The Infrastructure Mistake Founders Make in Relationship-Driven Businesses

Over time, I’ve come to realize how important relationships are in every area of business — including some high-stakes areas that aren’t exactly known for their warm or welcoming experiences.

For instance, I remember working with a credit union team and realizing how important it was for them to cultivate relationships with their member communities. The concept applies elsewhere. Recruiters need to earn the trust of candidates. Venture capitalists need strong connections with founders.

Most entrepreneurs can see the important relationships in their business. But they can lose that focus as their company scales. As they obsess over things like product, hiring and distribution, they can lack the same intention in cultivating the relationships that matter.

If you’re operating in a relationship-driven industry, you want to invest in relationship infrastructure as you grow. Scratch that. It’s a requirement these days. I’ve found that if you truly want to succeed, you need to invest in relationship infrastructure. Here are three practical shifts founders can implement to help that happen.

Audit and understand where relationships live in your business

Strong connections don’t happen instantly. Every time I’ve built good business relationships, they’ve taken time. They also took place in different settings.

This can lead to critical relationship management information being scattered across various parts of your business. Communication history can sit in inboxes and Slack threads. Meeting notes can exist in countless audio, visual and text-based tools. Relationship ownership is often vague and fragmented. As it grows, the distance between key points of relational information can grow.

Despite their name, even customer relationship management (CRM) tools often lack a comprehensive relationship element. They can silo and completely miss information. That’s why one of the best early infrastructure moves you can make is to go beyond the CRM concept and establish an extended relationship management (XRM) layer in your business.

Rings.ai points out the key difference between CRM and XRM models. A CRM’s focus is singular: to manage a company’s interactions with its customers. The AI-powered relationship intelligence platform compares that narrow focus to an XRM approach, which is built for things like holistic relationship management, process automation, increased transparency and scalability.

An XRM expands the customer focus across all business relationships. Instead of relying only on CRM records, it pulls in communication history, notes and external data to create a unified view of every relationship across the team.

If you want to scale your relationship infrastructure, start here. Use an XRM approach to map your institutional memory and make it visible across your team, even at scale. Centralize your communication history and relationship data at the person and company level.

See relationships as long-term assets, not transactions

The need to cultivate relationships as a core business asset is nothing new. But maintaining that perspective while scaling? That’s where I’ve found things can become challenging. Nevertheless, founders must maintain the mindset that their relationships are more than transactions. They are investments in long-term assets.

Transactional relationships have their place. They’ll always exist. But client relationships aren’t in the same category. They offer much greater value in the form of lower acquisition costs, greater trust and satisfaction and ongoing business.

Your infrastructure can help you stay focused on treating client relationships as recurring relationships. Start with mindset. Stop tracking key relationships as “opportunities.” Instead, see them as long-term assets. Again, use AI and XRMs to resist the linear sales cycles of CRMs. Store client profiles as entities, not interactions.

Treat relationship intelligence as “soft” infrastructure

Relationship intelligence should be deeply ingrained in your growth strategy. It isn’t a feature or an add-on. As a founder of a tech company, I think of relationship tools as productivity enhancements. They are not.

Use your relationship management tools as part of your operating infrastructure. It is a tool that provides a “soft” element that adds depth to the harder elements of your infrastructure. While you implement scalable systems and standard operating procedures (SOPs), investing in relationship intelligence gives you an intangible edge.

A deeper, up-to-date understanding of your organization’s relationships helps you identify revenue opportunities and enhance client services. Understanding nuanced things like a unique connection between a board member and a client can help you take meaningful and effective steps rather than blind actions.

When communication history, ownership and relationship strength are centralized, it can help you move faster, reduce internal friction and coordinate next steps with fewer people. Those are all aspects of infrastructure that make scaling easier.

Setting a relationship-driven foundation early

Founders must recognize the instrumental role that relationships play if they want to facilitate sustainable growth. I’ve found that doing this requires taking the time to identify where relationships live in your business. Treat these as long-term assets, and exercise relationship intelligence when you engage with them.

If you can do that, you can create a relationship-driven infrastructure that can not just hold up when you scale but become a catalyst for growth.

Over time, I’ve come to realize how important relationships are in every area of business — including some high-stakes areas that aren’t exactly known for their warm or welcoming experiences.

For instance, I remember working with a credit union team and realizing how important it was for them to cultivate relationships with their member communities. The concept applies elsewhere. Recruiters need to earn the trust of candidates. Venture capitalists need strong connections with founders.

Most entrepreneurs can see the important relationships in their business. But they can lose that focus as their company scales. As they obsess over things like product, hiring and distribution, they can lack the same intention in cultivating the relationships that matter.