Should I be an admin or a consultant

is one of those online threads that pops up time and again, mostly answered by people who have been burned in one role or the other. It can be hard to even understand what each role does, much less choose between them. As a Senior Develo-admi-sultant, I’ve done it all, and I didn’t know the difference either, until my spectacularly bad implementation cost my employer at least $200k.

My Salesforce career began in the summer of 2020 as an accidental admin at my uncle’s metal shop and manufacturing plant. At the time, our small sales team was using ACT! CRM. Our finance team was using QuickBooks. It was QuickBooks Desktop, of course. The company was allergic to cloud-based SaaS.

In retrospect, I’m equal parts appalled and deeply grateful that my uncle trusted me, a fresh college graduate, enough to agree to my suggestion of migrating the company to Salesforce. I had an ulterior motive: the only thing hotter than Florida summer on the factory floor was the Salesforce job market. The Ohana was in full swing; Salesforce evangelists were on every corner trying to recruit new blood for referral bonuses. Back then, everyone knew that an admin certification meant a guaranteed 6-figure job. I had gotten certified, and my confidence was through the roof. I was going to modernize my uncle’s company, then leverage my success to get a swanky Salesforce job. I approached this undertaking by doing what I already knew how to do: I kicked off an unholy Trailhead grind, racking up over 100k points, 200+ badges, and ~5 superbadges in those few months. I could reset users, assign page layouts, and build custom objects all day long. I was going to nail this implementation and launch a long-term career in Salesforce.

The implementation was a complete disaster. I’d learned every admin skill from Trailhead that anyone could ever need, but here’s what the job ACTUALLY looked like:

• Our leadership had minimal interest or knowledge about software. We had no end-state goal for what our org would look like. With limited executive buy-in, I was sent off on my own to “Salesforceify” things.
• Our finance team was actually just two elderly ladies who had never used anything but QuickBooks Desktop in their combined 70 years of bookkeeping. For fear of losing their job security, they lobbied for a hard requirement that we integrate Salesforce with QuickBooks Desktop (hint to future souls: DO NOT do this).
• Our AE at Salesforce connected us with a consulting firm, but we found ourselves neglected after we turned out to be a bad (chaotic) client that was unwilling to pay for nearly enough consultant hours to solve our problems. This left me floundering and having no idea what had gone wrong with our implementation.
• We used the wrong parts of Salesforce. The company was supply-constrained and couldn’t make more sales. They didn’t really need a CRM; they needed an ERP. On top of that, we didn’t use features that are actually uniquely good in Salesforce (in areas like security, we just had open read/write).
• Generally, everyone was skeptical, fearful, and not interested in training.

If I had been handed a fully functional Salesforce org, I would have had all the admin skills required to maintain it. But in reality, I was a green admin who had no idea how to navigate a business. Ultimately, we spent 3 months on creating a really expensive contact book and ticket tracker, which was shut down just a few months after becoming usable. When I later counted up the costs (licenses, consulting costs, salaries, not to mention process churn and lost time), it added up to a minimum of 200k, for absolutely no benefit.

Having learned my lesson, I eventually left that job to try to become a real Salesforce consultant. In my final interview for my next role, I told my boss-to-be “I’ve seen the worst possible Salesforce implementation of all time, and I learned what not to do”.

So, what’s the difference between an admin and a consultant?

Admins are expected to be able to maintain and manage a Salesforce org. You write Flows. You write validation rules. You manage data. You take executive requirements & business processes and digitize them in Salesforce. An admin is paid to “keep the machine running”.

A day as an admin tends to look like:

• Reset a user’s password with your morning coffee.
• Review requirements passed down from executive leadership.
• Put those materials down, sigh deeply, reset another user’s password.
• Tinker with the Flows that you maintain, maybe build a new one depending on the requirements from leadership.
• Export data, import data. How is there always more data to import?

Consultants are paid to figure out what kind of machine should have been built in the first place. You have to convince everyone to agree on what the solution should be, then build it, document it, train people on it, and absorb the blame when someone refuses to use it. This can involve a lot of technical work, but your primary job is flexing your people skills to create buy-in. While admins are generally expected to say yes to every requirement from above, consultants need to learn how to gently say no to the same people.

Both jobs require Salesforce skill, but consulting forces you to learn the part Trailhead can’t teach: how companies actually make decisions, how people resist change, and how a technically correct solution can still fail.

A day as a consultant looks like:

• A client emails you saying everything is broken. It isn’t, but you can’t say that. You have to figure out how to make them happy again, sustainably.
• You prepare a slide deck for an upcoming meeting.
• You meet with your project manager to guesstimate how many hours it will take to implement a new Flow for the client.
• You work on untangling some client mess or another.

That being said, lately, the line between consultant and admin is blurring. Every year, admins are being asked to handle more dev and consultant tasks. Consultants are moving into the managed services space to help with administration.

So, which career path should you follow?

Even though times are changing, if you’re early in your Salesforce career and deciding between the two paths, my advice is simple: learn admin skills, then look for a job in a consulting firm to really kickstart your career. Consultancies are an excellent place to learn, in large part because you can lean on the experience of people above you. It’s also an easily reversible decision; if you don’t love being a consultant and want to find a pure admin job, being a consultant can surprisingly be the best way to find one. In the course of your job, you’ll meet the operational teams around many Salesforce orgs. If you mesh well with one of them, that’s your golden ticket for pivoting back to a comfortable admin job. You’ll be an easy hire.