Francesco Musso's Journey with Power Pages and Freelancing

Today's guest is from Bolton , england in the United Kingdom . He's a solution architect and power platform developer and freelancer specializing in PowerPages has contributed to multiple upgrade projects aimed at tuning functional but click-heavy systems into enjoyable visual dashboards and process-driven user experience . Into enjoyable visual dashboards and process-driven user experience .

He brings creative ideas , energy , enthusiasm , with a commitment to raising standards , improving user experience and driving user adoption . You can find links to his bio and social media in the show notes for this episode . Welcome to the show , Franco .

Just like what , four weeks , is it four weeks since we're in Canada ? About that , yeah , it's zoomed by .

There's usually a whole tribe of us in sicily for the whole school holidays , and yeah so .

But when I'm not with the family , I'm traveling in some sense or another , whether that's with the fam or it's solo for the community gigs , and the goal is one day we'll just have friends on every continent , if not in every country , an open door , whoever we want to party with that month , wherever we want to work , whatever coastline is calling our name , we've

got an open door and we've got some people to party with .

I did the obnoxious thing where I'd send a picture of me working from the hammock on half lubricating on cocktails and stuff , just to make everyone a bit jealous . Jealous to show them they can do it as well perfect , perfect .

So I was kind of the kid that knew how to do , whether it was fixing the printer , making the flyers , building the website , exploring what email means . I'd be doing that stuff unofficially . I'd always end up doing a bit of training as part of that , again unofficially .

So I was barman or in charge of stacking up the fridges or helping the um , the dj , with the pa system or whatever . But yeah , unofficially I'll be saying well , this is how you use excel , this is how you use outlook or your blackberry or whatever outdated tech we used at the time . This is how the millennium bug's going to affect us .

And then I was running an animation studio independently . They did animation and special effects at uni , wow . And yeah , I was just arsing about a little bit , to be honest , taking it too easy . My dad just came in one day , threw the newspaper down . This bit the forceful chap .

They just pick a job out of there , apply for it and don't give me any , yeah and don't give me any back tap . So I was like , okay , picked a job at random . It was IT trainer . So I thought , yeah , I can probably wing it at that .

And yeah , just randomly , one of the packages I was asked to train on was Dynamic CRM and at the time I had no idea that you can customize it , that there was the XRM stuff that had applied to all these other industries , and then further down the line , when portals came along , it's like happy marriage .

So I've done , got my graphics background , done , bits of web stuff before all my customers had hit those bottlenecks with the processes . That , right , yeah , I can only deal with your company nine to five . Then when I do , I ring up and the person that's dealing with my case cases and in , so there's no one to kick that workflow along .

So , yeah , when I heard of dynamic CRM portals , it's just like boom , just made for me , made for my customer processes , because it's all very much a case management background . I was loving it just from day one .

You know , how did you feel about all the portal management being done from a model driven app directly inside the , the , the back , then the crm interface ?

So , yeah , it made a lot of sense to me and it was so easy to go and explore those advanced settings , whereas I think now we've got the shiny new design studio and think people have got less and less reasons to go and have a dig around at the advanced settings .

So you miss a lot of the power that you get out of the box unless you know to look there .

One of my biggest original customers was a temporary recruitment company and they wanted all their onboarding of candidates and customers all to go through a portal . So back then it was the portal's tool . I think that might have even been pre-Microsoft's ownership and it was perfect .

It changed the game of their business and I'm talking about back in pre-2008 , because I know the global financial crisis hit and if he never had that portal in place , his business would have gone under because everything was automated through the portal and one of the things that enabled that organization is that when a candidate had submitted their timesheets via the

portal , it automatically generated an invoice right in dynamics and the customer would get a notification . I'd go into the portal and approve it .

As soon as the portal had , they'd done the approval within 24 hours , it did a direct debit from their bank account and so he had been in a , an industry model of 90 plus days of age debtors and that went to zero overnight , just , and you know , it just transformed . And that's where the power of portals just blew my mind , you know .

At that point I could say , wow , this applies to so many organizations .

Sorry , my first foray into dynamics was it trainer , so I was usually trapped in a training room somewhere completely inconvenient for getting signatures or accessing the fax machine . So I'd have been all over that . I'd have loved it even more from an earlier date yeah , we .

You know , because when I say temporary placement , it's like , let's say , it was a big sports game and they were serving the drinks , and so you'd get 50 people on staff , but they're only on staff for four hours or six hours . You know , around the game , and so you'd use biometrics to make it really just .

They didn't have to work out what was in my login or anything , we just updated that all through to the portal and away . Laugh it . So it was cool .

But usually I'm in a good position that when customers come to me they've already done the business case , calculated the roi and for that reason really it is about a business case . It is about um , cutting hours or weeks or days out of the process .

So I think if the same rigor went , same calculations went into someone to do it , just for , say , brochureware or a marketing site or trying to replace a whole corporate website with PowerPages , it probably would be stopped in its tracks . Yeah , usually for me they've already decided on the stack , They've already worked out that security works and all of that .

And usually the final bit to get them over the line is they want some pre-sales work . They want to see . Do they all have to look as bad as the microsoft examples ? Can we make it look like the corporate site ? Can we show some examples of the art of the possible ? And I absolutely love that kind of work .

Yeah , because everyone's so enthused , aren't they at the start of the project ?

Yeah , so if you can get involved when everyone's buzzing about it and and really they're rooting for the platform , they're not looking to spend that pre-sales money to be proven wrong and saying , oh you know , yeah it's about , come on , show us what it can do , and so often what I'll do in that sometimes it'll be as little as two days , some sometimes it'll be

two weeks , but what I'll do will be a really good glimpse into what the end project will look like .

Nice and it's more just about maybe cutting out a few click-heavy parts or working out well , the volume is in this specific area , so that's where we're going to spend the customizations , yeah , but I've done so many portal projects now that I've got great examples already of if you want to see an MVP portal , I've got plenty of those to show .

If they want to see kind of an intermediate one , an advanced one right up to right , we've got millions to throw at this . What can it look like ? You've got a portfolio . So much easier now .

And I , and I even feel it more so if I look at a portal and I know they're using power pages , I'm like , okay , so there's not enough design work being done , not enough ux , ui , that type of thing being incorporated into what's been done . And you know , I like it when the only way that I get the giveaway is to look at the URL string .

Right , if everything else is so schmick , right , I'm like that's a good design portal .

We'll base it on the list experience , the multi-step form experience , but I'm going to elevate it so much with things like drag and drop controls , like REST API , integrations , output the list as cards , that you're getting all the benefits of the configurable components . But the look and feel and the number of clicks is just next level .

The reason we we were we're going to have a chat on this podcast was around contracting and freelancing , and I have noticed this kind of this movement almost in the community globally , where more and more people that might be working for big traditional companies are starting to have side hustles , they're starting to earn money on the side doing their own thing ,

having their own you know clients , often in totally different geographies , and then ultimately they go . You know what . I could just do this as a freelance , right . I could do this , you know , as an independent consultant . They take on that type of moniker .

What was your journey to going away from traditional partner land or working for a consultancy and and going out on your own ?

So part of it was the shadow of the ir35 changes coming along that we want to be seen , that , for example , we we want to show that it's very much project based , that you've got a spread of different clients , that you can't be seen as a full time employee , that you're not necessarily using their equipment or being on their site .

So that kind of started a number of the decisions going for why move away from contracting ? And I've never had a permanent job within the IT space so that wasn't a decision for me . But I did find with my contracts I was getting more and more specialised .

To keep the job interesting , I think I'm going to reinvent or rewrite my job title each year , or sometimes less than that , every six months . And portals , as I said , really took my interest .

So I went from being a generalist pretty much overnight from one project to next being a generalist dynamics functional consultant and solution architect , over to being purely a portals developer . I've always been busy Everything comes through LinkedIn but ever since I specialized in power pages or portals .

At the time that's when the phone just never stopped ringing and I had much more command over my rate because it was like well , there's 200 of you that have applied for this role , so we're pretty much going to go for lowest of lowest of costs .

Yeah , it's got some experience , whereas now I'm bigger fish in a smaller pond and I'm delivering very specific skills quite often where I'm a one-person team , whereas when I was in the contracting space , the resourcing was so bad because there's one thing against PowerPages is a very small talent pool . So I'd come into the . Promise was right .

It's a giant nationwide project and you're going to have a team of 20 . And then it turns out well , only one of you will have the skills . Yeah , 19 will be testers . Yeah , that have no idea what they're going to test .

We'll have a pm that has no idea what a project plan for portals would look like and maybe a ba that's never worked with portals before . So essentially , I was being paid less than money to be a one-person team on behalf of a Microsoft partner and I thought , well , why not do it for myself ?

And like so many people breaking into freelancing , I think you see as well that where the value is . So , for all the busy work on a project , what is actually moving the needle , what is delivering the value to the customer , what are the pain points , what are going to be the obstacles before the project even starts ?

And I think there's so much value built into that . So I found if I can get on the phone with a client , I would always get the contract , whereas if it was just based on what's on paper , what's a linkedin profile , what's the daily rate maybe not as much , but yeah , I totally agree with what you said so many people wanting to move away from it .

I think there's been sorry away from permanent work or at least have some career insurance . I think that feeling of job security , yet with a permanent role has definitely been shaken up in the last couple of years . The amount of layoffs has been like you say , or even if it's side hustles , everyone feels the cost of living is increase .

It is just it's bonkers when you think , well , I could work an extra 50 days this year , as in my permanent role , and maybe just about break even . Or even when I was contracting , I'd offer to do all the time to pick up the slack and that would be met with them with suspicion . Well , why would you want to do that ? What do you think is going wrong ?

And but I'm I can see the problem in the project . I'm trying to fix it . If you want to hold me back . I don't understand where that's coming from . So , yeah , I think people in permanent jobs would probably get similar reluctance . That's why you've got to start to look outside , and I think the better you are , the better you treat customer .

The nicer taste you leave in the mouth , the easier it is to get that ongoing work . So I'd always get the question in fact during contracts what's the off-ramp sort of thing ? So you deliver this for us , we go live . We've not got an internal team that's skilled up in portals . How do we have that ongoing relationship with you ?

So when I did break into freelancing , I pretty much had a backlog of customers that did always want some ongoing work pretty much had a backlog of customers that did always want , um , some ongoing work .

Do you have a uh , your own site where people can go and see a portfolio of your work or that you can point to if you're on a call with somebody and they're like what would you do here and you've got examples , is that , how is that where you've got set up ?

Or do you go ? Hey , it's , my rate is x per hour and it's going to be . I estimate x number of hours and you know , if it goes over it'll be more . If it's going to be , I estimate X number of hours and if it goes over it'll be more , if it goes less , it will be less .

How do you handle those type of sizing a project from a financial perspective for yourself ?

And again I'll field a lot of inquiries by just I'll put them off with the day rate and that's sounding obnoxious . But plenty of people will say , well , why don't you just do it for half the price and get the extra exposure ?

I've done all that nonsense in contracting , whereas for me , if it I know I'm going to deliver a fantastic uh product , I know that all my clients become repeat customers , yeah , so yeah , I'm happy to be kind of reassuringly expensive yeah , yeah , perfect , perfect .

It sounds like it was beautifully planned . It was totally coincidental , but it was just a really well-oiled machine . But yeah , so my customer base is probably equal parts Norwegian , us and UK . Wow .

Yeah , so plenty of people that have delivered the out of the box precisely as it is in the Microsoft certification or I don't know whether it's a cultural difference or what but people that can build what's specced out in a blueprint or a technical spec .

To then have to train up the offshore resource to say , well , yeah this is how you do that . These are configurable options . These are the course . You haven't done front-end development before , so , yeah , it usually meant me being the one one person team was much more , much better value for the customer .

Yeah , I have got , yeah , some subcontractors in mind that I've leaned on from time to time nice but they , they're all on show , as it happens yeah , yep , makes sense , do you , do you ?

Are you getting a lot of work directly from , let's say , a Microsoft FTE that knows your skills and know that , hey , we need somebody that knows their stuff and therefore you get introduced ? Is it partners introducing you ? Is it customers introducing other customers ?

How are you , you know where's the lion's share of your business coming from on a day-to-day basis ?

Okay , I have in recent times so I'm only talking since 2022 , had that good relationship with Microsoft FTEs that do send me work , and that really is for lack of many Microsoft partners that have got that custom experience or have got the visual design chops as well as the backend stuff .

I'm getting a lot out of the community as well , so happy to give'm getting a lot out of the community as well , so happy to give , happy to help and mentor and train people up and do the conference talks . But it does all come back indirectly , um , with work , so all good .

So , for example , randomly enough , all the norwegian work that I get in results from going to scottish summit in 2021 , I think it was Wow . Just randomly bumped into my good friend Ricky Ekerbeck and the awesome table full of Norwegians , just instantly like , oh , franco's , here , he speaks English .

We just instantly switched Wow , carried on their technical , in-depth conversation . Yeah , I apologize that their English was only 99.999999 yeah , yeah , I was just in awe of them , yeah and just such cool people really nice to do business with , totally laid back yeah , absolutely my , my kind of people so that's an interesting thing .

Like , wow , right , no , you just showed , without being cocky about it , you are leagues ahead of me . Or Business Central recently done some work with Mary and Myers , just immediately thought , well , community content , business Central , it's got to be Mary and Myers .

So , yeah , it definitely helps , but I think more so if you've got that specialism that springs to mind , so like , for example , the Power Automate , the VC . It was much harder , for example , to recommend me when I was a dynamics functional consultant , because it's an incredible skill set and a really exciting role .

But when you think there's so many hundreds of people it , it doesn't usually come across that , because I connect a lot of people with work yeah it never tends to be like frank or do you know a really good all-rounder ? It ?

It is someone that is all about the finance or all about the insurance industry , or is it all about a particular power platform tool , maybe a power bi person and not just a generalist ?

So loads of people that do reach out for mentorship with how to find work through LinkedIn . First thing they go and check out the profile . They haven't got any specialism mentioned . They've maybe got just a one-liner worked here between these days , worked here between these days . Nothing about here's what I contributed . Here are the challenges . Here was the ROI .

So yeah , I'd say that would be the next step . And then I would say learn to extract all the learning from your projects . So there's two outputs for every project I do . It's what I build and deliver and what I learn .

So that might be at the end of the project building time to do a case study , refine my code snippets , work back through the documents I've been asked for that are going to be repeated on each project . Maybe that's even just extracting a project plan that I think went well , that we can say well , here's everything from .

We've got authentication planned at the right time , we've got decisions made at the right time . We approach the portal in the right way . We've got this set of resources and JDs . The more that you can bank on that next time and build from a foundation rather than just , well , let's go to every project and build from scratch .

The more profitable it is , the better it is for the customer , the more you're going to get referrals and the repeat customers . They're gold , not just because you're getting extra cash from them , but you're not having to convince them from scratch . You're already front of mind .

You're benefiting from having already been through the induction with the business inside and out and it's just about yeah , you're going into a friendly place . I've got customers that I've had I think my longest serving one now is 14 years .

I've still got a cracking relationship with them and I'm sure well I know I'm still the first person that comes to mind for any Dynamics work . So if you can have it that way , then you just you don't need to advertise . I never spend the money advertising .