Cove Street Capital is a boutique investment firm in Los Angeles with 12 employees.
This is a portrait of the firm during its quarterly busy period. Everyone in the office deals with tons of data - receiving it, processing it, and sharing it. It’s a small team, so there is a lot of collaboration, but also often a time pinch when co-working. Deadlines make or break the firm’s partnerships and in finance one cannot afford to mess up. As a result, individuals silo themselves and the work being done across departments is not shared with people who could benefit. The same calculations are done multiple times and arguments break out over methodology and interpretation. That’s a data management problem.
To fully understand the firm’s data needs, I analyzed the quarterly tasks and recorded all data points onto post-its. Without limits on what I could put there, I found myself realizing truths that weren’t spoken aloud. The data in use comes from 3 sources, not one. Multiple manual calculations reoccur.
Once I had our needs written out, I organized it into like-pods. Finally, I began looking for larger patterns. What I found was 3 big workflow patterns - fulfill duty, fulfill requests, and find new partners. They were using all the same data, but they were being treated like separate tasks. It took a few rounds of organizing and adding information before I found a pattern worth pursuing.
To determine what we should do, I embarked on some multi-faceted research. I spoke with 2 other companies to find out how they deal with their own data problems and found that they had dedicated positions for data management and that they too kept tasks siloed. I interviewed a software company that specializes in this service and found that it wasn’t a match due to price and future inflexibility. I also presented the problem to the team. This gave me multiple viewpoints to go along with my data organization.
The final solution was a proprietary internal database. I was able to get a good understanding of where the data comes from, goes, and who is involved. I also identified people in the firm who wanted to work on the project with me that have different skills and viewpoints. When I hit a wall, I went back to the post-it stage.
A future iteration would explore custom software. Current off-the-rack offerings were not the right fit, but software tailored to specific needs is a future possibility. As the project progressed, we checked for accuracy, speed, and usability.
The firm mission is to delight clients, have fun, and make money. Managing data well is an essential underlying step that came to light. This is a vision of the team in the future, enjoying data success.