The FBA Team met up at our office bright and early to do a massive data migration of our franchisors into our new Members website.  Armed with nothing but doughnuts, coffee, and Christopher Quintero‘s instructions, we set out on our mission!

As you know, we have over 300 franchisors in our system and the amount of data contained within each of their profiles is very large. Using the FBA systems we break down franchises into important details to allow our broker members to be able to search on any specific criteria.

The event was intended to be both productive in insuring accuracy of the data and to educate each of our team with how to use the new system. Despite the early hour and the large task in front of us everyone was in great spirits. I started out by showing everyone how amazing our new system is and how it is going to fundamentally change our members’ businesses for a bigger and brighter future. Through our new system our members are going to be able do research even faster than before, quickly find specific trainings or tools from our hundreds of hours of training, or make new friends and generate stronger business relationships with our social features.

I couldn’t help but feel emotional. To have seen the FBA come from nothing but an idea in Sabrina’s head back in 2008 to what it is today is just remarkable. It’s hard to imagine all the people who have connected through our traditional website and I am so excited about the possibilities that are before all of us and our members today. The process of building and managing a project of this website’s size and scope has taken about a year and a half of non-stop work. Every day I would work on it with my team and every night I would dream of new ideas to add to it. At this point, with the team ready to dive into it, just fills me up and I’m so happy to see what it has become.

Through the day we kept our attitudes positive and loaded with caffeine and sugar. 80s party music played (possibly a bit too loud) but it was worth it to see Joel and Mandy recreate a Napoleon Dynamite dance moment to “Take My Breath Away” from Berlin.

We didn’t get it all done…BUT we did a large amount of it accomplished.

This marks the start of our transition to our future. We’re all excited and, over the next few weeks, we will be sharing with you some of the exciting things to come.

Stay tuned! We’re just getting started.