This is the fortieth post in my blog series in which I feature people I know from the community: Salesforce employees, MVPs, User Group Leaders, Partners, and honestly, anyone who I’m connected with who is willing to share with me the answers to five simple questions. I hoping that this blog series will help everyone out in the community get better connected to others who are either like them, can help them, are nothing like them, can’t help them, or are simply people they haven’t met yet! After all, a stranger is simply a friend you don’t know yet.

For me, one of the greatest strengths of the Salesforce Ecosystem is its people and the connections that are shared.

So, if you are brave enough, even if you’ve never met me in person, fill out this form and I’ll feature you in an upcoming post. (In case I have confused anyone, the questions on the form about our relationship refers to you, the reader, and me, the author, Eric Dreshfield, and not the featured person in this post.) Just beware, by completing the form, you are giving me permission to use that information in a future post, as well as allowing me to interject some of my own thoughts into your responses!

And now I introduce the 4-time Salesforce Certified and Salesforce MVP, Nick Lindberg.

What’s your job title? Director of Nonprofits, Redpath Consulting. (EFD – So you direct nonprofits? How do you know where to you tell them to go?)

What does that mean you do? Dreaming and building tools via Salesforce for nonprofits all while running the team at Redpath to carry out our nonprofit projects. (EFD – Oh!!!  I get it now. You help nonprofits become more connected to their donors and clientele, while making them lean, mean, efficient machines. Except for the mean part…I hope!)

How long have you been involved with Salesforce.com (as a customer and/or an employee)? I’ve been in the Ecosystem for over 7 years now. Five years as an accidental admin for a nonproft, and now 2.5 years, so far, as a partner.  (EFD – You and I have been in the ecosystem about the same amount of time!)

Bacon or sausage? It’s Bacon or Nothing!

What’s more important: Who you know, or what you know? To me, it is all about who you know. By knowing others, you have a group of people you can lean on and look to for knowledge. There is no way one individual can know everything there is to know about Salesforce or life for that matter. Collectively, through who you know, there is a greater chance of building out the what and potentially discover things you didn’t even know were possible. (EFD – I don’t think I could have said it better myself.)

How did our relationship start, and when? I first heard of this amazing Salesforce Kevin Bacon character also known as Eric during User Group Roundtable calls back in the beginning of 2014. During the calls, there would be a lot of conversation about various ways to run a User Group or referencing previous conversations. He was the person who would chime in and say he had a bookmark of the conversation topic and would in turn post them to the Success Community after the call so we all knew where the information was. From those calls, I just knew he was one solid fella and I needed to get to know more about him.

Afterwards, there were many occasions that the relationship really started to take off. From exchanging tweets back and forth, to chatting about how awesome it is to be an Admin after the Admin Keynote during Dreamforce 2014, to many awesome conversations during the MVP Summit 2015 & Midwest Dreamin’ 2015.

Over the past year our relationship has blossomed into a friendship. He’s really taken on #raynasunset as a way of remembering my daughter Rayna. It seems at least once a week there is a post by him or reposting someone else’s sunset with the hashtag. Beyond that, we had the chance to organize Midwest Dreamin’ 2016 together and our weekly Friday calls were something I’d look forward to each week. There have been countless times I’ve gotten to know more about him both professionally and personally and realized just how awesome he is. What else can I say, he’s a solid fella. (EFD – STOP IT! You’re embarrassing me….and this post is supposed to be about YOU, not ME!)

And now the bonus question – What’s one fact about you that few people know, that will surprise me and my blog readers? Where to begin. There are so many :). The one I like to use is when I was growing up, it took me seven years to pass the beginners swimming class. I was a foot taller than my instructor. I was determined to pass no matter what. (EFD – I can safely say I do not know any adult that I’m a foot taller than…sadly, I do know many who are a foot or more taller than I am!)

You can find Nick on Twitter.