How do your portfolio companies communicate with one another? Are you managing communication with your portfolio companies as effectively as you’d like to?  If not, there are simple tools to help you unify CEOs and managers and establish a support network that helps them grow. We’re sharing easy digital communication solutions that will build up & bring your portfolio companies together.

We know that your firm doesn’t shy away from improvements that will help your portfolio succeed.   How you communicate with your portfolio companies & equip them to network is a major piece of what drives the bigger picture forward.  A streamlined process will allow your firm to provide better help to the companies you back.  

Here are 3 techniques that will help you share information and bring your portfolio companies together.

1. Establish a Collaborative Messaging Space

A collaborative space to communicate is a starting point to create community between portfolio companies.  Furthermore, a virtual place where people can touch base on important topics with minimal clutter is essential to making this space effective.  

There are several existing platforms tailored to this need, but our best recommendation is Slack.  In our opinion, it provides the most robust atmosphere for communication with features to keep messages organized & that suit various needs.

You could also explore a less conventional option.  Discord markets mainly towards video gamers, but if it works it works. It allows for organizing chats and topics so conversations and messages can easily be found later on.

Still, there are plenty of other programs you can utilize. The important thing is that, however you choose to do it, your portfolio company managers can communicate on large and small scales. Instead of searching and cleaning out an inbox, participants can address any number of people, hassle-free.

2. Create a Shared Directory of Vendors

A valuable asset you can share with your portfolio companies is a cultivated directory of vendors for the services they need.  It’s not only a service for your companies, but a process to keep you more organized and maintain better quality control.  When trusted companies that you’ve vetted are easy to access, it’s a win-win for everyone.

With a directory, you escape the trap of sites where reviews can be bought and manipulated. In-house recommendations are the safest way for any business to operate, and this allows all the relevant and trusted ones to be available in an instant.

Keeping things simple, an Excel doc is all that you need to house this information. Include a name, number, the type of work they do, how portfolio company management rated them in the past, or any information you deem relevant. 

Do your best to keep this list tight.  The best way to avoid an over-saturated list of sub-par vendors is to use a ranking system that rates their quality level – something as simple as, “good”, “better”, “best”.  Better yet, your directory should contain nothing but “A” game players. Providing names that you and other trusted individuals vouch for is best for your playbook.

This system can be beneficial for years to come and make for an easy way to review work that has been done by third parties in the past.  Make sure you are archiving data on vendors no longer in use.  That way you can reference their history should their name come up again.

3. Run Quarterly Webinars

Webinars seem to have forever been cemented as an effective meeting format and we can only anticipate that their quality will keep getting better.  Your portfolio company’s leadership teams have become more accustomed to webinars as opposed to constant in-person meetings.  Modeling business practices to these changes is an opportunity for more frequent live communication to share high-quality information. 

A collaborative webinar space between your company’s CEOs and other leadership allows for the best communication and updates on growing issues within and around their businesses. Though collaborative messaging spaces cover wide ground,  live (and even recorded) webinars allow for large developments to be explained to their fullest.

Think of these webinars like a Ted Talk with a captive audience, and a platform for your subject matter experts to provide their expertise on specific topics.  Multi-company seminars provide a valuable opportunity for communication that feels bigger than the day-to-day people grow accustomed to on Slack or Discord.

Now the last thing people want is more time on Zoom.  All we suggest is interactive presentations among portfolio companies to get everybody back on the same page and engaging in how to advance.

Let’s Summarize

To wrap it all up, here are our recommendations for managing communication amongst portfolio companies.

1. Provide a messaging platform that promotes regular communication and organization.
2. Curate a master list of third-party vendor information that companies have shared and open access to.
3. Create webinars that engage portfolio companies with robust updates and live conversations amongst each other.

These are practices that you can implement one step at a time with little fuss.  Yes, some people will have more of a learning curve with a new messaging board. But the programs we mentioned are user-friendly for even the less tech-savvy on your team. They’re also the next logical steps in digital communication — once actively using them, you’ll see what we mean!   

Of course, there are digital adjustments you could make to improve communication and collaboration amongst your portfolio companies that we haven’t touched on.  If we’ve stirred up other ideas or questions about how to manage communication between your portfolio companies then we’d love to hear from you!