Last weekend I pulled my old 2019 contact spreadsheet out of a Google Drive folder. Two thousand rows. Maybe forty of them ever closed. The rest? Gone cold. Never had a real system to work them past the first call. If you’ve been in this business more than a year, you know the feeling — […]
Last March, a broker buddy of mine in Tampa nearly lost a $1.2M listing. The reason? Two of his agents — one in Austin, one in Miami — were updating the same client record in two different tools. Brutal. Truth is, that’s the price you pay for running a modern brokerage without the right stack.
A $640M long/short equity fund I advised in Greenwich blew its 2024 capital raise window with $185 million still on the table. Why? Because the IR team was tracking allocator conversations across two Excel files, a shared Outlook inbox, and a Notion page nobody updated past July. By the time they reconstructed which family office
A mid-market M&A boutique I advised in Charlotte walked away from a $42 million sell-side fee in 2024. Why? Because nobody on the coverage team realized two MDs had been working the same family-owned target — from opposite ends of the firm — for 14 months. The client found out, got spooked, signed with a
Picture this. You’re running a 22-agent shop in Tampa. Your top producer just blew a $1.4M listing because a buyer lead from your IDX website sat in someone’s Gmail inbox for three days. Lead went to Compass. That’s the moment most growing brokerages wake up and realize a free contact app or a duct-taped Google
A mid-market PE firm I advised in Boston blew through their 2024 raise window with $340 million still uncommitted because their IR team was running LP outreach out of a shared Outlook inbox and a 14-tab Google Sheet. Not a strategy problem. A data problem. By the time they reconstructed who had been pitched, who’d
A boutique RIA I advise in Connecticut spent $94,000 on a CRM rollout in 2023. Then ripped it out 11 months later. Not because the software was bad. Because nobody asked whether it could model a multi-generational trust, sync with Schwab Advisor Center, and produce a 408(b)(2) audit trail in the same pane. Truth is,
