My first real estate job was typing 340 names into a portal
I'm changing careers and had exactly nothing to offer anybody, so when a small fund manager at a meetup mentioned he needed help moving his investor records off spreadsheets and into an actual portal, I said I'd do it. Six weeks, part time, paid badly. Best six weeks of education I've had.
The spreadsheet had 340 rows. It was not 340 investors.
There were people entered twice under a personal name and a trust name. There was a married couple counted as one row in one deal and two rows in another, with different email addresses. There were fourteen rows with no phone number at all. There were three people whose entire contact record was a first name and a Gmail address, and the manager could tell me exactly who each one was from memory, including one guy's dog's name, but there was no version of that anywhere except in his head.
The one that stopped me was a row with a note in the comments column that just said deceased, ask Michael. Dated 2021. Nobody named Michael worked there anymore.
By the end I could tell which deals had gone well by how complete the records were. The good ones had everything. The one that had struggled had missing fields all the way down, like everyone stopped writing things down at the same time.
I don't have a deal. I don't have money to put in a deal. But I now know what 340 investors actually looks like when you have to touch every one of them.