Episode 42: Freelance as a Salesforce Professional with Bradley Rice
INTRO:
Today, we get to learn about a very specific type of freelance career that can be very lucrative and recession resistant. This is a freelance business where you're helping companies with their Salesforce software.
Salesforce is a very popular business management software that helps with everything from company operations, to the sales pipeline.
And my guest today, joining us to talk about this is Bradley Rice.
Bradley has worked in the Salesforce ecosystem for 10 years. He's become one of the highest paid Salesforce professionals in the world. And most importantly, Bradley's a dad who figured out how to earn enough money to support his family while only working 20-25 hours a week, like I did.
When you’re working in your freelance business like this, you basically have a part-time job, but get more than a full-time income. And that is our whole goal here, so that you can spend more time with your family.
Bradley wanted to spend more time with his family, and he realized that by having a standard job, there was very little time in the evening that he even got to have with his wife and kids. But, he was able to find a freelance career that really made that possible for him. And you're going to learn about that today and how you can get going in this type of freelance career.
Chad:
Welcome Bradley!
Bradley:
Hey, thank you so much for having me. I am excited to talk to the audience and hopefully drop some knowledge that they haven't heard before. So yeah, thanks for having me.
Chad:
Yeah. I'm glad we connected. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about your career and how freelancing has played a part in it. What do you do now? Give us a little bit of a rundown on that.
Bradley:
Yeah, I'll give you the quick rundown and then we can dive in.
When I came out of college, I wasn't a hundred percent sure what I wanted to do. And I also wasn't a hundred percent sure how to even get a job or make money. I had an idea of what it looked like. I'd seen adults around me doing “adult things”. I'd seen people land jobs. I kind of knew what it looked like but didn't know too much about it.
But, I managed to trip and fall into a junior Salesforce administrator role.
That was the name of the role. I was just applying for anything and everything, and somehow got this job. But it turned out to be a really excellent career path. Like not just a job or something I could do for a year, but something I could do as a career. So I moved through that and my entry level income there was about $30,000.
And then, after doing this for about five years, I was making about $120,000 plus bonuses.
I was thrilled with that as somebody that was 26, 27 years old at the time. I never dreamed I'd make that much money by the time I retired, much less by the time I hit 27.
About that time is when my wife and I found out that we were pregnant. We had been trying at that for a little over a year, so it was a surprise that it finally worked out. I know that it’s different for everyone listening, and your expectations of the timeframe of that might be different than ours, but for us it was a long time.
And then finally it happens, 18 months later. We were really excited, but at the same time I was feeling apprehensive. And the reason for that is that I was starting to realize that, wow, this is really happening, as my wife entered her third trimester.
During that time, I worked from home, I got off work at five-thirty and I would sort of be decompressed from work by six o'clock. But I was reading these books about how kids go to sleep at like seven o'clock or maybe eight o'clock or something like that.
And I thought, if I'm getting off work at six and my daughter is going to bed at seven, that's not what I want parenting to feel like for me.
I know different people have different situations they're comfortable with, but for me, an hour with my child after I got off work, before she goes to bed, did not feel natural. I just thought, you know what? I never thought I would make this much money in a full-time job. I'm fortunate to be here. So why don't I go look for a part-time job and see if I can work less hours and make less money and that'll be totally fine.
I know I'll never regret that decision and if it works out awesome. And if it doesn't work out, then I'll just go back to having a full-time job. At least I tried to do something.
So I went out and I got that part-time job. And I did make half my previous salary. I made $60,000 while working 20 hours a week. Less than 12 months later, I was making just over $200,000 still working 20 hours a week.
And to your point and the point of a lot of what people are listening to this show for, was that I developed that part-time job into what was effectively a freelance gig.
Then I started layering clients on the side on top of that part time job, and I got more and more comfortable with my business and flow. I increased my rates and I got more comfortable getting more work done in a shorter amount of time and slowly, (I mean, rapidly when you step back and you go, wow, one year!) but slowly month after month after month, it developed.
And I was able to get to that $200K mark still working part-time.
So yeah, we can, we can dive in on any aspect of that, but that's pretty much my story from college to starting a freelance career.
Chad:
That's great. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, our whole goal here is to be able to earn a full-time income working part-time and that’s because as a parent, I am right with you on being able to spend more time with your kids and family.
Soon after college, I realized that the traditional employment route was not for me when my wife got pregnant and now we have three. And having that time with them, they grow up so quickly that I'm so grateful that I've been able to land upon a career like you have, that allows us to have that time. It’s so short lived.
I'd love for you to share a little bit more about Salesforce specifically. First of all, what is it for those that don't know what it is, and secondly, who can freelance as a Salesforce professional?
Bradley:
Yeah, it's a great question. And it's a tough question to answer in a synopsis, but I'm going to do my best. Salesforce is an entire career. And when you're trying to describe an entire job or career or field, that can be difficult.
Salesforce is a tool that hundreds of thousands of companies use to basically run the back end of their companies.
And if you don't know what that means, it's basically everything that makes marketing work.
It’s having the ability to go get a new lead and to decide if that lead is worth emailing, or calling, or mailing something to? And it’s also helping to determine where you found this lead, and what makes them a good prospect for the product that we’re selling.
Those are all backend processes.
Once you figure out that lead is qualified to call, awesome. Let's label them as qualified and transition them over to our sales team. And now our sales team has a list of prospects or leads that they need to call, and they're gonna call them, and when they do, they have some information about them right here on their screen.
They're looking at a Salesforce screen and they're seeing that we got this lead from that marketing event that we did in Las Vegas. And they were interested in this particular product. And now the sales team is going to call them and talk to them about that. And they can joke about, “Oh, did you make a lot of money gambling?” or whatever, and be able to relate because they have that information in front of them.
That's kind of what Salesforce does. Those are all little backend processes and Salesforce takes all of those and it streamlines them.
It makes it easier for the marketing team to generate new leads.
It makes it easier for them to score those leads and decide if they're worthwhile. It allows the sales team to create these really custom reports and dashboards and look at all of these leads and know exactly which ones to call based on certain factors. You can call it AI.
I think AI is used a little generically, but what’s really happening is that you’re just looking at a pattern of the types of leads that typically buy the product. And the artificial intelligence will tell you which ones you should probably call first. It does things like that, but it also does way more than that.
But really, it handles all of the backend processes of a business and automates them.
Whether you're talking about processes for technical support or human resources or recruiting or anything in between. At the end of the day, Salesforce makes it easier for employees to do their work and makes it easier for businesses to rapidly scale up.
Because if a business can automate things, they don't have to constantly hire employees just because they're getting more leads or adding more customers. So that's what Salesforce does.
As a Salesforce professional, you're sort of that magician behind the scenes.
Everybody thinks you're like a master programmer, but it turns out you don't have to code at all, if you don't want to. You can choose to be a developer, but most people are not.
You're that magician who people look to and they go, “Wow, you were able to get us a report that showed us that? That's incredible. How'd you do that?” Or, “Man, you just made an automation that basically made our jobs a thousand times easier. That's crazy. How did you make that happen?”
And to them, you are just incredible. And to you, this is a skill that you can learn in less than six months with completely free online training. And you're really not a magician. You just took some time to learn about something that you didn't know before.
Chad:
That’s great. Thanks for explaining that.
With this type of career, whether it's a freelance business or full-time, would you explain a little bit about how having this as a specialty can make you recession proof?
A lot is going on in the economy right now, and many people are expecting a possible recession. And I know that freelancing is one way that you can navigate that, but there are certain careers in certain industries that are less impacted by a recession. Could you share if this is one of those and why?
Bradley:
Yeah, it's a good question. And you mentioned the difference between being a full-time employee and maybe being a freelancer and how you could be impacted differently during a recession. That’s the really neat thing about Salesforce.
If what I just described about Salesforce made any sense to you at all about what it is and how it works, you can imagine this tool is not specific to just manufacturing or healthcare or pharmaceuticals or whatever else.
Salesforce is embedded in many, if not all, of these massive trillion dollar industries.
You have companies that manufacture air filters that use Salesforce. You have companies that create software to try to predict future stock prices using Salesforce. And what that means is, in a recession, if you look at recessions historically, (and I would bet going into the future), they tend to impact two or three industries more dramatically than they impact others.
A recession is not across the board. The stock price and the revenue and the profits of every single industry in the market are not all impacted heavily. It's usually two or three.
And the great thing about Salesforce careers is that, let's say you're working for a company that's maybe closely tied to the mortgage industry. And all of a sudden we see something like what happened in 2008, like a housing collapse, and mortgage industries are obviously impacted massively.
Well, for someone who is specifically set up with skills that are specific to the mortgage industry, they may have to start their career over. They may have to find an entirely different job until the market recovers, and that can put them in a really bad position, but for you, yes, you work for an employer in the mortgage industry, but your skills are not specific to that industry.
You have Salesforce skills that you can go and apply in an industry that is thriving during the recession, or at least hanging in there.
And a lot of times you'll find companies that are hiring during recessions, but typically you're not going to see that in mass media because the media tends to not want to latch onto the positive aspects of things they want to latch onto the more dramatic aspects of things.
So yeah, we found throughout recessions that, yeah, you might need to quit your job and go get another job at a company that's in a more successful industry at the time.
But are you at least gonna be able to keep your six figure work from home job during times when there's a lot of turmoil? Yeah, absolutely.
Is any job recession proof? I don't know, we can't predict the future, but I would say Salesforce careers get pretty darn close to being recession proof.
Chad:
That's really cool. And it's good to know kind of how much flexibility there is there with this type of career. Explain a little bit about how you can have multiple clients with this because it sounds like that there are companies that are hiring outside people to come in and be their Salesforce person. Explain a little bit about that. Do they come in as a consultant or are they actually operating the software for them? Does getting brought on as a consultant happen more often than a company just hiring a full-time employee as their Salesforce person?
Bradley:
Yeah, that's a great question. And that's pretty much been my life, working to understand those dynamics. I shouldn't say my life. My career in Salesforce has been understanding those dynamics because when my daughter was about to be born, that's when I was pivoting from full-time employment into this freelance employment. And I was having to figure out, is this possible? Is this scalable? Is this long term?
No one was really doing it at the time. I mean, people were doing it. They just weren't documenting it and sharing exactly how they did it. So when you come into this, to sort of set the ground game for Salesforce careers, let's say you're gonna go the standard path and you just wanna get a full-time job. Well, entry level jobs start out, on average, what we've seen in the last year, at about $72,000.
By the time you finish year one, you have about a year of experience. You can expect to make an average of about $85,000 to $90,000.
By the end of year two, you're probably getting pretty darn close to tagging a $100,000, or you're sitting in the nineties. And then year 3-5, you're probably looking at around $125,000. And once you get to year 5-7, you're probably going to be specialized.
I don't know if we'll have time to talk about that today, but there's all these different Salesforce specialties like CPQ and field service lightning and all these different things. That means nothing to 99% of people listening, but just know, there are specialties. And when you get into those and you're skilled and you have those niche skills, you're probably looking at capping out at a plateau around maybe $150,000 to $200,000, just working a normal full-time job.
If you get into management or directing a team or something like that, obviously you can go much higher.
But for your typical 9-5 working the job, when you've got five years experience, you're gonna cap out around $150,000 to $200,000.
And the really cool thing about this that I think allowed me to transition into freelancing, but still feel comfortable full time was that I was fully remote and I had a lot of autonomy over my schedule. And these jobs are in extremely high demand. So your employer doesn't have the same power as in other jobs. A lot of people work a job, and they're fearful that their employer might get rid of them.
Well in the Salesforce world, if you've got even six months to a year of experience, you really are in the strength position at that point.
Like if your work, you know slacks a little bit, or you go on a vacation and you take an extra day and you say, “Hey, I'm not gonna be there on Monday. I thought I was, but I won't be.” Many people would be scared of doing that in most jobs because they’d fear they would lose their jobs. With Salesforce, your employer is the one who's fearful that you might take off because there's such a massive shortage of people to get this work done.
And so I say all of that to set the ground game for the expectations you typically would have if you're going to be in a full-time job. And so now think about that from the employer perspective. They're trying to hire some college kid with no experience, maybe a Salesforce certification and trying to employ them.
A lot of employers for college kids, they're thinking, all right, I'm gonna pay this kid $40,000-$50,000 and give them their first shot. What a great thing I'm doing. Well, it's not a reality in the Salesforce ecosystem.
That college kid is gonna make $70,000. And a lot of times that's sticker shock to the employers and they're like $70,000 for somebody I have to train? They don't know what they're doing!
A lot of times we'll see job descriptions where they're asking for people with two to three years experience. And then they interview a couple people and ask them how much they want to make.
And the candidates say, “Oh, well I have three years experience. So I was thinking $120,000”. And the employers are floored. They're like, “What? I am gonna be your manager. I don't make $120,000. That makes no sense.” And then they have to adapt.
So a lot of times they're going through that. They don't know where to go find freelancers because there's not a standard marketplace for them. I mean, there’s the typical Upwork and Fiverr and stuff like that. But we're talking about highly skilled professional jobs where somebody is operating the back end of your system which is vital to the health of your entire business.
You need somebody you can count on for that job. You don't want somebody off Fiverr who might flake on you at the end of the week. You need somebody legitimate and qualified. So a lot of times they're going, wow, I need someone experienced, somebody with maybe a couple years experience, but I don't have $10,000 a month to shell out for this role. Plus typically we estimate 20 to 30% on top of that for all of the fringe benefits like health care and retirement plans and everything that goes into having an employee.
So you could be looking at somebody making $120,000 and in reality, that's going to cost the business $150,000.
When they’re looking at freelancers and they find those individuals or you get in front of them and you make your pitch, it often works out, and they want to take you on as a freelancer. You’re saying to them, “Hey, I see you're hiring for a full-time role. I'm actually really skilled at this. I've got two years experience specific in the industry that you work in. I would love to come help your team out and talk to you about what I can do in 10 hours a week.” And then you sell them on the benefits of working with you.
That's what I did. And that's what I've coached. A lot of people do what we call managed services agreements. That might be 10 hours a week. Some people just call it a support contract or whatever else, but it’s for 10 hours a week, 40 hours a month, and you're charging them like $150 an hour.
So when you look at those numbers, you can make $6,000 for a 40 hour month, working 10 hours a week, which equals $72,000 a year.
So with this company, what you can do is cut that back and be generous, and do it for a hundred dollars an hour and make $4,000 a month which is almost $50,000 a year.
But then they see they can get a skilled professional for $50,000/yr on a one year contract, even if it’s only for 10 hours a week. They realize that they’re getting a high quality professional 10 hours a week versus someone straight out of college that they have to train and upskill that they simply do not have time for.
Plus, that college kid is sitting in a chair 40 hours a week taking up office space and costing money because of benefits, there’s a good chance they would rather take the person for $20,000 less plus no benefit. So really probably like $40,000 less in the grand scheme of things. So almost half price.
And even though they only get them for 10 hours a week, if somebody is really skilled they'll take that offer a lot of the time.
Because truth be told somebody with two years experience 10 hours a week can probably do just as much as someone with no experience 40 hours a week.
So that's the landscape of the Salesforce market and where freelancing fits into this. Is it still a sell to get a new client? Absolutely. But is there a massive reason why they should be interested and why it’s so compelling to them? Yeah, 100%.
Chad:
Yeah. That's a total win-win and that's what I love about freelancing in general, that the business is able to save money yet you're able to make more money. There's plenty of parents that would love to earn more than $6,000 a month and are willing to work more than 10 hours, but maybe they want to work 20, 25 hours and that's a good balance for them. How do they find clients with something like this and start stacking them? Because obviously you mentioned things like Upwork and Fiverr, which are the typical freelancer platforms. How do you find clients as a Salesforce professional?
Bradley:
Yeah. So there are a few different strategies. Like there are with anything, right? I can throw a few out here, and I think people would probably find that it's similar to finding clients in pretty much any industry.
Obviously, Salesforce is cloud based. It's a cloudware. You can call it a software, even though technically it's not because it's not installed on the machine, but what you're doing is you're working virtually and you can access it virtually.
I mean, you could go to your public library and log on to your client’s Salesforce organization. Obviously you may not want to do that for security reasons, but you could, and you could do your work from a public library. And when you're looking for clients, you have to think of it in this very virtual way.
So if an employer is looking for a Salesforce professional to come help them, how are you going to know that? Well, the number one way is through job postings.
And the key here is to simply ignore the fact that they're hiring for a full-time position because you know, based on what I just told you, they're about to get sticker shock anyway.
In this process you know, at least 50% of the time they're gonna get halfway through the hiring process and realize, oh my gosh, we are not prepared to shell out this kind of money. We do not have that budgeted. So a great way to set up your leads is just go to LinkedIn jobs, go to Indeed jobs, go to ZipRecruiter, go to whatever else and just look at the full time positions that are available. And I would say that that's number one, generic job searching.
The number two way to sort of dial it in a little bit better is look for companies that maybe have really basic requirements for what they're asking for in the job description.
But then they're asking for somebody with like five years experience because that's an indicator that they truly have no idea what's going on and they think they know what they need, but their expectations for what they might be able to get are extremely unrealistic.
So like when they want that five year experience person that's when they're going to be getting the sticker shock $150,000 levels. The people that are really qualified for that job that probably have a year of experience or less and could come in at $80,000 or less are likely not gonna be applying for the job because they got scared away from that five years experience requirement on the job description.
And at that point that's really where I would say, okay, we have a really qualified lead. We've got somebody who has basic requirements on the job description, looking for somebody with way too much experience, they're gonna get sticker shock and I'm gonna be there having the conversation saying “Hey, you’re probably talking to some people, probably getting some six figure salary negotiations going on there. And if, if you're comfortable with that and that's what you have budgeted, that's awesome. However, here's some services that I can offer for less than 40 hours a week, but for far less than, you know, $150,000. And so let's talk about what I might be able to offer.”
And then how, how do you stack that? Well in the Salesforce consulting world, it is very normal for a consultant to work on multiple projects.
So it's not uncommon for an employer to expect that if you're working for them, say 10 hours a week, that it's very likely, they're gonna assume you work a 40 hour a week job. So it's within their realm of expectation that if you work for them 10 hours a week, chances are you have three other clients that you're also working for 10 hours a week.
And that's how we find that balance where an employer might say, “Oh, you don't have time to meet at 8:00 AM on Monday morning? Well, yeah, probably not because you have other clients that you're working with at eight o'clock on Monday morning.”
So that's really the natural way that consulting works and specifically how freelance consulting works.
And I think that's what introduces a lot of these freedoms, like when you don't really want to work afternoons, which is me. I never wanted to work afternoons. So I would just create this perception that I had other clients that I worked with in the afternoons, so we had to get everything done in the mornings, and that was just the way that I needed to balance my schedule. I hope that makes some sense.
So that's one strategy, but there's so many others like for beginner freelancers in the Salesforce space that don't have experience.
I typically recommend volunteering for a company and you can find these on different volunteer sites, like volunteer match or tap route or whatever else.
I know, you’re like wait, no, Brad. I said, I needed to make money, not volunteer for a company. I get it.
So what you do is you volunteer for a company, you do incredible work for say 10 to 20 hours, and then you convert them into a paying client.
Worst case scenario, you get experience on your resume, and once you get that experience, it's going to be easier for you to get out there and find your first paid client.
And in the best case scenario, you convert that volunteer client into one of these, 5 or 10 hour a week clients and they become your first clients.
And the last thing I'll say on this is that a lot of times we see people first getting the full-time Salesforce job before they start to freelance.
What that allows them to do is polish their skills and get confident. Yeah, they have to work that 40 hour a week job from home with a flexible schedule at first, but eventually it pays off and it’s not too bad in the meantime.
So that can be a really nice transition in, and then their first client often becomes that employer that they're leaving and they say, Hey, I'm leaving, but I'm actually starting my own freelancing. And I think I could support you guys with X number of hours a week and still get all the work I was doing before done and help you train up the next employee. How would you like that? And a lot of times, if you keep a strong relationship, your full-time employer can easily be your first client.
Chad:
Hmm. That's great. And that's how it was for me. My first client was my full-time employer that I was doing video production for, and I agree that it’s a great way in.
So as we wrap this up, when there's a difference between freelancing with this and doing it full time, by “full-time” do you mean that you're working for Salesforce or does it mean that you're working full-time for a company that needs a Salesforce professional?
Bradley:
Yeah, it's the latter. You're typically not working for Salesforce and it's not because they don't hire Salesforce professionals, but it's because they're only one company.
So the likelihood is you're gonna work for a company that uses Salesforce and needs a Salesforce professional because there's one company called Salesforce, but there are 200,000 plus companies globally that use Salesforce as a tool. That's typically who you're gonna be working for when you're working those full time, 40 hour a week (if you're in the U.S., W-2) jobs with full benefits and all that fun stuff.
Chad:
Gotcha. Well, thanks for explaining that, you shared a lot of value with us today. Is there anything else that you felt like you wanted to share with our audience before we finish up?
Bradley:
I think that sums it up.
If I could say one thing, it would be why not take a look at it?
If something we said today sounded interesting, if it sounded somewhat compelling and you're wondering like, well, okay, can I really do this? Is this really for me?
Maybe you don't have a college degree or you don't have a tech background and you think like, oh, I'm probably not allowed to do this stuff.
As I like to say a lot, like there are no rules, the gatekeepers are gone.
All the rules were perception in the first place anyway. So you don't need a college degree. You don't need a tech background. You can absolutely do this.
And I would challenge you to just give it a chance.
I don't think I mentioned it, but when I was 31, I was in a position to retire because of this career, and because I grew up in a very frugal family, by the age of 31 I no longer technically needed an income.
So we started this little company called Talent Stacker, helping people break into Salesforce jobs. And because we didn't need revenue, we focused a ton of our energy on free resources for the community.
We spend a lot of time just talking to people on YouTube, on TikTok, on LinkedIn, on Facebook. And just trying to, for lack of a better word, “evangelize” the opportunities that Salesforce careers offer over the next four years. They're forecasting 9 million new jobs in the Salesforce space and we have very few people to do those jobs.
So the door is wide open. I would bet that the salaries I discussed are out the window by the end of the year, because they're just gonna keep going up and up and up.
And yeah, if you wanna check out the free stuff which there's a ton of, you can totally get into this and at least test the waters on your own risk free.
You can just go to www.TalentStacker.com/free and check that stuff out. And if you want to find me, the best place to find me personally is on LinkedIn. You can just search Bradley Rice and I'll be there. It's like this bright orange background in my picture, so I'm hard to miss. If you come message me, I literally do respond to every single message that I get. It may not be today. It may not be tomorrow, but I do make it a personal sort of “responsibility” to make sure that even though we're in a virtual world, I'm going to respond to you because you're still a real person.
I sort of value that very human connection, even if we never meet face to face. So yeah. Message me on LinkedIn. I promise I'll get back to you.
Chad:
Great, thanks for that. And I definitely encourage you all to connect with Bradley, to check out TalentStacker.com and to look at his free resources, go to YouTube and watch his videos, check out the podcast and you'll be able to learn a lot more.
I think what he shared with us today is a very viable career path for freelancers to have a secure income and predictability in being able to support a family, which is super, super important. So Bradley, thanks for joining us today, hope to see you again!
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