Advertise for AS400 programmers or Informix and you'll have the same problem. Fortunately or unfortunately (depending how you look at it), it seems to be growing more and more. Unfortunately, there aren't enough programmers. There is a massive shortage of programmers in most languages. Depending on a companies requirements, VB\Access could be enough if their tables are small. A major company that I worked for used the VB\Access route and now are thinking about changing platforms ... that route was too inflexible and especially too slow on bigger tables. Did you not find any VFP programmers or the ones you found were not in your price range?