Recently, LuminFire attended the Build, Grow, Learn conference. This conference was designed to help entrepreneurs, small business owners, and software developer/consultants create their businesses. Held at the Marriott Springhill Suites in downtown Greenville, South Carolina, the hotel was easy to get to from the airport, clean, modern, and new. Within walking distance we found downtown Greenville and the Reedy River with a beautiful waterfall.
The conference schedule was full of business and tech speakers on many interesting topics. With 4 simultaneous tracks to choose from, FOMO (fear of missing out) was real. Hopefully future conferences will have video recordings available so we won’t have to miss a thing. The schedule did allow plenty of time for networking with other business owners with several included luncheons at the hotel as well as convenient restaurants within walking distance.
The conference highlighted Claris FileMaker as a brilliant technology solution for small/medium sized businesses, and keynote speaker Andy LeCates, the Director of Platform Evangelism at Claris, talked about the amazing capabilities of FileMaker and how the platform has grown and evolved over the last 38 years. With 100 quarters of profitability and backed by Apple, Inc., few software platforms can say they’ve had such a long life with such a stable history.
Some case studies showing the breadth of FileMaker’s business application were highlighted including:
- Pin USA – Pin manufacturing and distribution
- Furnace Records – Vintage vinyl record production
- Mobile Tyre Shop – A new business concept in Australia where the tire repair vans come to you. See this story.
Andy Lecates reflected on how often a key component to business success with the platform is working with a Claris Partner. This starts with:
- Getting the right licensing for your exact needs
- Having secure, high performance FileMaker hosting
- Using a proven starter solution that gets you a head start on implementing many common business functions.
- Consulting and development assistance
Working with a Claris Platinum Partner like LuminFire moves your solution forward faster with a brilliant team of experienced FileMaker and web developers. You’ll get to your destination more quickly with the experience of our team, rather than only having the limited benefit of one internal developer’s knowledge.
Finally, Andy discussed the use of AI with FileMaker, which certainly isn’t a new concept to FileMaker, but has recently become more powerful and much more popular.
Final Thoughts
It was fun to see the success and impact of a smaller regional conference like this. Being present caused us to reflect on our journey as a business, and helped highlight how and why LuminFire has been continually able to grow over the last 12 years, largely in part due to our internal use of Claris FileMaker. Integrated with multiple other web tools, FileMaker has been a key component to our success, and we’re grateful for it. We use it as our single source of truth to track so many things: our clients, invoices, inventory, projects, tech, and countless other points of business intelligence. It gives us the information we need at our fingertips when we need it. It’s been key to our own ability to Build, Grow and Learn.
Congratulations and thanks to conference organizers Susan Fenema, Joe Scarpetta, and Brandon Hayes and sponsors for all the work they did to make the event so valuable. We are looking forward to seeing the conference grow in the future!
If you’re looking for a trusted business technology partner with real world experience, let’s connect.
Tim Cimbura – CEO, CFO and Software Engineer
Tim is an expert in creating custom business solutions that make businesses more effective, productive, and profitable. He specializes in rapid application development with the Claris platform including FileMaker, Laravel, and WordPress. He also knows Apple macOS technology inside and out.