Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Scott Luikart, Awesome Admin Award Winner for Dreamforce 2017.

Join us to learn about how to make time for yourself to keep on learning, how you can get conversations about Salesforce started, and using Trailhead to make code less intimidating and help you troubleshoot problems.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Scott Luikart.

Somehow It Always Starts at a Water Park

Like a lot of our guests, Scott came to Salesforce in a roundabout way. In 2010 he was working for a water park (following in the footsteps of Marcus Torres), but after an acquisition left him without a job he decided to try to get into tech. Through his work with a nonprofit, he was able to land a position at a small startup in Philly, where he was in charge of deploying a new product demo team. They needed a support tool, and Scott implemented Service Cloud, Live Agent, and Communities. It was a huge job and, as Scott says, “Lack of sleep was definitely a thing that I excelled at during that time in my life.”

At the time he was doing all of this, there wasn’t Trailhead the way we know it today. Instead, they had to do a lot of learning by trial and error, making guesses and then figuring out what went wrong. “Our agents were moving from copy and pasting emails into Salesforce cases to using email-to-case and how that changed their behavior.” Obviously, this made for some problems: “I had many wonderful times where I had to go sit down with the IT guy and be like, ‘Hey, can you break into their email? That person called out sick today and I need to know what’s going on with that ticket.’”

When the startup was acquired by a large tech company, Scott’s new boss changed his title from Manager of Support to Products Manager for Salesforce to help him get out the Support organization. After a year of working on the transition, that position helped him apply for other Salesforce jobs and eventually landed him at LegalZoom as the Senior Admin for Salesforce.

Giving Back to the Community

For Scott, Salesforce is special: “I really believe that Salesforce is not just a company— I think that I cry almost everytime I see the 1-1-1 videos at Dreamforce because I think of Salesforce much more as a thing than as a product. They put time and effort into making the world a better place.”

To do his part, Scott manages the Salesforce accounts of some nonprofits, helping to upload data, manage contacts, and more. His favorite work that he does is with Montrose Grace Place in Houston. They provide a drop-in service for homeless LGBT youth, where they started a GoFundMe to get computers. As Scott explains, “People who are homeless are typically not allowed in libraries, because they will be seen as trespassing or loitering and given citations, so I wanted to bring technology to them where they currently experience community.”

Scott’s fundraiser was successful beyond his wildest dreams, so they were able to buy 10 computers and set up a monthly training over the summer spending an hour teaching Trailhead. “At first it was just me, but then I started to get random people from Twitter to volunteer and join me. The community really came together and started showing up to volunteer and help teach Trailhead to these really great kids.”

Making Time for Yourself

Scott has an interesting strategy to make sure that he has time to continue to expanding his knowledge and improving. “The way I continue learning is that I book two hours a week in a conference room in my office and I go sit in there and work on Trailhead. That way people think that I’m on a call and they don’t interrupt me.”

To get others involved, Scott’s simple tip is to just wear Salesforce gear out and about and see who talks to you. If someone makes a comment about his nifty Trailblazer hoodie, he can tell them to check out Trailhead and get started. Like with his kids at Montrose Grace Place, you don’t need to be an Admin or a Dev to benefit from learning about a CRM and being able to put that on your resume.

For more insights, make sure to follow Scott on Twitter (@SLuikartInfo).

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