Growing up in Michigan I played travel Hockey my entire childhood. If you've ever been involved in hockey, either playing or spectating, you've most likely heard the expression, “creating time and space”. I'm not sure if my childhood coaches were aware of what this phrase truly meant, though they repeated it more times than I can remember. At the time, I was a goalie, because of this I was very different than the rest of my teammates. Due to the separation, I never really paid attention to my coach’s “chalk talks''; which were basically our coach drawing a makeshift hockey rink on the back of a metal door locker room. I remember the chalk he used specifically always seemed to be about the size of a thumbnail. To this day, I'm not sure what happened to the original crayon-length piece of chalk, somehow they always ended up with only a small fraction. More impressively, this tiny piece of chalk would last the entire season. Circling back to “time and space”; in Hockey, it refers to the degree of separation from your opponent (space) which enables the player longer-term control of the puck (time). The concept is “Time and space” should give you the ability to determine your next move, ultimately creating time to decide where you want the puck to go.
Through the last several years of my career, I've had the pleasure of creating relationships with a long list of amazing individuals. These days, I'm surrounded by people who are recognized as leaders in the commercial real estate industry around the globe. These range from investor relations professionals, CPAs, property managers, maintenance technicians, CEOs, GPs, LPs, etc.In the process of getting to know the people I now call my network, I started to realize that they all have something in common. Creating time for themselves. Some wanted to spend more time with their loved ones, some wanted more time away from their loved ones. Some wanted to vacation more, while others wanted to have more time to work on hobbies. Time being the consistent variable.In my day-to-day, I receive reminders regarding my technology usage regularly. Every Sunday, like clockwork, my phone reminds me how much time I've spent staring at the screen for the given week. To add salt to the wound, when I open the notification, the system generates a series of analytics. The details of which dive into the amount of time I've spent on each app installed on my phone.
When used properly, Investment Management software does a lot more than manage your investor relationships. With proper implementation and adoption, firms are able to upgrade their operations across the board.In my article Creating Investor Visibility, I dive deeper into how Investment Management software dramatically increased my productivity, while working in an Investor Relations role. I know from first-hand experience, in the syndication business, time is of the essence. In the time wasted building an investor report in excel - a deal can slip right through your fingers.Adding tools with the ability to mass upload documents, and distribute K1's remove mass bottlenecks in many firms' annual administrative tasks. Implementing a feature like instant commitment funding saves dozens of hours in the capital raise process.Not to mention calculating distributions, which can save you the headache of dealing with complicated excel calculations when automated.With all this in mind, how are you going to create time and space in your day-to-day lives? Only you can answer that question.