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,
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