Francesco Musso's Journey with Power Pages and Freelancing

Mark Smith: 0:31
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode we're going to be focusing on contracting, freelancing, and we'll sprinkle in a bit of Power Pages to the mix as well. 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.

Francesco Musso: 1:28
Thank you, Mark. Thanks for having me Very happy with that intro.

Mark Smith: 1:31
Excellent, excellent. Now, I was just saying before we jumped on, I love when I'm, you know, having a chat with a guest that I've met in real life, which is kind of a novelty after COVID. And, of course, we just caught up recently in Canada. I think our first meeting was brunch at a nice little cafe there and, yeah, so good to see you. Just like what, four weeks, is it four weeks since we're in Canada? About that, yeah, it's zoomed by.

Francesco Musso: 1:56
Yeah, um, yeah, so so good to see you. Just like what four weeks Is it four weeks since we're in Canada? About that, yeah, it's zoomed by Crazy, crazy. Sorry, I'm just going to say it was awesome to meet you in person and to get you almost to myself for a bit, and it was fun to the fat, it was fun. It was fun.

Mark Smith: 2:17
I always love hearing people's stories and how they've got to where they've got to on their you know their um power platform journey, and so it was good listening to you tell me food, family and fun what do they mean to you?

Francesco Musso: 2:23
well, they're usually pretty much come all as one. I'm from the crazy big sicilian family. We used to massive get togethers. There's nothing but um, noise and passion and way, way, way too much catering, and so we'll do that just as often in the uk as we will over in sicily. 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.

Mark Smith: 3:08
I love it, I love it and I love that. You know, a career in this space is allowing that type of lifestyle which I'm seeing more and more.

Francesco Musso: 3:16
Yeah, because back in the day, for me there was none of that glamorous side, it was very much. I just saw the train station and the office building and I'd spend my whole weekends traveling for that, for the wrong kind of travel. So yeah, from about 2018, I just cut the ties from the office, went to Thailand first. First did many different stops. 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.

Mark Smith: 3:49
Tell us about your career journey. How did you ultimately get into what you specialize in now? But where did it really start? Where did your start in IT come about and bring us right up to modern day?

Francesco Musso: 4:00
Yeah. So I've had a twisty turny journey really. I've worked in just about every industry imaginable. I didn't get into IT until relatively late. My family's background was in bars and nightclubs the leisure side of things but I think I was just about the right age for windows 95 coming along. 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.

Francesco Musso: 4:52
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.

Francesco Musso: 5:22
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.

Mark Smith: 6:08
I wanted to, to master it so what version of portals did you start on?

Francesco Musso: 6:13
it was dynamic CRM portals. I think it was the first incarnation where it was Microsoft at the helm, so where you'd have the portal management app rather than have to do everything in code and build ASPX and that kind of thing.

Mark Smith: 6:29
Interested to get your opinion on, you know, because at that point Microsoft had just acquired it from adx studios and and the lead on that was a guy called shan mccarthur, who's still, of course, in microsoft now. 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?

Francesco Musso: 6:55
yeah, well, funnily enough for me that that was ideal because I knew model driven well. Not, I don't think they were even branded as model driven apps back then but I knew. I knew dynamics inside out and I knew xrm and workflows. 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.

Mark Smith: 7:26
Yeah, you know, being that, that's been your journey across those various iterations. So it went from dynamics 365 um what was it? Power Portal was it. No, it was just called Portals, Dynamics 365 Portals, right. Then it became.

Francesco Musso: 7:39
Power Portals and then Power.

Mark Smith: 7:40
Pages.

Francesco Musso: 7:41
I think it was Dynamics CRM Portals, then Power Apps Portals, but everyone just called them Power Portals, it seems.

Mark Smith: 7:47
And now Power Pages.

Francesco Musso: 7:48
It was a perfect naming for me. It did precisely what it said on the tin. Yeah, exactly. No one's ever come for me asking for a power pages site. They specifically want a portal even to this day nice, how do you?

Mark Smith: 8:03
yeah, so much of the power was there from day one. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, no, no, you're on the money. And, and you know, if I look at what shan designed back then was this idea that you know you could service data to the logged in person specific to them, and that was a powerful use case. 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.

Mark Smith: 8:38
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.

Francesco Musso: 9:33
Yeah, well, for context. At that same time I was still having to fax my timesheet in. Once I'd got it signed, which was by somebody that wasn't usually on site, I was trapped in it. 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.

Mark Smith: 10:00
We ultimately got it to the point where the time shedding was all done biometrically, with wi-fi enabled and even um sim enabled biometric scanners, so staff could just put their finger on it. 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.

Francesco Musso: 10:35
Sweet love it.

Mark Smith: 10:37
Tell me about. How do you talk to customers about portal? And sometimes what I'm angling for here is that I see people go I'm going to build my website on Portal, like my information website, my blog, all that kind of stuff, and you know I'm kind of adverse to that. How do you explain it?

Francesco Musso: 10:59
Yeah, I totally agree. First of all, I wouldn't take on that kind of work. There's plenty of times I'll have the conversation and just say not only thanks but no thanks. But I advise you not to do it. 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.

Francesco Musso: 11:40
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.

Francesco Musso: 12:02
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?

Francesco Musso: 12:58
You've got a portfolio. So much easier now.

Mark Smith: 13:00
Yeah, yeah, no, that's awesome. You know, I've always said that if a Power App looks like a Power App, you've done it wrong, right, if I can see it. So you've used a power app, you know tooling to do it. 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.

Francesco Musso: 13:38
Yeah, 100% agree, and even with the out-of-the-box configurable components. So for my more MVP kind of portals it will be. 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.

Mark Smith: 14:10
Yeah, fantastic components, but the look and feel and the number of clicks is just next level. Yeah, fantastic listen. 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?

Francesco Musso: 14:55
yeah, good question. So there's a few levers that led me towards that. 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.

Francesco Musso: 15:44
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.

Francesco Musso: 16:40
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.

Francesco Musso: 17:03
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.

Francesco Musso: 17:47
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.

Francesco Musso: 18:23
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.

Francesco Musso: 18:32
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.

Mark Smith: 19:14
So I'm going to ask you some specific questions around the mechanics of freelancing, and that's just so that folks listening can start. If they're thinking this way, they can start, you know, learning. 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?

Francesco Musso: 19:39
Yeah, I've pretty much got a portfolio of examples, but I never just share out the links. Get on a call with me and I'll walk you through it, because I want to make sure, first of all, that I'm hearing your pain points in your own language. So even if you don't go ahead with me, I've still got some value out of the call.

Mark Smith: 19:56
Yeah.

Francesco Musso: 19:56
And I want to highlight while I'm showing you. Here are the pain points, here are the bits that really took the effort, here are the bits that are the massive time savers.

Mark Smith: 20:04
Yeah, and so then when?

Francesco Musso: 20:06
it.

Mark Smith: 20:07
Carry on carry on Sorry.

Francesco Musso: 20:08
I'd highly recommend, whenever you can get in conversation with a potential customer, do that. Don't just rely on emails or job posts or whatever.

Mark Smith: 20:18
Perfect, perfect. How do you work out how you're going to bill or invoice the customer? Actually, let's start at the quoting stage. Do you do pricing for what I call outcomes-based pricing? Outcomes based pricing so, hey, this is what you've asked for, it is x and you'll handle your time, etc. And these will be the milestone deliverables. Blah, blah, blah. 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?

Francesco Musso: 21:01
Yeah, so again, there's a lot of conversation that goes into that, but it's probably a blend of the two. I'm much keener on the value-based pricing than the outcome-based pricing, but still, clients will still want some idea of how many days. Does that work out as?

Francesco Musso: 21:18
and what's the daily rate? 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.

Mark Smith: 21:50
How do you? I take it? It you work across any geography. So you know, although you're based in the UK, you work on US gigs. You work on really wherever the work is right. I would assume in today's world there's no reason, there's no time zone conflict or anything like that that would really allow you to work anywhere on any project.

Francesco Musso: 22:09
Absolutely. Yeah. So I've worked in thailand for uk customers that work really nicely. Just because I happen to want to go to thailand, yeah, but we'd have say, our offshore indian development team they'd do certain hours. Do a drop to me, I'd qa it, provide some feedback, add some value before the uk team come online. Yeah, and that just coincidental. 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.

Mark Smith: 22:47
And you mentioned there the Offshore Development Centre. So in the scenario that the customer doesn't have a whole team, can you bring to the table resources that you've got relationships with also then that help build out a delivery team if you needed it.

Francesco Musso: 23:05
Yeah, absolutely, and again, this is probably going to sound obnoxious, but usually the scenarios where I am having to interface with an offshore team, it's usually a hindrance as opposed to a help. Right, and I'm going to qualify that by saying the gap that I see so much in the portal space is that, first of all, lack of any custom experience. 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.

Mark Smith: 23:41
Yeah.

Francesco Musso: 23:41
Whereas for me, the value is in being able to know what that blueprint should be. How do I take the customer goals and translate that into? We should build this. It means that form these lists this bit's custom. Yeah, so usually, but I would be writing out the specs, spending longer doing so than what it would take me to build it. To then have to train up the offshore resource to say, well, yeah this is how you do that.

Francesco Musso: 24:05
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?

Mark Smith: 24:25
you mentioned linkedin before, as people contact you via linkedin, um, so I assume some form of word of mouth happened before that point, or are they actually just looking or doing a search for independent contractor that specializes in PowerPages? How are you, you know? 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?

Francesco Musso: 25:02
Yeah, great question. So the lion's share is still LinkedIn. That has been the case for 15 years. 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.

Francesco Musso: 26:07
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.

Mark Smith: 26:23
Do you find that, um, you know, going to the community conferences, the microsoft conferences, et cetera, getting a speaking slot? That also helps increase your exposure and your potential. You know audience base 100%.

Francesco Musso: 26:38
So I immediately, for example, someone comes to me looking for advanced Power Automate work, I'd be thinking Paul Morana, damo Bird, and that's precisely because they're giving so much to the community. I've attended their sessions, been wowed by them Kind of humbling because I thought I was pretty good at power automating. 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.

Francesco Musso: 27:30
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?

Mark Smith: 27:55
yeah, and I think if you're going into freelance, that's probably the easiest way to make the mark final question top five, top five um bits of advice you would give to somebody that bumped into you in a conference and said, frank Frank, I'm wanting to go independent. What are the first five things I need to do?

Francesco Musso: 28:15
I would say pick your deadline, build your runway leading up to that. So how are you going to have plenty of customers that want to do repeat business with you by that point in time? Look back through your recent project. What was the value add? And do a bit of a case study on your LinkedIn profile.

Francesco Musso: 28:32
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.

Francesco Musso: 28:51
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.

Francesco Musso: 29:35
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.

Mark Smith: 30:25
Franco, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Francesco Musso: 30:27
You're welcome. I really enjoyed chatting. I hope to catch you at another conference pretty soon.

Mark Smith: 30:32
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom forward. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.