It all started in middle school for Mike. As a teacher there, he was tasked with building a system for grades and comments with FileMaker, which led to communing with other educators doing similar things. Before he knew it, he became an expert in providing customer support and speaking at FileMaker DevCon (now Claris Engage). His strengths? “Managing expectations, figuring out issues, debugging and rapid prototyping and coding,” he says. Mike thinks of himself as a service provider, which means timely responses and complete answers (in complete sentences), anticipating the needs of the client. He also gets everyone to work on the same side – customers and support team – so that things get done right the first time. He gravitates toward issues that relate to education, schools, and local/regional governance.

In addition to making things sing at work, he also likes to play the ukulele and actually sing outside the office.