right time, then they'll take they'll take a period of time off. And this also coincides with the next benefit, which is flexible working. So because we're self-managed, people can work from wherever they want. There's no fixed times to come into the office. You know, it's it's not nine to five. If people, I don't know, need to visit a friend in the morning until eleven o'clock, you know, they can come in at eleven o'clock and they can work until seven o'clock or or whenever they feel like it. Or we have some quite a lot of our offices from other countries in Europe and around the world. So one girl is from Canada, so she she goes out to Canada to see her family and she'll take a week's holiday and then she'll work remotely for a week. And quite a few people are from Spain also, so they'll go to Spain and work remotely for a week. Which works quite well. So this was yeah something quite unique I think in the in the ecosystem of Salesforce. So it was I think people quite liked kind of. Being trusted to you know make their own minds up and you know take holiday when they want work when they want but of course people are still very hardworking as well. Would you mind to send me the unlimited holiday information you mentioned the the Virgin and Netflix? I will put in our share notes just for people to to check what those are. Okay. Yeah. Cool.
[19:48] And one of the questions coming from me is that in your current team do you have anybody working full time remotely? Without to use in the office, so we, yeah, we actually do. So it's although it's a fairly new thing. So we've actually just hired two people in Liverpool, which are working full time remote, and they come down to the office once or twice twice a month. Because I mean, for them, obviously, it's really nice to be engaged with the rest of the team because we we speak to them on quite a regular basis. So it's nice for them to come down and you know be one team. We also have a guy in who used to be based in the UK, but now he's he's needed to move back home to Barcelona. So he's working remotely from there. So and the role he's a consultant slash project manager who works in Barcelona. We have two people working in Liverpool. One is a solution architect and one's a developer. Okay, I see. So, in your opinion, the most important thing to maintain the consultancy firm is the company culture. Am I right? So, you need that to to make sure the employees are happy. That you really have a unique value to provide to them that the other consultancy company competitors they don't have. So, in that sense, you can keep the people who share in the same value. Yeah, I think of course there's many
[21:18] you know different things to to create a successful consultancy, but I would probably say that is the most important because you know it's obviously not just about the perks that we offer, but we we put employee happiness above everything. And in fact, I I do something quite funny when I go to pitch to. Companies, even very big companies, I say that we put our employees first over our customers. Yeah, put our employees first over our customers, which you know might be a bit of a controversial thing to say, but I think I think everyone agrees. You know, even the companies that we're pitching to, they they probably treat their employees and customers the same. And the logic is that if our employees are as happy as they can be, then they work harder on their projects. They make sure they're doing a good job. And and this has worked really well so far, and we get on very very well with our customers. And it's very rare that we will lose a customer. You know, everyone occasionally doesn't get on with a customer or does a bad job. But luckily, we've completely been been able to minimise that. And I think our culture is quite a big part of that. And adding on to that, we because we don't lose a lot of people, it enables us to grow quicker. Which is of course a you know a hard thing because we have lost people and people move around all the time in the Salesforce ecosystem. But I think we've been able to minimise that, which has enabled growth to to be yeah pretty big. I think I grabbed the most important
[22:48] things from you, and the next step for me maybe is to start a consultancy for myself. Yeah, you should do it. You should. Yeah, but just want to make it clear that still there's a difference between what you did, which is like an intrapreneur, you spin off from an existing company. Comparing to people who quit their job and start by themselves, building everything from scratch, right? You mentioned at the beginning of the company, the UK branch already has the minus revenue, and if you start from scratch, that's a big burden for for yourself if you are a founder from from zero, right? Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, just to kind of set the scene there, I suppose we. I think we're a bit naive when we set up the the company originally. So we set up the company with a a technical architect and two consultants and a salesperson. So there was initially four people, but the sale the salesperson left quite quite quickly after I joined. But the salesperson unfortunately didn't have any. He was a very good salesperson, but he didn't have any network inside of Salesforce. So this meant we weren't aligned to Salesforce. We weren't the the verticals that we aligned to. Salesforce didn't know about us. So there was a very large salary cost with no real strategy about how to get projects or leads. Which which was a mistake that was was made by us.
[24:18] So if you were doing this, yes. So that minus 300k in the first year was was because of that. And we we did have projects in the first year, but they were no way enough to to pay salaries, pay office costs, and you know IT equipment and everything around that. If someone is starting. By themselves, it's obviously very different, especially if they're you know they they're a skills Salesforce professional, maybe an admin developer, consultant. They they need to wear a lot of hats, but ultimately you can very successfully start the consultancy just with yourself. You don't need to hire a very expensive salesperson or a technical architect or or something like that. So if we take the example of I would guess most people listening to this would probably be focusing on the SMB sector instead of you know MM or enterprise because that would probably require some investment to get a you would probably need a technical architect and people but and you know you would need to wear a lot of hats so you would need to be the the salesperson the account manager the project manager the consultant. But once you've once you've established yourself within within Salesforce and the rest of the market, and you've got a few projects going, you know that's when you can look to to expand and look where ultimately you you need to fill in the gaps. And I would say the the first kind of I would say the managing director or or the founder really needs to be in sales quite heavily for definitely for the first
[25:49] few years because Salesforce people Salesforce sales people are quite expensive. So you know you need to be going after the leads, selling on behalf of your company, and then building up an operations team to support with, with the projects as they come in. Excellent, excellent. I've learned so much from you, and I think I've used the most of your time now already. Do you still have something else you want to add before we close the session?
[26:19] Um. Hmm. I mean, yeah. I. I think. I think we have. Um. Yeah. We have gone over most things, but I would say. Um. Just to kind of summarize. Um. Yeah. Culture above everything is is very important. Um. Engagement with Salesforce, but also your USP within the market is. Very, you know, it's yeah. I'm not really tearing these, but the the USP is very very important. The industries you you focus on. So yeah, hopefully this has been interesting for everyone. It is excellent. Thanks, Ben. So talk to you next time. All right. Cheers. Bye.
