British Honey was a retirement hobby. We bought five hives, then we had 15 hives.
Then, we received an order for 75,000 pounds' worth of honey, and then we had to really get serious.
That's when we stepped into using FileMaker to run the business.
On the beekeeping side of our business, FileMaker manages the process.
It's just a way that no one else, I believe, has done beekeeping before.
All these information that are usually in just one head are now in the collective system for beekeepers to use.
Three other companies wanted to have our software, and one of those companies was a gin company.
And I said, "Good heavens, we could make a honey gin."
So, after the success of the launch of our first honey gin, we continued developing the
software alongside the company with FileMaker.
It's a complex operation that we have here, where we do everything on the FileMaker system and
that's basically traceability of our honey--from the hive that it's harvested from, right to the jar
or bottle of gin that it ends up in. It's, it's a big process with a lot of complex parts. So there's--
within that, there's hundreds of problems that FileMaker solves.
Because we were still successful in selling spirits, we decided to actually build our own distillery.
As a consequence, we had to build a software that would allow to keep the traceability of our products for the manufacturing,
but also tracking the movements of alcohol during the various stage of the production of spirits.
We can actually manage a whole amount of business processes just with one single system for everything.
FileMaker has been behind everything I've done in business since '87.
So, our whole company is built upon FileMaker and its flexibility, because we know that FileMaker
works across countries. So, we want to work in China, we want to work in America, so
we'll use FileMaker there as the backbone of our business and it's easy to move it.
Imagine that Covid hits. In three weeks' time, we were up and running and started producing alcohol sanitizer.
We pushed the, uh, ABV up to 70. Guess what? We've got a hand sanitizer.
We've done it in less than a week. Any other conventional software, how do you develop that?
We were up and running and we were shipping within 14 days.
Again, back-office flexibility, FileMaker involved secretly in the background,
and I would vow that nobody could have acted any quicker than us.
I have a partner, and he and we both agreed that we were working to live, we were not retiring to die.
No, I don't drink any of our spirits. I only drink California red, and I think
working with young people, working with software, working with exciting things, keeps people young.
FileMaker can keep you young as well, because it stretches the brain.
You've got to think things through, think the business processes through. We're on to our next one already.
Opportunities with FileMaker are enormous. All you've got to do is dream it, then put it into action.