If you'd told me seven years ago that I would become a 5x certified Salesforce professional and would be standing in front of a huge crowd competing for the title of Salesforce Developer World Champion at Destination Success 2017, representing the consulting company I co-founded, I’d have called you crazy. Except that’s exactly what happened this year when I stood on stage wondering, “How did I get here?”

Like many in the Salesforce Ohana, my path to becoming a Salesforce certified professional was anything but traditional. I earned my business degree after a difficult decision to switch from pre-med. Other than a semester of computer science, C++ in high school, and a little SQL in a database design class in college, I'd had little exposure to computer programming. It wasn’t until I started my first job out of college that I realized the true importance of technical and programming skills.

As a project management and operations specialist working for a company where 75% of sales came through the web, I was constantly dependent upon the IT department to help me meet my project goals. But at the same time, I was constantly frustrated with the slow turnaround times of my requests. It wasn’t until I was three or four years into my career that I had the opportunity to take things into my own hands.

It took two people abruptly leaving the company for things to fall into place for me, one of whom was a developer who had originally set us up on Salesforce to manage our course scheduling and logistics. I was now responsible for entering data and creating new records to populate our online course schedule for the website. I had no idea how the guts of the system worked—I only knew how to enter the data and refresh the API calls to get them to populate on our website. After doing some online research and taking some online training courses, it was then that I came to realize the true potential of Salesforce.

A light bulb went off as I discovered that so many of my company’s systems and processes could be migrated from outdated Excel spreadsheets, sent and shared through local file share servers, to Salesforce. I convinced my employer to send me through what is now known as the Administration Essentials for Experienced Admins training. After just one short week, I had gained a ton of new knowledge, tools, and a deeper understanding of how Salesforce could be used, customized, and enhanced. I don't think I would be where I am today if it hadn't been for that instructor-led, in-person training—sometimes you just have to be immersed in a learning environment, and held accountable to focus, in order to make real progress (as you all well know, the office can be quite a distracting place!). 

Immediately after, and fueled by the excitement of my newfound knowledge, I returned and built an entire lead and opportunity tracking application for our sales team that completely replaced all the Excel spreadsheets and manual reporting that our Sales Managers were undertaking at the time. Everyone was ecstatic about the new features, and I continued to help them add new features practically every week.

However, it wasn’t long until the requests reached the limits of what could be done with declarative configuration, and we had to bring in an outside consulting firm to help us build some programmatic functionality and integrations for our Salesforce instance. Maybe it was the fact that they were not an official Salesforce partner, but results were less than satisfactory. The services seemed outrageously expensive to us and the results were always less than stellar, with bugs discovered every other day. It got to the point where I decided that I would simply spend my nights and weekends self-learning all the ins and outs of full-stack web development and APEX/Visualforce, instead of having to wrestle with our external consultant.

On top of that, we were a small company and were down to one web developer and an IT intern at one point. When the web developer abruptly left the company and there was no replacement made for several weeks, the decision was made for me—either learn the skills to keep our systems up and running, or go and find another opportunity. I chose the former, and after a few weeks of long nights pouring through code and Stack Overflow forums, I learned enough to put out the fires that were of highest priority. After a few months, I was building new integrations and functionality between our website and Salesforce using the Web Services API and APEX/Visualforce. And within the year, I became the go-to person for all things Salesforce and IT.

Fast-forward a few years, and I graduated from my part-time MBA studies from UCLA and was looking for a reset and a new direction. After traveling the world and mentally decompressing for 7 months, I came back, ready for my next move. I thought I would join one of the big consulting firms as a perfect fit for my combined technical and business background. But a brief foray into part-time contract work changed my mind. I thought back to those bad experiences with the IT consulting firm and thought, “You know what? I think I can do this better.”

And I did. I co-founded Cloud Mine Consulting with my good friend and partner, Adam Zuckerman. We had a single goal in mind: Create a better Salesforce consulting experience based on bringing together well-rounded individuals with combined technical and business backgrounds—developers with MBAs (just like me!). We wanted our clients to rest assured that we weren’t going to outsource their project halfway around the world and that the person they talked to on the phone and on conference calls knew all the ins and outs of the technical aspects of their project.

It was this single-mindedness that led to our ethos of supporting all of our team members to get Salesforce certified in at least Administrator, Sales, or Service Cloud Consultant and either Platform Developer I or Platform App Builder. We know these certifications carry a great deal of weight with both our clients and the company, so we pay all test fees and also provide bonuses for passing exams—yes, we actually pay our staff to learn!

Trailhead has been an indispensable part of this process as well, and has really accelerated the speed of learning for everyone. In fact, my business partner, Adam, went from zero certifications when we first started to becoming 4x certified in just a few short months! His secret? Starting with Trailhead and then attending (and studying hard at) Destination Success 2017. Don't get me wrong: he's a super smart guy, but I don't think that that level of progress could have been made without this winning learning combination!

So that's how I ended up on the stage competing for the title of Salesforce Developer World Champion at #DST17. After having scored in the top three of all test-takers, I couldn’t help but think how a few fortunate accidents (and a lot of hard work, I may add!) led me to that point, and how the support and resources of the whole Salesforce Ohana helped get me there.

As for next year, I plan on taking the trophy home! Bring on Destination Success 2018 (and those study guides!).

Jason's Certifications
Salesforce Certified Administrator March 1, 2016
Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I March 8, 2016
Salesforce Certified Sales Cloud Consultant April 27, 2016
Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder April 28, 2016
Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultant March 10, 2017

If you’ve been inspired by Jason's story, learn more about how you, too, can become a Salesforce Certified Professional.