Going Independent: What Microsoft Dynamics professionals should know before they leap

Note: A few months ago I was approached by Dann Maurno, Assistant Editor at MSDynamicsWorld. He wanted to write an article sharing my experience and lessons learned as an independent consultant. Sadly, Dann passed away weeks later. We exchanged a few emails about the article and he seemed very excited and passionate about the subject, so I reached out to Jason Gumpert, Editor at MSDynamicsWorld and asked if I could write the article for Dann. He said yes. Thank you, Jason.

Back in 2010 I decided to leave a great position as a global technical lead for a Microsoft Dynamics CRM ISV Partner of the Year - for a variety of reasons. But the main reason was that I was ready to pursue something I thought I could be really good at, which was being a functional consultant and eventually becoming a solution architect. I found an opportunity at a startup organization that was looking for talent to grow their functional consulting team and that organization focused exclusively in CRM Online implementations, something I had almost zero experience with (since I focused mainly on the On-Premises version of Dynamics CRM) but I was super confident that it would be "the future".

When I joined that company, I learned that one of the founders and majority shareholder of the organization was a serial entrepreneur who had started organizations in the past, to later sell them once they were larger and had a proven system or product.

I was one of the first employees and I benefitted tremendously from the freedoms or perhaps advantages a startup organization gave me. I remember that ...