 Hey, this is Christian Buck with another MVP Buzz Chat and I'm here today with Joel. Hey, good afternoon. Good afternoon, Christian. Good to finally meet you in person here or in person remotely, I should say. That's right. Yeah. Well, this is the new normal if this is in person. So, yeah. Well, for those that don't know you know who you are, why don't you describe who you are, where you are, what you do. I'm based in South Carolina and I work for Atachi Solutions. I've been an MVP for 13 years now, I think it is. About where the discs are about to start falling off of the trophy or whatever. You've got the two blue rings. Yeah. Yeah. I've got the two blue rings. I'm about about two years away from the third one. Yeah. Then when you reach the third one, then you got to decide, do I take the blue rings out to make them fit or do I maybe go stack them along the top? Lay it sideways. You've got more surface there. Yeah. I mean, people that don't know where you're talking about here. Now, I don't know about you, like when was your first MVP award, Christian? 2012. Okay. So, my first one was 2008. I'm not saying that because I've been for a long time, but they didn't start the ring. I think that's what that's called. Yeah. Yeah. That was my humble brag. Exactly. But they didn't start the rings until 2010. And so, I have two missing rings and it irks me to no end because the complete is that I hate seeing like ring, ring, ring, five years that it just, it, I need to find somebody who can, who can fabricate those rings and make me a 2008. Three. You don't have access somewhere for two, a 3D printer? I'm sure. I, I, I, that's a good thought and you should 3D, 3D printer or something. Yeah. So, I've originally was awarded for dynamic CRM and if you know anything about the business applications world, that has now grown significantly to also, also factory and power platform. So I'm considered a business applications MVP. And so, It's become a hot property over there because it's, so I'm trying to remember when the Microsoft acquired all the dynamic stuff. So I was of an employee at 2006. So it happened right, right down there at the sometime, right, right around that time. Yeah. It was actually, and this, this is going to date me significantly, but it was early 2000s and actually dynamic CRM was a kind of an organic product that they, they developed themselves. The others like AX, which is now FNL and the vision and GP, they acquired all those but dynamic CRM, that was something, I mean, they built with partners, but it was really. Okay. I didn't, I didn't realize that. I thought that also came to the great pins acquisition, but all right. Yeah. Yeah. Now, and that's where, you know, kind of the, what they call the common data service grew out of what the dynamic 365 database was. And so that's where the power platform world is just, is still a little bit bifurcated where a lot of the like power apps grew out of SharePoint. The SharePoint was the first platform to adopt flow as its main workflow engine. And so as a result, a lot of the initial MVPs were on the, on the SharePoint side. And then when they brought in CDS 2.0 in 2018, that opened the door for dynamics people and there still is a little bit of a bifurcation there where people who came to it from a SharePoint side are trying to use Office. Now we've got CDS and then you've got the CRM people who are, don't really understand the office world as much as we're, we're, we're learning and I'm kind of bridging both worlds now. So, you know, we're delivering, delivering power apps to customers that don't have CDS as well as people that have CDS and dynamics. And I think that vision is increasingly coming clear and becoming more reunified thing. Yeah. That's, that's, I was going to ask you about that with your, your experience. I mean, so there's like, so here in where I am in Utah, of course, we've got a number of small, you know, SIs, consulting firms that have been long time SharePoint businesses and doing a lot of that, that kind of work. Well, as custom SharePoint, a lot of the on-prem work and that all has gone kind of down and, and some of them have retooled. Well, the large, one of the larger vendors in, in town, a company called Journey Team, they've shifted over. They shifted a few years back over to the dynamics. The business is booming. Right. And so they, their little division is like the SharePoint portal collaboration side of things, which is kind of my world. And, and they're really just, they're growing leaps and bounds on the other side of the business. And they're, you know, I don't know, they're going to double here. But well, before all this pandemic stuff happened, they, they were going to like almost double in employees this year. So, wow. Yeah, it's, it's something that, and I think that's where kind of realization to me is, you know, the average, I think the average dynamics implementation is in the, is in the hundreds of users, you know, it's, it's, you've got some of their small, some SMC stuff, but probably the average that we see for dynamics deployment is somewhere in the 500 to a thousand users. And then they've got some that are 3,000, 5,000. I mean, but we're, we're talking power apps deployments that are in the 10,000 or more users. And that's where Microsoft really sees this platform as even a much bigger pool or bigger opportunity than what business applications have been for them. And they have so much legacy stuff out there with InfoPath and access and Excel and all that other stuff that there's plenty of opportunity. But the realization is, you know, the, the initial power apps for a lot of personal productivity stuff, which are great. And I, I mean, I've built the food tracker app for myself and things like that. But the reality is that's not the real opportunity. It's not the free or, you know, not the five user, you know, productivity type apps. It's the opportunity to have somebody have a time sheet out that's used by 20,000 people. You know, that's the real opportunity. Right. Well, I guess the next question is about the stuff that you do in the day to day job. And then, so how, you know, what are you, what are you primarily focused on, what kind of projects are you're seeing? You know, that, that's always a good sign of the adoption and what's happened out in industry is, you know, what, what projects are the consulting company is starting to pick up. So I'd be, you know, my job has changed somewhat in that, you know, I've been, I've had almost every job on our, on our CRM team, use the old term, except for, except for being a project manager, I'll be a terrible project manager. You're a project manager. You basically have to be, be like nervous about everything all the time. Yeah, yep, it's the worst part of that job is, is chasing people for status updates. Yes. Yes. This is the, this is my quote for every project manager. I'm concerned. Yeah, you're, you, that's right. You have a responsibility for everything. They got to see the icebergs that are coming. You know, the poster I have on my wall over here. I mean, at my heart, I'm a, I'm a solution architect. It's the despair.com poster problem, no matter how great and destructive your problems may seem now. Remember, you've probably only seen the tip of them. I love that one. Yeah, but I was saying at my heart, I'm a, I'm a solution architect, which means I am not a developer. I've never claimed to be a developer, dabbled in it, but I never had, it's kind of the same reason I'm not an accountant. I don't like to go through a problem at the granular level. I like to jump to the solution and design what, what it looks like. But I, so, but my job has now changed. So I'm the principal power platform architect for Hitachi North America. So that means that I'm setting the vision for how can we bridge these worlds and how can we, you know, grow? And we've seen tremendous growth with power, automate power apps. We have another group that does Power BI. I've never, I've done reporting, but it's not my main focus. Yeah. There are, there are a few other Hitachi MVPs, aren't there? Yeah. We actually have more business applications, MVPs than any other partner and hasn't been that way forever. But, um, yeah, some of them have come as, it's like the more MVPs that we've, we've grown organically, the more want to come work for us because they realize that we support MVPs and the things that MVPs like to do, like speaking at conferences when there's not endemics going on, they're, you know, doing podcasts and other things like that. You know, I see a lot of leading partners sabotage themselves by having the social media police and everything that people post has to be branded with rah, rah, my company. But what we found is you get a lot more, you get a lot more mileage from just having people who are great people who know what they're talking about. And if you have somebody speaking at Ignite or other things like that, that's a much better, that's a much better advertisement for your company than posting canned things that your marketing department has put out. Well, people see through the, it's about authenticity. And people, you know, recognize it. I mean, I had this, I don't know if you remember the company I worked for a, was based in Seattle, but working for Boston based Acceler. And, and they, they were fantastic and their attitude towards, they said, look, I don't understand a lot of this stuff, but they were, as we started, we're measuring, and I remember having a conversation with their VP of sales about a year after they acquired the little company that I was working for in Seattle. And, and he said, you know, hey, want to apologize. Now, which were like, must have been poison out of his mouth to say that. Now, good friend, but he, he said, you like, we're seeing the data now, like we're seeing now the impact of the, I was the chief evangelist for it, but it was your product marketing and, and he says, we're, we see that your, your hand in almost every single sale that we make. So we were seeing now the impact of those different pieces. You know, attribution is a difficult thing to, to measure, but they, in fact, they, when they hired a new CMO, and the first thing she said was, you know, look, this is, I may not agree with some of the things that you're, you're doing dollars spent, like, but the results are there. We're not going to change anything. In fact, I want you to do more of what you, what you're doing, which was fantastic support. And, and I found most other organizations that I've worked with, that there, that's been more, you know, the other executives have been, you know, been jealous of that because they don't understand how that works. And then, like you said, they want to go and brand everything you must be wearing our logo. We don't want you blogging on your own. It must be through our site. I mean, kind of all those kinds of problems. And they, they kill it. People see right through that. It's not authentic. It doesn't allow for the natural interaction of your people, no matter what their role is, to, to interact with the community. And it kills it. It stops it. Yeah. Well, I think I've, what I've experienced is, is that too. And I've had times where I've had in other companies management that wasn't supportive of that. But I'm, I'm a fan of Jack O'Willink and he talks about leadership leading forward. And as somebody who either is an MVP or wants to, wants to do the community, you put yourself in their shoes. You know, if you had a bunch of people kind of going off and doing their own thing, there's a risk there or a perceived risk there. But, you know, I think if it is possible, and I have seen it happen firsthand for you to train your employer, in other words, show them, hey, here's the value that comes and, you know, and, and do that. But it saddens me sometimes when I see certain partners that used to be really strong, you'd go to the user group summit or you would go to Ignite or back when I had convergence and they had a lot of people that really knew what they were talking about. And now you go and there's all these just marketing people, right? Just, it just is not, I don't see how that that's effective or it's much more effective to use the best asset you have, which is your people. Right. Well, it's, it's funny. So I had, I remember, you know, so I had my MVP for, so this must have been like 2013, 2014 and somebody came up, I was doing like, I think one of the SharePoint Fest events or something. And after I presented on a topic and came up and said, I have no idea what your company does. So you just spoke on this topic, you know, what was it? It was like an administrator. But I said, well, I said, that's the thing. I said, I, there was zero pitch in any of my presentations. I would go and talk about actual problems. Hey, this is what the gaps are in the product. Here's what needs to be there. And, and so even though I was, I was trying to be and this is the guidance for anybody that wants to, you know, like create content and do things that maybe they feel that they're on the path. They want to become an MVP or they just want to give back to the community, but doing it in a way that's not heavy handed towards your product or service. Here's the secret is that everybody knows that you work for a company, whether it's your own or somewhere else. And ultimately you want to sell a product or service. Right. And they also know that everybody thinks they have a unique, unique approach and that everybody thinks they're the best at everything. And right, but you don't need to go and then heavy-handedly, you know, add in like, and here's what we do and here's what we do. And here's what our product did. It's like, no, you can, you can talk about and educate. And what I, my, again, my experience was it led to then those conversations where somebody would say, like, I don't even know what you guys do. What do you do? I said, well, let me tell you, not up on stage. This is in the hallway afterwards. And it led to organic conversation. We build the products that do these things. This is why I'm talking on this, this topic. But, and then let's have a conversation. What are you experiencing here? You resonated with the topic. Here's our solution. Let's have a conversation. I think it's the same, same thing companies and people who've been, I don't want to say influencers, but MVPs and other, other things like that. There's a point where you start believing your own hype, where you're shifting it to MVPs, where the, around year three or four, the imposter syndrome can turn into arrogance, where you get a lot of affirmation, where you go to events and you, people come up and say, I've been, I've been listening to your podcast for years, Christian. It's awesome. I feel like, you know, you're, I'm the only person who does this in my company. And, you know, I'm sure you have conversations like that, or, you know, it's like, you start thinking you're pretty hot stuff. And that's where, that's where you can jump the shark really easily. Yeah. Well, I don't know if you've seen, Joel, like the stickers that I did. Well, that's why I created exactly that line was these, these stickers. You mean these stickers? Oh, that's right. Oh, that's right. I sent you one. Yeah. And that's great. And it's, it's kind of like, that's where, you know, and I don't want to talk poorly, badly about people in the, in the MVP, MVP group. But you think that people feel entitled to have a free license for everything. And, you know, really, when it comes down to it, we're unpaid PR people, you know? And we try and be authentic and try and say what we think. But, you know, we're there at Microsoft's Goodwill. And, you know, within our worlds, we may be, you know, we may be minor celebrities, but outside of that, you know, you're not. So having that perspective, but I think that translates to company as well. And that recognizing, and that's where I think being in a group, like, in a community, like the MVP community, gives you appreciation that those people that we trash and say are, our competitors aren't as good as us. They got some really smart people. And some of those people know certain things I don't. And we have people that know things they don't. And it's a big enough market for everybody to succeed. Yeah. You know, there's, I have to say that the, my interactions with the MVP community, the vast majority of people that we interact with, you know, are fairly humble about, you know, where they are, that they, you know, had this, got this award and they're able to participate in this community and some of the perks of it. Like the in-person MVP summit, it's really going to be tough to do it again, you know, virtual and not be able to have those interactions. But we'll get back there someday. But yeah, there are some great people and whether you're an MVP or not, just to go and reach out to the vast majority are connector personality types. They are, you know, social people who are willing to and are openly like asking like, send me your questions, how can I help you? Did they just that kind of personality? And that's been, that's been great. So you get the occasional jerks within any community. It's going to happen, but yeah. I remember, and I don't know if 2012 this was happening in your part of the MVP program. Were you ever involved when, was that after, was that after Ballmer left or was that before Ballmer left? So that was, I think it was right around that time. I don't remember. First couple of MVP summits, they had an open mic with Steve Ballmer and people could line up and ask whatever question they want. And at that time, they had MVPs for consumer technologies like Microsoft Money had MVPs. And I remember vividly one of the MVPs almost breaking down in tears about Microsoft discontinuing Microsoft Money. And it was, it was sometimes there was, it was like a pitchforks and torches mentality at MVP because people would bring their list of problems or things that irked them and be very, very passionate about it. And that continued for quite a few years. In fact, I tell some newer MVPs that, like here's a great example. After the Yammer acquisition, to talk about Yammer in a room full of SharePoint people was a dangerous proposition at the MVP summit. But for those of us that were kind of sitting about in the back and I'm, look, I've been a Yammer advocate prior to the acquisition and there's been some problems but I'm a fan of the technology. But that was some good entertainment like Jerry Springer type entertainment at the MVP summit. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, but good times, good times. Well, so how else, so what are you out presenting on now? Kind of what are the topics that you're out doing events? I'm imagining you're doing a lot of online events now like all of us. So I haven't, well, I've had user group presentations and other things like that. I was supposed to be at Ignite the Tour in Chicago next week but that's not happening. I was supposed to be in India for Ignite the Tour, so. Really? Well, I was disappointed. I was looking forward to that, getting back there. So that last time I was there was. Yeah, I've been to Chicago before. I've never been to India though. Yeah, yeah, I've been there. But yeah, so other, what I'm doing, last year I had kind of an event heavy, at least for me. I did Ignite, I did user group summit, which is the big business applications. I did several other conferences like that, attended build. So, but beyond that, most of my contributions are through CRM Audio is my podcast network where we almost every week have at least one episode. And then I also, way back in 2013, George Dabinski, one of the Australian MVPs started this, a tip, a daily tip site modeled after that time there was an office kind of tip of the day. We kept that going unbelievably for what, eight years now. It were up to like 1400 tips. And so, those are some of the main things that I do. But as far as other things, I'm taking some of the events that we do around Power Platform and doing a virtual version of them. So there's the app in a day, we've done several of those. There's a bunch of other in a day type hands-on lab events that I find are great. I love those kind of content, those are great, yeah. But there's the Power Virtual Agents is the kind of newest member of the Power Platform family. And so there's a curricular in that. There's Power Automate in a day and customer insights in a day and some of the other ones. That's what I'm trying to get into because I think the app in a day is great, but, and they do update it, I know that people update it and they're regularly updating and bringing new technologies but there's so much more in the Power Platform beyond just Power Apps that giving people the option an easy way to do that. And it was kind of interesting, I was kind of nervous going in doing one of these remotely because they're very interactive. You have people, I'm stuck, how do I do that? Usually people miss a step in the hands-on lab. But what I did is kind of shook up the, what I found is people don't like to be on a Zoom meeting or a Teams meeting for eight hours. I think the virtual MVP somewhat taught us that. I don't know about you, but I was dead after each day. Right, well, because the other side of it too is that usually during the summit, I mean, you're going through, there might be five or six sessions in a day, but you're breaking that up with other conversations and meetings and there's events in the evening and it breaks it up slightly different, but the, or you might skip a content session and just be out in the hall in a deep conversation with fellow MVPs and Microsoft people and here just consuming it, not having some of those other interactions, but because the way that they split it up to serve North America and Amia and then APAC in the evening, I found that I was just doubling up on content, but made for some long days. Me too, and I thought the evening sessions, some of them were better because they had had a rehearsal. Yeah. It was like the first session, something would go wrong and then the second session they had it working. So anyway, next, I guess it's two weeks from now on the 21st, we're doing the virtual app in a day or virtual agents, which is the visual bot framework that works with Flow. So that's something. So that's easy to do. I just try and what I tell people, and I've been able to mentor 13 people to become MVPs now. And what I tell them is just try and do some kind of contribution every week and make it part of your schedule. So that might be writing a blog, that might be a podcast, that might be a YouTube video, you know, a number of different things. There's so many more things. I mean, when I started, it was basically forums and writing blogs. Now there's just so much other stuff to do. But I am seeing the whole COVID-19 thing and everybody worked from home. You know, I'm seeing like, it seems like podcasts and YouTube videos are getting a sizable decrease in some of their audiences because I don't know about you, but I don't, I generally don't listen to podcasts when I'm just working from home all the time. I've actually increased my podcast. Really? I'll sit there and we're working on something and I'll have, you know, on my phone over on the side. And sometimes you go with music going at the same time, but now I've found that it's, you know, and I'm walking a lot further with my dogs. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. I should listen to them while I'm walking my dogs. Yeah, I'm doing that more than anything. So I'm doing five, six miles a day with the dogs and so I'm get through two or three podcasts in that time. So. Well Joel, I really appreciate the time today. People want to find out more about you, get in touch with you. What are the best ways to reach you? I do a lot of LinkedIn. I find that's probably the one I do the most. I'm also on Twitter. Either one of those is fine. Also, CRM.audio is the podcast if you want to subscribe and learn about all things power, platform, and dynamics. Very cool. Well, Joel, we'll really appreciate your time and have a great weekend. Stay safe, stay healthy out there. Yeah, thanks, Christian.