Mowing the lawn with a “weed wacker”… It’s a scenario that many people can relate to, especially first-time homeowners who buy a small place with a parking-spot-size lawn, as some of our team members at Altvia have done through the years. The weed wacker/lawnmower analogy comes up often as we prepare to implement AIM, our private equity CRM, for fund managers.
Money is tight, and more importantly, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to invest in a lawnmower. Cutting the grass with a handheld tool works just fine. But then, you move to a home with a bigger lawn and you have a decision to make. Will you struggle to keep up with your yard work and settle for the ugly, uneven cut that is the best you can do with the weed wacker? Or will you upgrade to a machine built for mowing lawns?
An Essential, Purpose-Built Solution
There’s certainly a time at every firm when the weed wacker version of a private equity CRM system serves its purpose and is the most affordable solution.
In that scenario, there are likely just a few people sharing data and they can keep track of fundraising and deal tracking in a spreadsheet. Meanwhile, they use their email address books to manage their contacts, at least to some degree.
But every fund manager aspires to move into that house with the bigger lawn, and the question becomes, “How do you know when the systems you use to support your operations require an upgrade?” While implementing a true private equity CRM like AIM isn’t difficult—in fact, we’ve gone to great lengths to simplify and streamline the process—it’s not as simple as buying a lawnmower, firing it up, and getting to work.
Making a Timely Move to Your Private Equity CRM Solution
Your “system” of spreadsheets, address books, and other tools that have helped you get by becomes more complicated the longer you use it. If you wait too long to get your data into a cohesive, centralized, user-friendly database, you end up with a tangled mess of information that requires a significant amount of time and effort to clean up and straighten out.
At that point, a data migration that would have been simple had you implemented a private equity CRM solution three years ago is now a much bigger project. And even though assistance from Altvia will help you tame that beast, it’s still a project that temporarily takes team members away from focusing on your business.
Launching a Private Equity CRM Solution the Right Way
Some firms decide to simply dump everyone’s information into a database and “massage” it over time. Of course, that means that initially, the firm suffers from the “junk in, junk out” principle. And let’s be honest: The massaging that you’ve planned on probably isn’t going to happen right away, if ever.
Consequently, you may find yourself limping along with really poor data quality for the foreseeable future. And, unfortunately, that means watching your competitors, with their carefully implemented private equity CRM systems, sprint ahead of and get the kind of results you can only dream of.
Are You Ready for a Private Equity CRM System?
If you’ve stopped even once to ask yourself, “Do we need a private equity CRM?” the answer is an unequivocal, “Yes!” That is if your goal is to be successful and grow your firm. (And if that’s not your goal, obviously you should be considering another line of work!)
Our industry and product experts at Altvia can get you into our AIM CRM no matter how complex your processes have become and how convoluted your data is. But you’ll save yourself a great deal of time and effort—and start winning more deals faster—if you make the move today.
The grass keeps growing. If you don’t care for it properly, someone else will. It’s time to get yourself a lawnmower.
