A conversation with April Robinson and John Powell of Pilot House Associates
Following the ongoing success of our partnership with Pilot House, we caught up with April Robinson, VP of Investment Operations, and John Powell, Enterprise Cloud Architect, to find out how the family office’s quest for operational excellence and efficiency is going, and how new integrated technologies are aiding them along the way.
Read on to find out what they had to say about all of the above and what it’s meant for user adoption and Pilot House’s pursuit of progress and versatility, or click here to download the Bipsync x Pilot House success story.
Can you provide a brief overview of your organization and how this project started?
April Robinson: Pilot House is a single family office based in Boston. We established the office back in the late 1990s when the family exited its operating business. What started with 4 employees is now north of 50, and more than half of those are in our nonprofit group. The family office side is where John and I function. We’re managing data and reporting for two large asset pools with a significant number of individual fund investments across multiple managers. That’s an enormous amount of data coming in – a lot of document storage.
We have a small ops team considering the scale of the investments we run. Our goal is to leverage technology to keep that team small by letting them work as smart and efficiently as possible. We rely on software solutions to help us manage data and workflows so we never lose sight of a capital call notice or a deadline for a new fund investment, and we maintain accurate document records, reporting, and enable communications between teams concerning different workflow stages.
Initially, our processes were siloed and modeled after all-in-one products that tried to do everything but didn’t do any one segment of the business particularly well. As a result, we decided to shift away from legacy software to more flexible options like Bipsync which enabled far better data management and communication. As our asset base diversified and relationships expanded, we required agile solutions to handle workflow, document management, and team coordination effectively.
So we were searching for an integrated best-in-class solution that is adaptable to our process, and not the other way around. Thanks to the talent behind the Bipsync team and their agile thinking that resonates with how we think, we were able to look at workflow solutions and integrations in tandem.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the challenges you were facing that led your organization to consider a platform like Bipsync?
April Robinson: The project originated with our IT group. As our portfolio has diversified over the years, we needed a system to help us manage the flow of data coming from those managers and document the workflows so that they could be shared amongst the team. Our team needed true CRM functionality to keep track of meeting notes and ideas, and John’s team stepped up to address this.
John Powell: We had an existing document management platform, but it was used for April’s team and was set up like a classification system, not necessarily a platform that’s living and breathing. On the other hand, our investment team was operating more in a note-type structure, so not everything was a document, and it’s not necessarily just in Word or Excel or a PDF. They needed something more fluid – easy to modify and access – and had the ability to relate that information to contacts, entities, investments, managers, and other related records. So they wanted something like a OneNote but with more formality and structure – a system where they can collaborate and can easily see all the interactions that have taken place across all the funds and managers and the associated context. The existing system we had in place wasn’t designed to support all of that.
That’s when we met with John Hans at Bipsync, who did a really good job at explaining the breadth and flexibility of their platform, and it offered us a nice combination of all the functionality we needed for each team. We found that it even supported our accounting team’s workflows. Within less than a year we had it rolled out for everyone – it wasn’t just one group, it was rolled out to everyone at the firm, which, for us especially, was crazy fast to get that done.
We understand that implementing new systems can be a challenge – how did you approach change management to ensure user adoption?
John Powell: Over the years, we had developed shorthand codes internally to reference a specific fund or manager in our incumbent system – which became muscle memory if you’ve been here long enough. We were sort of hacking it, and it was hard for new members to learn and adopt.
We realized we needed a system that is more intuitive but can also fit into what we’ve designed. Structurally, we had done a massive redesign of the flow of information where we diagrammed and documented each team’s processes and workflows for our prior implementations, and Bipsync was able to adapt to that and helped us design the layout from direct owners to investments to partnerships all the way down, and map it between the two systems.
After our initial demo, we noticed that Bipsync had this concept of a note being a core dynamic feature that can be left unstructured or you can choose to add structure to it by adding a customizable note type that operates as a tag. The system is very flexible and has the ability to capture all associated metadata and related documents, and it is easy for users to add content and data on the fly. Its search function made it a lot clearer for our new Managing Director to be able to easily look up the information, retrieve it, but also tag it properly so that she can associate it with other contexts. At the same time, the Investment Ops team can manage their workflow within the same system leveraging the same information, but with views and dashboards designed specifically for them.
Accounting was another layer – where we’re looking at the investment vehicles that roll up to a fund. We were able to implement the Accounting team’s workflows in Bipsync, which was cool to see. It’s like, “Oh, we can have multiple entity records, and you can see how data and information progress from one team to the next throughout the investment lifecycle.” Everything is related and presented in a nice structured way in Bipsync.
April Robinson: I think it’s Bipsync’s versatility that made us realize we had found what we were looking for. We needed a product that was versatile enough that if the Managing Directors are searching, and they think on a manager level, versus John on a super tech level, or our Ops team on a fund level, they can all find exactly what they’re looking for.
The project’s greatest accomplishment was user adoption. One of our Managing Directors never used our previous system due to how difficult it was to navigate and find what he was looking for as a result of coding, confusing naming conventions, and menus that were not at all intuitive to the average user. He relied on a much more manual process. With Bipsync, we were able to set him up with his customized views showing the document sets he is most interested in seeing – so now, he’ll go in Bipsync and run a search on his own – which speaks volumes for someone that was so hands off – to now, being comfortable enough to use the search functionality of Bipsync and just type in the manager name he’s looking for – so, huge win!
What did the implementation process look like?
John Powell: It was really smooth. We met with the Bipsync implementation team to show them what we needed, and what we’d been using, and then they got to work hashing out recommendations on best practices – how we can improve on things like the flow of capital calls coming in and going out, for example. There were lots of direct meetings and Patrick Harms, one of Bipsync’s implementation members, even visited us on-site.
From there, the Bipsync implementation team was just absolutely incredible in taking what we had discussed and diagrammed, and building that into Bipsync – but not in the way that they wanted it to be, but in the way that we asked for. This is a very different approach than the typical vendor saying, ”This is what we do, you have to learn how to make it work.” With Bipsync, it’s more “This is what we recommend – what do you think? What would you like to change? What works, what doesn’t work? How can we make this better?”
April Robinson: What I appreciated most about the Bipsync team during implementation was their ability to approach this from a creative perspective – which you don’t typically find in software, particularly in implementations. It was really refreshing. They were open to thinking outside the box to help us get to where Pilot House wanted to be with, for example, a capital call workflow, versus what another client may have wanted for that same type of workflow.
John Powell: It really was a win. April used the phrase “thought partner” to describe Bipsync in the past, and I think that’s such a great description. It feels like everyone at Bipsync is collaborating with us, rather than just offering us a transactional service. They’re not finishing the job, wishing us luck, and then disappearing. Instead, there’s this living, breathing, evolving collaboration between the vendor and the client.
How did Bipsync integrate with other tools and systems in your tech stack?
John Powell: As you can imagine, the API functionality has opened the door to what’s possible. Today, we view Bipsync as the central source of truth in terms of where data sits and where it flows. The nice thing about Bipsync’s API is that because everything is based on conditions and rules we’ve set, Bipsync can send out notifications that can trigger downstream processes within the platform itself as well as across our integrated tech stack. Because Bipsync is designed in an extremely extensible way, we can leverage their API to build on to the platform additional capabilities to enhance the process. An example of extensibility is its ability to send SQS messages to our AWS accounts to run customized business applications and logic.
As mentioned before, we’ve integrated Bipsync with our portfolio aggregation system – where Bipsync acts as the starting point of the due diligence process when we’re looking at a new fund. Once that fund hits a certain stage, its unique identifier in Bipsync is added as an attribute to the portfolio management system to sync certain changes between systems.
Another example is an in-house application we built that analyzes and extracts data from K-1s. The K-1 data that our app extracts are imported and mapped back into Bipsync fields alongside other contexts. Bipsync became the UI for our app, displaying the K-1 and extracted data in a split view all within Bipsync. So our accounting team no longer has to open up multiple windows to key in information manually – it’s now being integrated using the Bipsync API.
Lastly, we’ve rolled out a new platform to manage data extraction and retrieval; the synchronization between this platform and Bipsync has again proved to be incredible thanks to the ability of the Bipsync team to be so versatile, so quick to adapt and to leave a very standardized API open to other vendors. We were able to very quickly move to the new platform because we’re not wasting time on things like managing servers, and patching the underlying infrastructure. These things that Bipsync is solving for allow me and my team to be more forward-looking and focus on strategic projects like business logic and direct collaboration with investment operations, accounting, and investor teams.
Last question here for you, how would you best articulate the value you are getting from Bipsync?
April Robinson: I’d say the collaboration factor among teams. Certainly from the Managing Directors down to the Investment Ops team has, I’d say, doubled in efficiency just with the implementation of Bipsync. And the collaboration with the Investment Ops team out to other teams, I’d say probably the same – where there was very little interaction before – it’s now so highly integrated, and both teams are now able to approach it from their different perspectives. So I’d say we’ve more than doubled in efficiencies, just with the addition of Bipsync. And I’m probably grossly understating it.
John Powell: We had two new employees start, one in accounting, and one in investment operations. The barrier to entry and getting to understand the system and the structure of how we operate is so much lower and so much easier now for new employees to come and see it, it just logically makes sense. It’s not something that’s like, “Oh, these are the codes you need to know” or “this is the report you have to run.” It’s more of, “What are you trying to view, at what level? And do you like it?” And if not, there’s another way to do it.
The UI design is great, but the structure and everything else is also just way more intuitive. And from an IT side, there have been massive amounts of time saved. It’s weird when we look back and think about what we were doing before and then realize the amount of time spent managing infrastructure compared to now – I mean, it’s a massive shift.
Download the Pilot House Success Story to read more, or book a meeting with the team today.