Our Clients: Evergreen Exhibitions

Darcy Hope is a busy man in a very busy industry. His company, Evergreen Exhibitions, produces 18 home and garden trade shows in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland each year. Founded in 1986 by Darcy’s father, Evergreen Exhibitions works with clients across the home improvement industry, from HVAC, windows, roofing — really, any product or service that has to do with the home.

Evergreen Exhibitions started working with FileMaker 15 years ago. But in 2019, they started to lose data in a very old version of FileMaker. It was time to seek a technical partner, and Oak Bay was recommended by a work contact.

Oak Bay went right to work identifying the issues and a range of solutions. Initially the two companies focused on retrieving lost data, cleaning up corrupted files, upgrading FileMaker, and setting up an improved data storage solution. “It was reassuring to know we were set up correctly and could move forward more confidently.”

But that was really the start of an ongoing process of finetuning Evergreen’s database with Oak Bay developer Steve Cooper. Darcy acknowledges that they were relatively naive to all the possibilities for customizing a FileMaker database. Oak Bay changed that.

“They did a deep dive into the backend of our program, identifying opportunities for improvements, streamlining the database, and showed us how we could tailor some of our functions to improve our processes,” said Darcy. “It has been a huge timesaver for operations. Most of the functions we’ve improved we use daily.”

By reducing the number of steps to complete an action — for example, creating and sending an invoice — Evergreen achieved more clarity and confidence in reporting. But more significantly for this fast-paced business, they freed up time previously eaten up by unnecessarily complicated processes.

Today the Evergreen Exhibitions database houses client information, exhibitor info, bookings, invoices, booth and rental needs, and generates reports for everything needed for an event.

After a year of fairly intensive database improvements, Evergreen Exhibitions has reached a place of being able to dream up new requests rather than focusing on problems and improvements. These days, when Darcy wonders about a new feature, he knows exactly who to talk to. Because Oak Bay has taken the time to fully understand the businesses’ needs and processes, new features and changes always function the way Evergreen needs them to, and Evergreen is always able to make an informed choice from an array of personalized and tailored solutions.

Says Darcy: “My advice: Don’t be shy to ask if something can be done. They’ll tell you if it can’t, or if you’re crazy, but I learned if you want your FileMaker program to do something, you just ask. It can make your life a heck of a lot easier!”