Kevin Hammond, founder and CEO of DB Services, is an accidental entrepreneur. He graduated from Indiana University Kelley School of Business shortly after the dot com bubble burst in 2000, which forced him to make his own way in a tight job market through independent tech consulting.

It’s been 17 years now, and tech consulting has evolved into DB Services being one of the premier custom application and workflow solution shops in the Midwest.

“I was a sole proprietor for the first five years or so, but eventually I was getting more work than I could handle on my own so I hired my first employee,” Kevin said. “The flywheel effect really kicked in after the Great Recession and now we’re up to 28 full-time employees. We’ve been on the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies list now for two years in a row and the IBJ just added us to their Fast 25 list of the fastest growing private companies in Indianapolis in July.”

One month later, DB Services was named the Claris Excellence Award FileMaker Growth Partner of the Year for the Americas in August, 2020. It’s the fourth consecutive year that DB Services has received the honor from Claris International, Inc., an Apple subsidiary.  The award is presented annually to each region’s Claris partner that achieves the highest revenue and brand growth for Claris. FileMaker is a low-code platform used by more than one million people at over 50,000 companies.

DB Services has been known as the go-to Claris FileMaker Partner in the region for many years, but that’s not all the firm does. Increasingly, the company is earning customer praise in the Salesforce platform, Amazon Web Services cloud, and AWS Amplify serverless markets as well.

Whether working with Fortune 500 companies and other large enterprises or small- to medium-sized businesses, schools and universities or nonprofits, there are two things Kevin and his team of engineers and project managers focus on: employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

“Our mission is to make organizations more efficient and more effective through custom software. If you peek behind the curtain you’ll see that the only way to achieve that is to go about our engagements each day working to increase our employee satisfaction and increase our customer satisfaction,” Kevin said. “And if you do those two things simultaneously and do them very well, you’ll create a company built to last that continues to grow. I would say that approach represents who DB Services is today.”

A great example of this dual satisfaction track in action is DB Services’ partnership with Steel Art Company, a manufacturer of architectural sign products. The company was looking for ways to increase quality assurance and achieve better inter-departmental communication.

DB Services built the company a mobile app that began their digital transformation. Their manufacturing system allowed each department to track their work digitally and include photos to ensure everything was in order. This saved them time and resources and significantly increased customer satisfaction immediately. The company has gone from multiple packaging errors a week to only a couple every month. Additionally, the system allowed customers to track the status of their order in real time.

“The solution we provided them has saved them a lot of time and already improved their reputation,” said Kiyan Allaei, the Senior Application Developer who worked on the solution for Steel Art Company. “It’s really put them in line with the competition, and we’re continuing to discuss even more improvements to the app.” With their extra time and resources, Steel Art Company has been able to begin new training initiatives and create new opportunities for continuous improvement.

Kevin noted that DB Services created the app for Steel Art Company using Claris FileMaker and web development. “We’ve really diversified and invested heavily in Salesforce, AWS, and web development in recent years, which is much more than a business strategy; it’s also an employee satisfaction strategy,” he said. “We’re maintaining and growing our leadership with Claris FileMaker, but we don’t hammer it into every project. Offering our engineers the opportunity to branch out and work with new, cutting edge tech and platforms is an important piece of how we’re going to stay a top developer.”

Readers can learn more about DB Services’ FileMaker, Salesforce, and Web Development services. You can also find an additional 18 case studies about the company’s collaborations with customers like Eli Lilly and Company, IU School of Medicine, and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.