The context
A US land investment fund of $80M, run by its partners.
The problem, as it was lived
In a fund, the raw material isn’t the deal. It’s what was said around the deal. And what was said didn’t live where the deal lived. Part of the relationship sat in WhatsApp conversations. Another part sat in email threads, often crossed between several partners. The rest sat in the head of whoever took the call.
The consequence: to find out where a deal stood, you had to ask the partner who was running it, and then wait for him to answer. Every question cost someone else an interruption, and every late answer cost decision time. Multiplied by the number of live deals and the number of partners, this stopped being an annoyance. It was the speed of the fund.
What we built
A CRM brain shared across the partners, wired to a single memory.
WhatsApp conversations and crossed email threads are centralized in one place, attached to the right deals. The system maintains a common memory of every deal, one that no longer depends on who happened to be in the room. Each partner gets a daily brief built on what concerns him. And each has a private space to look things up, so he can get an answer without interrupting anyone.
What it changed
Each partner knows where the others stand without having to ask.
It’s a short sentence, and it is exactly the deliverable. The question that used to mean interrupting someone and then waiting now goes to the system, and the answer comes back with the history attached.
The proof
In production.
If your company has the same disease in a different form, the one where the information exists but is never in the same place as the decision, that is precisely what the audit maps.