The Human Resource – Beezwax Anniversary Edition

30 years in, a founding Bee reflects.

Julian Nadel is president and founder of Beezwax. He’s celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Beezwax with this update to his original Beezwax Blog post.

In 2014, a colleague interviewed me about Beezwax; the interview transcript was the orginal basis for the article herein. It was then and still is now one of the only public summaries of my thoughts on how Beezwax works, and why.

Since being published, the article has been a meaningful springboard for many conversations I’ve had… with existing Beez, clients, and colleagues… and people new to Beezwax. As we reached another milestone – completing our 30th year – I took this opportunity to revisit the article and provide an update.

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Beezwax Software Engineering Apprenticeship – Celebrating 9+ years

Since 2017, Beezwax has sponsored software engineering apprenticeships. We wanted to share a little more history and info about this program.

We designed our apprenticeships to provide opportunity for graduates of college engineering programs and coding schools like Qwasar.io, 42 The Network or Apple Developer Academy to enhance their professional training in software development plus gain real-world consulting experience working on projects for our clients.

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How We Use n8n to Build and Control AI Agents – Keeping Business in Focus

Everyone’s talking about AI agents, including us. But making agents actually useful in a business context – not just a clever demo – requires more than a chat prompt. You need orchestration: a way to give agents access to real tools, enforce structure on their outputs, and debug them when things go sideways.

At Beezwax, we’ve been building AI agents on top of n8n, an open-source workflow automation platform. n8n acts as the control plane: it handles triggers, authentication, tool routing, and LLM orchestration so we can focus on the business logic.

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Why Fast-Growing Teams Outgrow Spreadsheets

In the early stages of building a team or company, spreadsheets are a gift. They’re simple, fast to set up, and familiar to just about everyone. Need to track spend, manage a process, or share information across a few people? Open a new tab in Google Sheets or Excel, and you’re off to the races.

But if your company is scaling quickly as it adds people, processes, and increasing pressure to move faster, spreadsheets can quietly become a liability.

At Beezwax, we’ve worked with hundreds of growing teams who hit the same problem. What started as a clever spreadsheet workaround slowly turned into a fragile, messy system that couldn’t keep up. In this post, we’ll break down why that happens and what comes next.

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See FileMaker analysis tools in action, including InspectorPro 9 — 2025 Claris Community Live

Special event featuring Beezwax’s Vincenzo Menanno and other Claris Partners

Gain deeper insight into how your Claris FileMaker solutions are structured and maintained. With the right developer tools, you can make changes confidently and have full visibility into the impact.

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Beezwax at Build Grow Learn 2025 – Claris Community Conference

Allison Bell Presents Transforming Time: Five Leadership Strategies to Maximize Impact and Model Sustainable Success

This month, September 8–10, we’re in Greenville, SC for Build.Grow.Learn 2025, a business leadership and growth conference designed for founders, entrepreneurs, and emerging executives. Beezwax is proud to support the event and share strategic insights that help businesses scale sustainably.

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Transforming Time: Strategic Framework for Leaders, Consultants, and Individuals

Time isn’t just a constraint—it’s a system. How we engage with time influences how we lead, how we deliver value to clients, and how we build lives that are sustainable and fulfilling.

This article outlines five time transformation strategies that help individuals, consultants, and leaders shift from reactive task management to intentional, purpose-driven action. Grounded in proven operational frameworks and shaped by real-world experience across personal and professional domains, these tools support better focus, sustainable execution, and long-term alignment.

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Retool, FileMaker, Airtable? Picking the Right Stack for Internal Tools

When building internal tools, you’re faced with a tough question that many fast-moving teams don’t ask soon enough:

What’s the right platform stack for what we’re trying to build?

From prebuilt dashboards to low-code platforms to fully custom apps, there are more options for internal tooling than ever—each with its own trade-offs.

  • Retool®
  • Claris FileMaker®
  • Airtable®
  • Custom-built Web Apps
  • …and plenty more depending on the department and the problem.

So how do you choose?

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New power for your everyday tools in FileMaker 2025 – Claris Community Live

Special event featuring Vincenzo Menanno from Beezwax, with Claris product team

Watch this Claris Community Live event where Vincenzo Menanno from Beezwax will join the Claris product team to discuss the enhancements available with FileMaker 2025 (v22). Learn about streamlined app upgrades, secure server integrations, and a modernized UI, prioritizing user feedback for improved functionality, enabling powerful new features for implementing AI with FileMaker.

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Dreamforce 2024 Recap

Dreamforce was often a bit of a disruption for me as a San Franciscan—traffic, closed roads, did I mention traffic? This year, instead of sitting in my car waiting to inch forward, I shared a Waymo to get around The City, and experienced Dreamforce firsthand. As a marketer and technologist, I was eager to see how Salesforce presented itself. As a company, Beezwax paid close attention to this conference, especially innovation happening with Tableau and Slack.

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Reconnect.Brisbane – AI with FileMaker 2024 and The Collaborative Journey

Katherine Russell and Vince Menanno from Beezwax present at Reconnect in Brisbane, Australia.

Beezwax is proud to sponsor and present at Reconnect.Brisbane, one of the biggest Claris FileMaker Developer conferences in the Asia-Pacific region this year. We’re excited to gather with our peers in the Claris community, and for the chance to engage in presentations and discussions on the latest development trends, especially AI with FileMaker.

At Reconnect 2024, Katherine Russell and Vince Menanno from Beezwax will kick off developer presentations with two sessions:

  • AI with FileMaker 2024: Get More Out of Your Data and Apps
  • The Collaborative Journey: Evolving Through Code, Teams, and Technology
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FileMaker Semantic Search – Part 3: Advanced Fun

Semantic search is a bit like LiDAR: it penetrates the data’s lexical canopy to reveal underlying meaning. In “Part 1: Fundamental Power” and “Part 2: Key Details” we covered the basics of FileMaker semantic search. Now let’s consider some more exotic ways this new feature can put a spotlight on our data.

We’ll show an example of “unified search” across multiple tables, using natural language to construct a semantic search. Then we’ll extend this to a second example, showing “unified search + actions”. A downloadable demo/tutorial file is provided for each of these two examples.

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FileMaker Semantic Search – Part 2: Key Details

In “FileMaker Semantic Search – Part 1: Fundamental Power” we discussed how to configure your Claris FileMaker 2024 app to support semantic search. Here in Part 2 of this three-part blog series we’ll dig deeper into the details of this awesome new functionality, including embeddings and cosine similarity, with a demo tutorial file for exploring AI Call Logging.

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FileMaker Semantic Search – Part 1: Fundamental Power

FileMaker 2024 delivers native semantic search, and it’s awesome. Now you can search records whose text is similar to the semantic meaning of your search term, even if those records don’t include your exact search term. Using natural language, users can be freed from trying to recall exactly how data was input. Let’s dive in to see just how powerful FileMaker’s semantic search is.

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The Art of Code: FileMaker’s Integration into ‘Problemista’s’ Plot

Throughout the new A24 indie film from Julio Torres, there is an ongoing dialog and deep drama about … Claris FileMaker Pro. Yes, FileMaker Pro is featured in a movie. Good news?! Well, based on initial press coverage and a clip on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, we thought perhaps not. In those brief seconds of national television coverage, our beloved software was called a “harder-to-use, not free” version of Google Sheets.

So, is this big screen debut a major problemista for all of us who love FileMaker?!

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System for Success: Atomic Design for Google Display Ads

Our UX/Design team shared their process for creating display ads, for Google Ads and social media campaigns, using a system to optimize collaboration between Design and Marketing teams.

Our marketing team wanted to implement a design system that could quickly generate different variations of display ads in multiple sizes, based on IAB Fixed Size Ad Specifications. This system had to balance creative freedom and brand adherence. We wanted users to be able to change content, colors, backgrounds, buttons and other visual elements without heavy involvement from a designer. However, it was important to create a systematic approach, so ads would stay on brand and follow a conceptual and visual pattern.

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Beezwax Sponsors and Presents at Claris Engage 2024, FileMaker Developer Conference on Apple’s Austin Campus

Claris Engage is the largest event for the Claris / FileMaker developer community. Hosted by Claris, an Apple company, Engage 2024 brings together hundreds of attendees to the Apple Campus in Austin, Texas for three days of collaboration, learning & training, networking and connecting with other peers and partners, with a theme of “Build The Future”.

Beezwax Highlights At Claris Engage 2024

As an award-winning Claris Platinum Partner, and Sponsor for Claris Engage 2024, Beezwax is proud to announce that:

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Google Ads Essentials: Common Challenges in Ads Performance

Google Ads, previously known as Google AdWords, has become indispensable to business advertising strategies. It’s no longer just an option; it’s a pivotal element in a company’s marketing efforts.

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EngageU 2023 – Most Inspiring Claris FileMaker Development Conference

I collected some thoughts and observations from EngageU 2023, the European Claris / FileMaker Developer Conference held Nov 12-14 in Antwerp. Beezwax was proud to be a sponsor. There were plenty of technical discussions, a few described here, and even moreso, plenty of things that should make us all inspired heading toward 2024. If last year’s conference were the “Biggest Claris FileMaker Conference of 2022“, this year’s EngageU was the Most Inspiring, as well as the Biggest of 2023.

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Data Gold: Uncovering Qualified Sales Leads in Your Database

Will a new client contact me today? Will they tomorrow?

As a business owner, salesperson, or marketer, you cannot afford to wait for business to come to you passively. You are likely doing everything you can think of (and afford) to attract new business while also doing your best to keep past customers happy.

What you may not realize is that you are sitting on a gold mine. There’s a treasure trove of past leads and customers that you must do everything possible to activate. Mining through your Contacts database is like panning for gold. Sure, it can be tedious, but the Gold Miners who actively search regularly find areas likely to be more prosperous.

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