Delving into ERP Development: Steve Endow's Decade-Long MVP Experience and the Emerging Role of Business Central

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP Show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from the US. He's a senior ERP developer at Blue Dragonfly. His first award was MVP in 2014, so therefore he is about to get a blue disc for his trophy cabinet For the 10-year marker. He has over 20 years experience analyzing business processes and implementing transformation systems in diverse industries. You can find links to his bio and social media in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve Endow: 1:35
Thank you very much. Great to be here.

Mark Smith: 1:37
So 10 years as an MVP, that's a bit of a milestone.

Steve Endow: 1:40
Yeah, the years do pass quickly, as you know, and watching the kids grow it's like where does the time go? Yep, it's been a fun journey. It's been fantastic. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Mark Smith: 1:55
Tell me your story that doesn't involve tech. Tell me about food, family and fun. What does that mean in your day-to-day?

Steve Endow: 2:05
Oh my gosh, that's a surprisingly difficult question. Food, family and fun. Well, it starts early morning, 6.30 in the morning, I get up. I drag myself out of bed. It's tough getting old, but I force myself to walk. Every morning I head out to the park down the street, walk a mile, get ready, take the kids to school, drop them off, head right back, start off with conference calls and the typical day, then go grocery shopping, cook dinner, pick up the kids from school. So typical busy day and the time just flies. I don't know that I have anything terribly notable. We just went to Hobbies, pardon.

Mark Smith: 2:56
Do you have any hobbies?

Steve Endow: 2:59
My hobbies are all tech, which is what makes my work so enjoyable. I get that people want to walk away from their computer and get away from their desk and get away from work, but I don't mind it. I enjoy every minute of it. When I'm not doing work for customers, I'm learning some new tool or technology or getting some different certification outside of what I normally do on a daily basis. I'm just kind of a super geek, an apologetic super geek. How's that?

Mark Smith: 3:38
Nice. You've seen some changes in your time. My understanding you focus on Dynamics 365 Business Central and therefore you've gone through the transition from Navijan NAV and into Business Central Land and you've probably also seen that for some time the categorization of business central against Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Finance has had an interesting position in market. In fact, I saw somebody come out with a flow diagram of all the different tech for Microsoft and they're like Dynamics 365 Finance is for enterprise and mid-market is business central, which I find very interesting because the company I work in we have a global deployment of BC for a customer which is in the top 100 companies in the world and it is very much enterprise-applied and there's been this weird thing and I think it's whether it's come from marketing or what that business central is not enterprise and when I see a global top 100 company I'm going it seems pretty enterprise to me if it can handle that scenario and I think it's been a weird classification over its history. What are your thoughts on that?

Steve Endow: 4:59
Well, I started with a Microsoft Dynamics GP just before it was acquired by Microsoft back in 2004. So my niche Fargo special yeah, my niche is mid-market. That's what I did right out of college. I was implementing Solomon 4 for Windows. I've done PeopleSoft and then went on to work with GP. So, as I'm currently still supporting over 350, 400 Dynamics GP customers through the software I sell and the software I sell is targeting the largest, highest volume Dynamics GP customers in the United States and even in South America and overseas, so I support $3 billion public companies that use Dynamics GP. Some of those companies process 20,000 transactions a day. We have one customer that processes hundreds of thousands of transactions a day, 24 hours a day, just nonstop. And I think the differentiator for those large, super large enterprise customers that use GP or Business Central or any other ERP system, they're only using it for, say, financials. They are not using it for operations, they're not using it for treasury management, they're not using it for global distribution. They have 17 different systems in their environment that handle all of those quote enterprise needs. They're special purpose, you know best of breed systems, but they just all feed the financial transactions in the ERP system and at that point. It doesn't matter whether you're using GP or BC, or I mean we've had $100 million customers using QuickBooks and migrating to a Microsoft solution. So that, I think, is what I've seen. That explains how a multi-billion dollar company can use these ERP packages that are normally classified as mid-market. Now could they benefit from a quote integrated ERP solution at the enterprise level, like financing operations? Maybe do they want to spend $3 plus million in implementing those solutions? Probably not so.

Mark Smith: 7:21
Interesting. Do you classify yourself now as more focused on BC as opposed to GP or?

Steve Endow: 7:30
Yes, so I do still support hundreds of customers on GP, but I call that my day job. But all of my focus going forward is on business central. So I have a business partner that together we started Blue Dragonfly and that's focused on business central application development, isv solutions and custom solutions for customers so customizations that they may need and she handles implementation, training, configuration and support. So we're working together, we have a growing team and we're 100% focused on business central.

Mark Smith: 8:11
Has there been any temptation to embrace other parts of the Dynamics 365? Stack over your career.

Steve Endow: 8:21
Only, as I would say, only as a supplemental tool internally or to help a customer. So internally we do have I don't even know what they call it these days 365 sales. I call it CRM, and so we do have CRM internally. We do have that integrated with business central. When a customer downloads and installs our application from Microsoft app source for business central, we automatically capture their registration. It feeds through Azure functions, our registration system, and then that flows right into the Microsoft CRM API. So we have a lead. We have automatic emails going out. So we use it internally. We don't actively sell it, just because it requires a different skill set, a different focus. But we're well aware of it and I think it has a place. We are aware of Power Platform. We don't really focus on it. It has some use cases that we might consider. We're big users of Azure internally Our developer, who is in India. He and I have worked together for years. He and I both have extensive NET and Azure experience. So we have geographically distributed Azure functions, azure SQL databases and that's our backend systems. So I think there are a lot of pieces, as you've mentioned in our initial discussion, the list of products in the dynamics ecosystem, or whatever it's called these days. It's an endless list. I don't have time to figure out what the current name is or what the product offering is, but I think there are opportunities for some of those products. But, with that said, business Central on its own is moving so fast that I, as an MVP that is just laser focused on that product, can barely keep up with the pace that Microsoft has with that one product. They do a major release every six months. They do a minor, what they call a minor release every month. Every single month, there's a release that can have new functionality and or breaking changes, and it's as significant as you need to be aware of this because you need to change your code to deal with potentially deprecated features. So it is a full-time job and I don't even try to keep up with the other products. I think that what did they rename Azure Active Directory to Enter? Now I just can't keep up and I accept that and I do not try to be a specialist of everything. Side story I once met a woman in Fargo, north Dakota, at a Dynamics GP conference. She worked for a partner or CSP or whatever they were, who claim to support Dynamics GP, business Central, fno and CRM and whatever else. They claim to support everything. She claimed to be an expert in GP, navision, business Central and FNO. I can't doubt her, but I'm just highly skeptical that anyone can truly be an expert across all three of those vast product offerings she claimed she did support calls 15 years ago maybe. Yeah, hats off to her if she can figure out those three products. I can barely wrap my head. I just had a call about how we're going to configure sales tax for a customer in Business Central In a one-hour call. We're still strategizing on how we're going to deal with this. It's fairly complex.

Mark Smith: 12:19
Exactly. The ecosystem has grown so large the size of the Microsoft engineering pool across these products are eye-watering large now and what they've grown to in the last five to 10 years. I encourage people to develop. It used to be a T a T what we'd call a T consultant. You're brought across everything, but you had a real good depth of knowledge. I've switched to a W or an M, which is you've really got to know three things really, really well, but also be broad. Nowadays, I'd say one of those legs of your W or your M, whichever you want it needs to be AI. No matter what, everybody needs to be developing their AI muscle, just with the speed that things are changing. The customers that you work with do you find they're traditional or because ERPs are traditional? I'm more like you don't see ERP folks going, hey, we want to be on the bleeding edge or even the cutting edge. They want stability. They want stability, consistency. It's dealing with money after a war. What's your mix of customers by industry mix, that type of thing that you would classify them in?

Steve Endow: 13:46
Years ago, Microsoft had a push within the ERP market, telling partners that they really needed to specialize and have an industry focus and specialization, because that was the future, that's where the money's at and that's how they differentiate themselves. We would have 100 customers and we would not have more than three in any given industry. It was an impossible task and the partners that attempted to do that okay, maybe they got three, four or five customers, but are they going to turn down the law firm and the marketing firm and the professional services firm and the elevator repair firm? In the mid-market there are so many industries. This isn't the Fortune 500, this isn't the Silicon Valley tech-focused market. This is the mid-market, in my case, of the United States, and there are millions of businesses To say that we're only going to focus on roof repair, commercial contractors, like it's just not going to happen in my world. Now there are specialists. I've heard of them. I can't imagine them. So I met someone who deals in the wine and liquor and spirits distribution industry and that's all they do, and she is an expert in that industry. When I said, hey, you're really smart, would you want to come work for us? She said no, I only deal with wine and liquor and spirits distribution. I'm like, okay, you have carved out your niche and she's probably the best wine and liquor and spirits consultant in the United States.

Mark Smith: 15:38
It's brilliant and it's horses for courses, right. Everybody's got a different view, but that's. I do remember that push from Microsoft. As we close, because we're already coming up on our 20-minute marker, tell me about Becoming an MVP. What does it mean to you? How do you answer the question when people go hey, I want to become an MVP. They go, or you're in a position to go. What are the benefits? Why would you want to be an MVP? Why would you want to stay an MVP for 10 plus years, when it's something that every year requires a consistent give back to the community? You don't get your MVP because you did something 15 years ago. You get it because what happened in the last 12 months. Therefore, there's a bit of confusion. I see this I've got an MVP certification. No such thing as a certification of an MVP. You can't go and sit and examine get it. How do you answer these type of questions that come your way?

Steve Endow: 16:41
Well, I'll choose to do some self-promotion and give you a non-conventional answer. How's that? As an MVP, I have had the privilege and opportunity to do some crazy things, like sit in front of a camera and decide to just livestream about some topic, any random topic that comes into my brain. I now have well over 100 live streams that people somehow watch, I don't know why. Then I was asked can I turn those into podcasts so that people can listen to them in the car, on the train, while doing dishes, cooking dinner with a family? Sure, I'm doing that. As a result of that, I now have the incredible opportunity of being able to produce a message or share something with an audience that greatly exceeds any audience I can get at a physical conference. It's a global, diverse, really interactive audience. As a result of the 10 plus years I've been doing this, I now have launched a new program that I'm calling ERP Center of Excellence in Latin America, because we have no user groups for Business Central in Latin America. We have them in the US, in Europe, in Africa, I think, in Asia. Not a single one, from Mexico all the way down to Argentina. That seemed very strange. I said what's going on here? As a result of being an MVP. Someone from Mexico just randomly reached out to me and said hey, can we talk about jobs and career opportunities and how I interact with US partners? It's like ding, here we go. I've launched this project. I have a logo. I am basing it out of El Salvador. I've been in touch with some large partners in El Salvador. Someone from Ecuador that I've worked with previously that said hey, anything you need, we are on board with you. I'm in touch with nonprofits who do job placement and job retraining in El Salvador. Hopefully by November I'm going to have a full Business Central training curriculum. I'm going to have classroom training. We're resurrecting the MCT program for Business Central, which hasn't existed for GP and NAV in well over a decade. This is the power of the relationships and the identity and the effort that comes after a decade of being an MVP. I do not take it for granted. I'm going to be working my butt off for years now building this Latin America program, getting user groups set up. Our first user group we're trying to set up in El Salvador, already in progress. With that, I want to train hundreds, if not thousands, of people over the next several years. I want to have Latin America and US employers lined up ready to hire the next group of students who graduate or complete this training program. That is the power of the MVP.

Mark Smith: 19:55
I love it. Are you doing it in Spanish?

Steve Endow: 19:58
No, actually the goal is to do it exclusively in English In El Salvador. They do not want Spanish training. They do not want Spanish documentation. All of the universities are 100 percent English focused. All of the top employers there demand very high English proficiency from their employees. They fully service US customers. As a near shore center, they have thousands of people working in call centers and support centers supporting US corporations. That's one of their main industries in El Salvador. I just had a call with a partner in El Salvador. She was educated at University, in Georgia technical university. She went back to El Salvador and started the firm, which is now part of a much larger US partner.

Mark Smith: 20:54
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash NZ365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time.