Charting a Unique Course in Tech: Fernando Tudela’s Insightful Dive into Freelance Consulting

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 Spain. He works at Aluma Technology Solutions as a senior technical D365 FNO consultant. He is first awarded as MVP in 2023. He is a Spanish software developer working with D365 FNO as a technical consultant and product developer since 2017. He has participated in many projects, both on a national and international level, from a consulting perspective and working in product development. You can find links to his bio social media. Check out his YouTube channel in the show notes of this episode. Welcome to the show, Fernie.

Fernando Tudela: 1:43
Thank you. First of all, I want to say it's an honor to participate in your podcast, mark. I know many great FNO professionals that I truly admire have been also like Martin Drabb, adriana Rieste, juanan and many more. I have to say it's a privilege for me. Thank you for the opportunity.

Mark Smith: 2:06
Thank you. It's fantastic too. I always love to see new folks coming into the FNO space because it's grown so much over the years. I always from outside looking in. It seems to be a harder journey getting into the FNO side of things. It's a different skill set than, if you like, getting into the CRM side of things and the power platform side of things. Full respect to you operating in this space.

Fernando Tudela: 2:38
Thank you, ax. It used to be. It was a very isolated technology. Now everything's coming closer, all the ecosystem but it's still very specific technology. That's good and bad for us. Whenever you get to know enough, you have a lot of opportunities because there's also a few offer of professionals, but also it's hard to sometimes to learn and new stuff and so on. It's kind of fit. It's where life brought me.

Mark Smith: 3:34
Yeah, good, tell us a bit about you as an outsider in the technology space. I've lived for three months in Spain. I've been all over Spain, where I walked the Camino de Santiago across the top of Spain for 33 days. Then I honeymooned, originally in Barcelona. I traveled all up that coast north of into France, then, on the other coast, I've traveled right down to Gibraltar, spent time in Madrid. I was involved in a thing called Vauntown, which is an English language school for Spanish people that are in international business. I did that for a couple of weeks with my wife. Needless to say, we love Spain and, yeah, I find it amazing as a country so diverse and so much variety is available. So where do you come from in Spain? What's your story?

Fernando Tudela: 4:41
I studied physics in the University of Valencia and it's hard to get a job as a physicist and the easy way to go was just find whatever was available. And that's how I started with the ERP. They were hiring freshers from maths, physics and whatever, so I learned how to program with AX. It's not the common way to do it, but once I started programming, I just fell in love with programming and I continued with AX. I started, in fact, with 365 Finance and Operations with the cloud version of it One of the first projects in Spain about it and after that I had to work, also in 2012 and 2009. But mostly my career that it's been six years, I think. It's been mostly in Finance and Operations and always working from Valencia. I have worked for AXS in Madrid, but I refused to move from Valencia. I like Valencia, I like to be close to my people and so on, and now I work for ITS Illumina Technology, so I work for US. I am the only one that is in Europe in the company, yeah, so it's like I never left my home in Valencia, but I got to work with so many different cultures and got to travel so much that I am very grateful for that.

Mark Smith: 6:42
This is amazing. This is amazing. Tell us. I think I know the answer, but what is your favorite food?

Fernando Tudela: 6:51
My favorite food? Well, I'd say croquettes. I know you were thinking about Paella, probably. Yeah, paella is like the typical. I love Paella, but yeah, there's so many options here that I couldn't just mention one. Like it's croquettes. You have a lot of jamón serrano from you know, I don't know the word, but it's. You know I don't know the word, but it's bello the food, the good pigs, or pork, pork meat. Yeah, it's fed with. Yes, and yeah, we could spend one hour talking about food, if you want.

Mark Smith: 7:43
So what do you do hobby wise? Are you right on the coast there? Are you right on the mid?

Fernando Tudela: 7:52
I am like 20 minutes away from the coast, from the beach, but I am not a beach guy.

Mark Smith: 8:01
You're a mountains guy.

Fernando Tudela: 8:02
Kind of yes, I prefer mountains. Yeah, and yeah, I like to do paddle. It's like tennis but different. I try to do some sports because being there all day in the office is not that healthy.

Mark Smith: 8:20
Yes, yes, yes, awesome, awesome. So you did a physics degree. You got into, you know, to AX. What type of projects are you typically working on, without revealing the names, companies etc. Who they are, but do you sit within a specific industry sector that most of your work is? What? Geography more than others, because you're obviously working remote predominantly. But where do your customers that you're working for ultimately typically sit?

Fernando Tudela: 8:55
There's so much variety in that I don't think we have a specific project that it's predominant. I've worked for educational projects, for retail, logistics, big companies, so I don't know, I don't see any like any, let's say, preference or any, you know, any field that it's predominant. And yeah, like now I am also working not only as an employee, but sometimes doing some works as a freelance also, and I don't know, whatever is available and whatever I think I could contribute and it's a good opportunity, I mean, you know yeah.

Mark Smith: 9:56
So it's interesting that you mentioned freelance, because just recently I've heard a lot of conversations in the MVP community around freelancing, or people moonlighting and you know, doing other work, and one of the common questions is how do customers find you for freelance work or how do you find freelance work? Is there any particular website you use? Is it just word of mouth? What have you found effective in picking up freelance work?

Fernando Tudela: 10:29
Well, in my case it was the opposite, like first I received the offers and then I decided to go for freelance. I think our situation in FNO it's not very common because there's as I mentioned before I think there's a lot of opportunities and low offer of professionals. So they are always asking and just in LinkedIn I don't have to look for opportunities right now. I hope it's that way many years. But yeah, I don't use any platform or just opportunities come.

Mark Smith: 11:17
And so are these people mainly reaching out to you via LinkedIn that is private messaging and say hey, we got work, Is it? Are they reaching out because they're just reaching out to every FNO consultant, or are they reaching out because you've spoken at events, you've got your YouTube channel? Where do you think they're hearing about you? Or is it purely they're doing LinkedIn search?

Fernando Tudela: 11:45
Well, sometimes it's just a template message, template email, that they changed Luckily they changed your name and other times it's because of some. For example, in my YouTube channel, in my blog, I have talked a lot about electronic reporting. It's a technology that it's very specific and there's no much around, so that has many opportunities has come because of that, because they needed some electronic reporting expert and they looked for electronic reporting and my profile was there. So sometimes it's One thing and other times, like the work I do for the community, also helps. And even when they reach out to me with that template email once I say, hey, look at my CV, they can't see all the other stuff. So I think it always helps. It always helps, yes.

Mark Smith: 12:58
So that type of freelance work? Where are most of those people coming from that are asking you Are they mainly in the US? Is it mainly Europe? Is it south of the equator? What type of people are you doing work for on that freelance stage?

Fernando Tudela: 13:16
Europe, basically Europe, because even I work as an employee for a US company. So it's better for me to work as a freelance in Europe so I don't have overlapping. In fact, the work I do as a freelance is very, very few hours per month. I am the opposite of brave. I am a co-worker freelance because I have my regular job as an employee and I am not taking risks right now, but mostly in Europe, so I can coordinate better with my work as an employee for a US that totally makes sense.

Mark Smith: 14:08
Are you working, being that you're working obviously in a different time zone for the US employer? Are you working like US hours or are you walking your own in its offset?

Fernando Tudela: 14:21
In theory I work my hours, but if I do that we only have three or four hours of overlapping. When you're in a project we are now in, for example, in a go live in a project, I can't do that basically. So I end up starting a little bit later just to have more time for those meetings and so on.

Mark Smith: 14:50
Yeah, okay that makes sense, I'm going to ask you lots of questions around how you work and stuff, and the reason is because a lot of people have these questions in the community and I also work full time for an employer but do a lot of freelancing independent of that and have done for five years. So another question I'm going to ask you how do you handle kind of your payment system, as in how you get paid? So I'll tell you why. So for me, I used to live in London when I traveled. I moved to London and I came across a technology there called they had Revolut, they had, I forget, another banking system, but they then got onto WISE and so I went for everything and then I closed the other accounts and I've settled on WISE and allows me to get paid in US dollars. I also do work in Europe, so therefore I get paid in euros, and then I live in New Zealand, at the bottom of the world, so I get paid in New Zealand dollars. So it's kind of like three main currencies and then some of the other work takes me. I take Australian currency as well, and those would be the main scenarios that I apply. How do you handle bank accounts and things like that in your payment structure?

Fernando Tudela: 16:15
In my case I don't need that complex system that you need Like I don't have and unfortunately I don't have so many sources of income in different currencies. But yeah, like for my employee work as they use an intermediate company for that, so I get paid in euros from the US.

Mark Smith: 16:45
Oh, wow, okay.

Fernando Tudela: 16:46
And also as a freelance. Everything I've done is in Europe. So euros, yes, yeah yeah, for me.

Mark Smith: 16:56
I always knew that with intermediary companies and stuff, everybody takes a slice of the action to do that, and that's why I found WISE and this is not a plug for WISE, but I found it so amazing because I do a lot of work for Microsoft and Redmond and so they don't want weird bank accounts to other, they want it to be nice and clean. We want your US bank account that we can pay you in USD. The beauty of WISE anytime I wanna start a new currency, I literally go into the app and go give me pesos and as an example, and it will create me an account. Here's my account number, here's my bank address in that country. Done and it comes into my app and only when I spend it do I do the currency conversion and it's generally lower than any other currency conversion that I can get out there and so it's not complex. It's actually super simple because it's all just done on an app on my iPhone, right To do these transactions, and so, yeah, yeah, it's a new European invention. I think it may be even Eastern European invention, but I tell you what it's been a game changer to be able to work in a global market and just take that kind of the friction out with whoever's employing you, you know, on a short-term contract, for them to think about how are they going to get you the money and where? They just want to pay in their local currency because that's simple for them and I think it's a simple way of making it possible. When it comes to Dynamics 365, f&o, it's a big product right. It's really many products in what it can do. Is there a particular area that you specialize in? You mentioned reporting. What else is there? Is there areas that you are like, okay, I'm a guru in these areas. I would touch these other areas, but they're not my primary skill set.

Fernando Tudela: 18:58
Well, my profile is very technical. It's very, very technical. So when you talk about areas, I guess you're referring to functional models like logistics, or so I'd say I have the basis of each model to be able to make the developments and to make the technical architecture, but I don't have full knowledge of any of them. Because of that, because my knowledge is poorly technical, and in terms of technical, I think I know enough of everything to do almost everything that's needed, at least for now, and the knowlets. Now it's not just Like what we need to learn and what we are now working on it's not anymore in Fano but in Power Platform, all of that stuff. That's the real challenge right now. Of course, Fano it's very big, it's huge, and there's always things that you didn't know, like how actually the database goes and things like that. There's a lot of stuff there. But yeah, I know I didn't answer your question.

Mark Smith: 20:21
No, I think you did, because my understanding of what you said there is that you're doing the hardcore development side of things, and so I assume that you get a specification of what needs to be done that's not available out of the box and you go in and make that a reality.

Fernando Tudela: 20:38
Exactly. Usually I work alongside with a functional that can be a finance, logistics or tax expert, whatever, and he carries out those details and I just have to find the better way to do it technically efficient, maintainable and all that stuff, or integrations, all that stuff. It's basically the work I do.

Mark Smith: 21:09
Last question I have for you how did you become an MVP? What was that journey for you?

Fernando Tudela: 21:15
Well, it was kind of natural because I learned from many figures that were very active in the community. So somehow I got context I don't know if that word exists, I think so from them, and so I started to look at hey, what if I start sharing? And also I saw it like just this, because whenever you are doing whatever you do, sometimes you get up to a point where you don't know how to continue and you ask, and there's Martin Draup answering your question, so like giving back a portion of all that knowledge that the community have given to me. It was kind of something that I saw good for me after that also. So, like, I started with a blog, with a YouTube channel, and it's kind of addictive a little bit. You start to committing to pause regularly to go to events and yeah, it started just like, yeah, I want to do it, kind of let's see how many months I'll keep with that. I thought I was going to get tired soon, but yeah, I continued, I dedicated more and more time and suddenly it happened Like I got nominated, but I thought I wasn't going to be elected because I'm young and so on, but luckily they accepted it. So, yeah, it's a great opportunity and also it's good to see that Microsoft somehow gives you recognition for your work, but it's nothing more than that. It's just a title and it's okay. But the real engine is the impact you have with people and the comments of people giving you, thanking you because you help them with. That's the real target, or the real goal.

Mark Smith: 23:46
Hey, thanks for listening From 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.