SAF Annual Convention 2014 Follow-Up

Every year the Society of American Florists hold their Annual Convention, usually in August or September. This year it was held in August at the Marco Island Marriot.

All of the SAF events, including others like Growth Solutions and the One Day Profit Blast, are exceptional but this convention might have been the best yet. The event gets more popular each year and this year there were more than 100 first-time attendees. It says a lot about the great work SAF is doing bringing quality content to florists.

For us the Annual Convention is a chance to support SAF as they in turn support the retail flower business. It is also an amazing opportunity to meet with existing clients and learn more about how we can serve them better by providing more powerful POS and CRM tools that will help them be more successful. There is nothing like meeting with clients face to face and exchanging ideas with them. Our clients are an amazing source of innovation – by coming to us with ideas that will make FloristWare work better for them they help us make it better for everyone. It was also great to support the many FloristWare clients that were competing in the Sylvia Cup.

It's also nice to meet with people that are not yet FloristWare clients. This year we spoke to several who had left their wire service POS systems and gone with other independent provider. Each tended to say the same thing – that they were saving money but struggling with vastly inferior systems. They might be cheap, and simple, but these shops realized very quickly that they were hurting their business. It was a pleasure to show them that independent POS does not have to mean compromise, and that FloristWare is a powerful, fully featured POS system that really will give them everything they loved about their wire service systems and more. We're looking forward to working with many of them in the near future.

Another very important part for FloristWare is the educational sessions. SAF provides incredible content that again gives us ideas on how to make our software better. We try and have someone taking notes at each of the sessions for review with our developers and clients when the convention is over.

This year FloristWare founder Mark Anderson also co-presented a session with Joe Aldeguar of SAF. The session focussed primarily on the important issue of computer security and the materials are available for download on the SAF website.