The Free and Unlocked FileMaker CRM for the FileMaker Platform

Hi! I'm Richard Carlton. I want to take a moment and give you some additional information about FM starting point. FM starting point is a custom application built on the FileMaker platform that is designed as a starting point for your next custom FileMaker project. Now, if you're familiar with the FileMaker platform you know that FileMaker is great for optimizing workflows or improving ROI or in increasing your team's efficiencies. Those are all fancy terms we're saying that you can save a ton of this stuff with FileMaker. And that's an absolutely true statement. We see this all the time every day. I get emails from people telling me how much time and money they have saved within their organization by using a custom application built in the FileMaker platform. So, what is FM Starting point? Well, FM starting point is a pre-built starter solution. Which means that we have pre-built contact management for you project management, invoicing, estimating, even basic product management that has already been built and tested and available for you free like really free at our website at FMstartingpoint.com. 

FM starting point has been designed by my team which includes very experienced developers as well as designers from Apple incorporated.  So, the whole idea is that it is pre-built, it has a great user interface, it's very intuitive and it's unlocked and available for you to take and build your next custom application. Now, FM starting point works great in a collaborative environment with your team. It's really designed for this. You can put FM starting point up in the cloud and then your team can access it from all over the world using laptops, desktop, computers, iPhones, and iPads as well as modern Android devices. It's really cool technology. In fact it's downloaded about a hundred times each day. Now, of course people sometimes email me and say that hey there's some feature missing an FM starting point. And I read a lot of the tech support messages that come into my team. And of course sometimes when we see these messages we say oh yeah we're missing some critical feature we're happy to put that in. But a lot of times we have to remind people that it is the FM starting point and not completely done. If it was completely done then it would already be tuned and optimized for your particular business. And of course that's the step that you're going to need to take yourself or get some assistance with.

So, if you're interested in learning about FM starting point or the FileMaker platform we have great video courses that cover this in detail. In fact, by far the largest most comprehensive set of video courses is available from my company. This includes about 70 hours of video training which covers building and deploying your own custom application. We talk about optimizing for mobile devices, we also talk about deployment onto a FileMaker server maybe that's in your office or optionally deploying to FileMaker cloud which is out on the internet in the cloud. And so, you get the idea that FileMaker is very flexible. It does a tremendous amount. It can integrate and talk to all sorts of services and systems. For example, there is an option in FM starting point for it to communicate with PayPal. For you to generate an invoice in FileMaker and then push that invoice to your customer through PayPal. Fantastic. It makes things very simple. So, if you have questions about FM starting point or the FileMaker platform or you want to reach out to us about our training or our coaching. Feel free to email us @support at RCConsulting.com.

In this short video course, we're going to explore whether FileMaker is the right platform for you and your organization. Now, as you go through the process of evaluating the FileMaker platform to see if it's right for you I strongly recommend that you take a look at the rest of the videos. In this short course, this course is designed specifically to answer questions that you're going to have about what the FileMaker platform can do along the way. We're going to start to show you kind of how to do some of those things, but largely this set of videos is designed to educate you on the overall capabilities. Now, also keep in mind that we have daily live training sessions at 1 o'clock Pacific time and these live training sessions will cover basic and beginning topics on the FileMaker platform. Additionally, there will be plenty of time for Q&A. So, if you're watching these videos and evaluating the platform and you want to ask a question to a live person well you can do that by visiting our livestream broadcast which is available here on a link. So, what are some quick tips that will help guide you in evaluating this platform and if it's right for your organization? Well, first off my personal experience is that as I talk to organizations both business educational nonprofit the FileMaker platform is a good fit for a vast majority of these organizations. However, it's not a perfect fit for everyone and one of the most important things that I value in my organization are happy customers. I want to make sure that if you pick the FileMaker platform that you're going to be a happy person in six months or 12 months or in five years because really the people who get in and use the FileMaker platform will save a ton of time and money and they will continue to use this platform for many years to come.

So, of course that brings up one of the most important topics in the evaluation process is the return on

investment or the justification. So, as you're watching these videos it's helpful to have an idea of the pain points that you are running into in your organization. What is the work rut that we talked about? Are you stuck doing a certain thing over and over every day? What processes can you automate or optimize that would greatly improve your life? Now, of course I say your life very simplistically. But that results in time savings during the day. Maybe you're gonna work the same amount of time but you're gonna get twice as much work done or maybe you're going to work an eight-hour day instead of a twelve hour a day in which case your happiness level goes way up. You're gonna have to figure out what your ROI looks like. For example, a true story and a very common story customer in Texas works with one of my FileMaker developers and they determine that they're using some very old technology and they have a huge field team. And when I say a huge field team I'm talking about people that are deployed out into the field. 

In this case, they're repairing vehicles kind of a specialty vehicle repair business and they go to car dealerships doing specialized repairs on cars that are damaged. Of course, this process involves them providing an estimate to the dealership. The dealership approves the work being done and then the back office staff billing the dealership and they literally have 30, 40, 50, 100. These people are running around in North America. Well, they determined that each of these people would waste one to two hours every week. If not an hour a day doing the backend paperwork because either they were using this old technology that wasn't very good or some of them kind of said screw the technology. I'm just going to use paper because it seems to work better than this old ancient stuff from 20 years ago. So, at the end of the day or the end of the week there's this period where they have to catch up on paperwork. Well, what we did is we worked with them, we identified this problem, we built an app that runs on a tablet computer out in the field. In this case it was an iPad and as these field personnel did their job they would interact with the iPad and enter the information. Kind of along the way during the course of their job. So, when it got to the end of the day at three or four o'clock when they would normally knock off they actually could do another hour of work. And so, the company figured out at the end of the day that they were saving a ton of money like in the neighborhood of $30,000 a month. So, this company actually ended up doing $30,000 more work per month and of course then they looked at their investment in FileMaker.

Now, they needed FileMaker for like a hundred people and they had to work on getting a customized application tuned for their particular needs. And so, when it was all said and done they had actually invested on the front end thirty forty thousand dollars they made that up in like two months. And after that it was all quote unquote free money. So that's a really good example of an ROI. So, you need to think about in your case what are your friction points, what are the parts of the job with you or your team where it's not smooth it's kind of you know friction it's tough it's hard it's like sandpaper things aren't smooth, and silky what parts of the job do you dislike because you might be able to automate those with a good custom application. So, a big part of this evaluation process is your understanding, maybe even writing down some of your friction points. Watching the training that we have in this specific course as well as attending some of our free live training sessions which are fairly short. And in those you can ask myself or one of my staff questions about the FileMaker platform. Can FileMaker do this? Can FileMaker do this? What are your needs? You just type them in and it will respond to you on video in real time. So, these are my hot tips for evaluating the FileMaker platform.

The FileMaker Platform Overview  

I want to take a quick moment and tell you about the FileMaker platform (FileMaker CRM). The FileMaker platform is one of the most popular custom application development systems in use worldwide. Everyday more than a million people use the FileMaker platform within large businesses, small and medium businesses, educational institutions and even nonprofits organizations. The FileMaker platform is actually comprise of several different products which include FileMaker Pro, the client, and development software that runs both  on the Mac and Windows platforms. There's also FileMaker server, a separate software package best designed to host or share your FileMaker solution on an office network or across the internet. FileMaker server works on your company's Mac or Windows server. Now, there's a separate product/ service  called FileMaker cloud which is similar to FileMaker server except when you purchase this service. Claris corporation can handle the setup on the server and hardware for you within the Amazon data center. So, you actually don't have to do any of the hard work yourself. So, once again FileMaker Pro  runs on Mac and Windows platforms. FileMaker server is an on premise server software that works on Mac’s, Windows and also Linux base systems. And FileMaker cloud service which is professionally managed by the engineers at Claris corporation. If you want to access a FileMaker custom app from an iPhone or iPad you're going to want to use FileMaker Go. FileMaker Go is available on Apple's App Store and allows you to access a local custom application or a custom app that's being shared from FileMaker server or FileMaker Cloud. So, really FileMaker Go is the dedicated client software for the iPhone and iPad. Now, additionally there is a third client and that is called FileMaker WebDirect. FileMaker WebDirect provides browser level access to a FileMaker custom application. WebDirect can be used on a wide variety of browsers. But the interesting part about WebDirect is that it provides access to Android devices and other browsers where FileMaker Pro or Go won't run.

People often ask me, what is FileMaker and what is a custom app. Well, the easiest way to tell you what FileMaker is to explain it, an analogy. In many ways the FileMaker platform is a lot like my favorite stores, Home Depot. Home Depot is a massive store that contains almost everything you could possibly need for building projects around your home or for building projects in and around your office. General contractors who build homes or office buildings frequently visit Home Depot to supply them with the tools needed to construct these projects. So, if you think about it in these sorts of terms FileMaker in and of itself is a development platform. It gives you all the tools you need to build a custom application and that app is going to solve business problems that you may have. For example, a very simple problem that you might have is the automatic creation and tracking of your contacts or customers. Maybe these customers are automatically invoiced and maybe those invoices need to be processed through an online credit card service in a very simple and easy fashion. Well, with a FileMaker custom application it is fairly straightforward to set up a custom app that tracks your customers, creates invoices automatically, and then communicates that. For example, with PayPal to collect payment on those invoices. 

Now, this is a fairly straightforward custom app but it's one that FileMaker would do very very well. So, once again, if we use an analogy this is one kind of custom house that you could build with the parts that you could get at Home Depot. What kinds of homes or offices could you build from the parts from Home Depot? Well any possible house or office can be constructed? There's really no limit to what you can do with a great set of tools and supplies and that's just the way FileMaker is. FileMaker provides a great foundation with great tools for you to build a custom app to solve your business needs. Now, of course there are options for how you get your custom application built. You could try to read a book that you might purchase from Amazon. You could get some great video training on how to build a custom application. You could even get some one-on-one coaching from a professional FileMaker coach. All these things are available to you right now. FileMaker does not require a rocket scientist to build a successful custom application. Typically power users in an office will gravitate towards FileMaker and absolutely fall in love with the product because they can solve everyday problems that they really can't solve with other tools like Microsoft Word or Excel. Now, if you don't have time to learn FileMaker yourself you can always hire an outside consultant to come in and help build a custom app for you. Ideally, once this app is developed and completed for you, you would be able to maintain that custom app yourself. And ideally, that would require a very minimal amount of effort and skill.

The FileMaker platform has the ability to both build simple and complex custom applications. It's extremely powerful. The true benefit of the FileMaker platform is that it is highly customizable to your needs. More specifically, it's easily customizable. So, a typical database system that an IT organization might build for you, say they're going to give you a quote to build a custom app for you. They might give you a quote and for the purpose of this conversation let's say a hundred hours of labor. My experience shows that you can solve the same kind of problem with a FileMaker custom app with only about 25 or 30 hours of labor. That's a dramatic savings by using the FileMaker platform. FileMaker's sweet spot where it really excels is with work groups. Most organizations, even giant corporations, have different departments or groups that work to complete specific jobs. And those groups range from two to three individuals to maybe 50, 70 or even hundred of staff. Most FileMaker custom apps have 10 to 20 users connected at any given time. Of course a single individual can use FileMaker themselves. However, a FileMaker custom app can have more than 4 or 500 users connected at a single time. So, FileMaker has a broad range of scalability.

Now, if you have 5000 users who simultaneously need access to FileMaker custom apps, well in FileMaker that might not be the right answer for you. There are practical limits to what the FileMaker platform can do in a situation where you have five or ten thousand simultaneous users. And in a situation like that, you're going to want to potentially look at spending more money and buying a much more expensive piece of software. But for your average department, your average workgroup within a corporation, a small business,  non-profit and even  educational institution, FileMaker is a great choice for solving business needs. So what kind of custom apps can you build with FileMaker? Well, we've mentioned contract management, creating invoices,  automatic processing them for payment through PayPal. You can also do project or job tracking. You can have FileMaker talk to quick books and exchange information with that application. You can generate PDFs and reports. FileMaker can even allow public access through a FileMaker server or FileMaker Cloud by using custom HTML web pages that talk directly to the FileMaker Server. Of course, FileMaker can send out and received emails, it can text or SMS people, it can do almost anything and talk to almost all third party systems. There's absolutely no limit. As a consultant in the FileMaker business for 30 years, my team has touched and worked with almost every market in existence within the United States. From legal to manufacturing, to marketing, to sales, to product management, to warehouse, inventory control with barcodes, to digital asset management of photos and movies, to capturing and storing contracts in your custom application. FileMaker could do all these things and it does them very very well. 

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