The Accountant Who Found Salesforce While Looking for a Way Out of Paperwork

How Maxwell Tuglo went from listening to a training recording, to Salesforce MVP Class of 2026

When the news landed, Maxwell Tuglo did not immediately feel triumphant. He felt the weight of it first.

“I think it’s interesting, and it’s more pressure,” he reflected, describing what it means to carry the title of Salesforce MVP. “It’s not just serving one community anymore. I’ll be serving more communities than I ever have, sharing my experience, understanding what makes each one unique, and championing the Salesforce products that best suit them.”

It is a striking thing to hear from someone who has just received one of the ecosystem’s highest honors: that his first instinct was responsibility rather than celebration. But once you understand where Maxwell started, it makes complete sense. Nothing about his path into Salesforce came easily, and nothing about it came from a search for recognition. It came from a search for a way to stop drowning in paperwork.

Before we proceed, let’s throw it back a little to how it all started

An Institution and a Drawer of Information

Before Salesforce, Maxwell was an accountant, a teacher, and a coach. He worked at an institution where he served as assistant to the director while also handling the roles of accountant and administrator. The paperwork alone was relentless. Parents needed their children’s reports, and every time information had to move between people, it traveled through a mess of scattered files, sorted by hand, transferred to Excel, then emailed or posted out. The director needed visibility into that information without having to physically track Maxwell down. So he did what he has always done when something bothers him: he went looking for a fix.

“I love researching.”

He gathered proposals from friends in IT, hoping one of them held the answer. Each time, something about the software fell short of what the school actually needed. He could not always name what was missing. He simply knew it was missing.

Then, on Facebook, of all places, he came across a scholarship post for a Salesforce Administrator training program. He almost did not click on it.

“Because I grew up with a background of hating sales,” he explained.

As a child from a large extended family, the word “sales” carried no good associations for him. It called to mind actual, physical sales on the street. But curiosity, as it always does with Maxwell, won out. He researched the company behind the word. He read about Salesforce’s Education Cloud offering, and somewhere in that reading, something shifted.

“I was like, wow, I think this particular thing is what I’m looking for. That is where my curiosity started from.”

Rejected, Then Accepted, Then Nearly Quitting in a Washroom

He applied for the scholarship. He was rejected. Two weeks later, without explanation, the rejection reversed itself into an acceptance.

“This is the work of God,” is how he puts it.

Two people in particular welcomed him into the Salesforce ecosystem in those early days and have remained steady sources of support ever since: Sambeet Mishra and Nell Nanue Paye. Nell Nanue Paye’s organization, then called Impact Studio and later renamed Askiya Tech, which is based in the USA. The training sessions collided directly with his working hours, often landing during his lunch break, the one window technically free but still subject to his director’s interruptions.

So Maxwell did something almost nobody talks about doing. He hid in the office washroom, earpiece in, trying to follow a Salesforce training session in stolen thirty-minute intervals.

“I wasn’t even understanding the concept. It was getting out of hand at that point in time.”

A month in, he decided to quit. He stopped attending sessions.

It was his wife who pulled him back. She suggested he stop trying to attend live and instead rewatch the recordings on his own time, at his own pace, without a director’s schedule hanging over him. He did. Something clicked. He started asking questions in later sessions. He started to feel like he belonged in the program.

The Real Reason He Fell in Love with Salesforce

Here is the part of Maxwell’s story that most outside observers of his career would never guess. He did not stay in Salesforce because he fell instantly in love with the platform or even because he wanted to fix his old employer’s paperwork problem. He stayed because of the opportunity it represented and what that opportunity could unlock.

Long before Salesforce, Maxwell had a different ambition: to become a certified master coach, speaker, and trainer, in the tradition of John Maxwell’s leadership philosophy, a coincidence of surnames not lost on him. He had been coaching people informally since junior high school. But the certification program he wanted cost close to ten thousand (10,000) US dollars, an impossible sum on a salary of under two thousand Ghanaian cedis a month (roughly $175 USD), with a wife, siblings, and extended family depending on him.

Salesforce, with its far stronger earning potential, looked like a bridge to that dream rather than a replacement for it.

“I committed every bit of my time.”

In 2023, he made a decision that still sounds bold to say out loud: he resigned from his job entirely and gave Salesforce two years to prove itself. If it worked, he would go all in. If it did not, he would return to accounting.

When asked which track inside Salesforce he wanted to pursue, admin or developer, he chose based on something deeply personal to him: his need to be around people. He was told the administrator path involved more human interaction than the development side. That was enough to decide it.

“Your personality will play a role in whatever career you find yourself in. I love to work with people. My curiosity leads me into those key areas, and that has helped me get to where I am today.”

A Year of Unpaid Work, and Becoming the Last Resort

While training with Askiya Tech, Maxwell learned that ALX Africa was building its own Salesforce program. The opening came courtesy of ALX’s CEO, Fred Swaniker, who gave him the chance to train at the institute in the first place. Having reached out to Nell Nanue Paye for trained instructors, ALX brought Maxwell on, but only on probation, as a supporting assistant to the lead instructor, Simon Jones, for an entire year. Unpaid. No compensation for internet, no compensation for equipment, nothing but the mentorship of watching Simon Jones teach and occasionally being handed a segment to deliver himself.

When Simon Jones’s contract ended, ALX considered other options before Maxwell. He was told, gently, that they might not be able to offer him the instructor role and instead offered sponsorship for additional certifications as a consolation.

One of the ALX team members told him something he still carries:

“If this opportunity is for you, put it into prayer. No one can come and take it from you.”

He and his wife prayed on it. Then the candidate ALX had lined up instead did not work out.

“I became the last resort.”

But this time, it came with pay. ALX brought him on properly, compensating him to train people across the Salesforce ecosystem, a role he still holds today.

It was Simon Jones’s mentorship and coaching, in particular, that shaped Maxwell into the trainer he is today. Because of that guidance, he has had the honor of training more than three thousand (3,000) learners in Salesforce Platform Administration through alx_africa. Many have gone on to land jobs, and many more continue to thrive in the ecosystem today, an impact he counts among the greatest rewards of the journey.

Certifications, and the Mentor Who Set the Bar

Maxwell’s climb from five certifications to twelve did not happen by accident or by chasing whatever exam happened to be trending. It was mapped out by his mentor, Nell Nanue Paye, a Solution Architect whose own path became the blueprint Maxwell wanted to follow.

“Because of her exposure to the Salesforce ecosystem, it became my driving force to become a solution architect.”

Nell Nanue Paye laid out the sequence: Administrator, Advanced Administrator, App Builder, Business Analyst, Sales and Service Cloud, Platform Developer I, and so on. Along the way, opportunities occasionally rewrote the plan, such as his CPQ certification, taken on as a direct requirement from a recruiter.

It was not a clean streak of passes. He failed his first Salesforce Administrator exam and passed on the second attempt. He failed the Business Analyst exam once before passing. The Nonprofit Cloud exam tripped him up twice, not because the material defeated him, but because he had accidentally registered for the wrong version of it and did not catch the mistake until he was already taking the test.

“Failing an exam is not the end of one’s career. There’s always a chance for you to go up.”

It is advice he now gives freely to anyone in the ecosystem still waiting for their first certification or their first job, along with a reminder that a Salesforce certificate is not the only door. Local, non-technical skills, speaking, service, and simply helping the people around you all count too.

Mentorship Even After Graduation

The bulk of Maxwell’s mentorship work has run through ALX, alongside stints with Supermums, the mentoring platform built by Heather Black, and Talent Stacker. Through Supermums alone, he has mentored seventeen learners, guiding them through more than three months of intensive support, from the start of the course through their exams and often well beyond, into their first jobs and the early struggles that follow. His work with ALX and Talent Stacker has reached many more, spread across cohorts over several years.

One mentee in particular stands out to him: a man named ThankGod Onyekachukwu Okoro, whom Maxwell trained and mentored during an ALX cohort. After their formal sessions ended, Maxwell continued pointing him toward people in the ecosystem positioned to help him further. Years later, when ThankGod, together with his co-founder, launched Africa Ohana, he came back to Maxwell and invited him into the community as it took shape.

“I’m always grateful that I was once a mentor for him and for what he’s still doing in the ecosystem.”

The Nomination He Almost Didn’t Accept

The MVP story, fittingly for Maxwell, is really two stories.

The first attempt was in 2025. Dangsenpenan Nokshuwan, a friend he would go on to co-host West Africa Dreamin with, reached out and encouraged Maxwell to put his name forward alongside Jennifer Ndlovu, hoping it would be a strong moment for the African Salesforce community. Maxwell looked at the selection criteria and talked himself out of it before he had even really tried.

“I told myself, I think it’s not something I need to go for.”

Jennifer was nominated that year. Maxwell was genuinely happy for her, and the community celebrated together.

The second attempt, in 2026, did not come from a friend nudging him. It came through a direct message from someone deeper inside the community, who told him plainly that she had seen his work and believed he was ready.

He still hesitated, talking it over first with his wife, as he does with most major decisions. Together they decided it was worth trying. He went back through his own history to gather evidence of impact and realized most of his community work had happened offline, in Ghana and Lagos, through individual mentorship rather than loud online visibility.

Once he committed, he did not do it quietly. He reached out to his ALX colleagues, who rallied behind him and helped mobilize former trainees to share their stories. He reached out to all of his Supermums mentees, his mentor, his former colleagues, and Africa Ohana itself.

Then the deadline passed, and Maxwell genuinely forgot about it.

Weeks later, Jennifer messaged him that the new MVP class had been selected. He did not immediately understand what she meant.

The Moment It Became Real

The confirmation came on June 30. His wife was beside him when he read it, and she was the first person to know. Even having quietly hoped, for years, to become someone influential in the Salesforce ecosystem in the mold of his mentor, Nell Nanue Paye, the news landed as a total shock.

“It was something I was expecting,” followed almost in the same breath by a correction, “yet it was a shock for me.”

What has stayed with him most since then is not the title itself but a piece of advice from Tunde Mosaku, who had told him simply that he had a quality to impact society and to keep it up.

He dedicates his recognition as a Class of 2026 MVP to everyone in the community who has shaped him.

What He Wants to Do With It

His first move as an MVP is not a victory lap. It is more training, specifically aimed at the leaders of various Salesforce communities across Africa and beyond, teaching effective leadership and communication rather than technical Salesforce skills alone. It is an extension of the coaching and personality assessment work he already runs on the side through the Maxwell Tuglo Leadership & Performance Institute, where he works as a Maxwell Certified Speaker, Trainer, and DISC Consultant, helping teams improve communication, performance, and leadership effectiveness through corporate training, coaching, and keynotes. The seed for that platform was planted early by Carlos Akhilele of TrailConsult, who gave Maxwell the chance to train his team from the very start and believed in him enough to encourage him to build something of his own. He plans to work community by community rather than staging one large combined session, starting with leaders before expanding further.

He is also actively planning to push others toward MVP status themselves, naming several people in his circle he intends to encourage and support through their own applications, driven partly by a clear-eyed observation: the number of Africa-based MVPs recognized within the ecosystem is still small, and he wants that to change.

“This MVP belongs to all of us, to Africa and to my fellow Ghanaians. I may be the first MVP on this path, but I know many more will follow and go even further.”

His advice for anyone hoping to get there someday is simple and repeated often in his own words:

“Pick one product to champion, learn it deeply, and then spend your knowledge generously on other people.” Mentoring, he insists, does not require mastery, only a little more experience than the person standing next to you and a willingness to show them the way. “Do not fixate on the possible end result. Focus everything on the impact and the service you provide to your communities.”

If He Could Go Back

Asked what he would tell himself at the very beginning of this journey, Maxwell did not hesitate. He would tell himself to resign immediately, rather than trying to split his energy between an old job, an unfinished master’s application, and a demanding new field that badly wanted his full attention.

It took him a full year to feel truly comfortable inside the Salesforce ecosystem. He believes, looking back, that a fully committed two months could have gotten him there instead.

It is a strange thing for a Salesforce MVP to regret not moving faster, given how fast his rise ultimately was. But then again, everything about Maxwell’s story suggests a man who was never chasing recognition in the first place. He was chasing a fix for a paperwork problem, then a way to fund a dream, then a way to be useful to the people coming up behind him.

The MVP badge, it turns out, was simply what happened along the way.