LinkedIn Post: You Can't Hold 10,000 People in Your Head

Source: /opt/gcv-portfolio/captions/4KgdezzKaB0.en.vtt — GCV relationship-management/CRM talk, ~00:00:01–00:00:45 opener + ~10:00–11:07 tool payoff

The toughest thing nobody warns you about when you start a non-profit, or honestly just a business, is relationship management.

One day you're tracking the people you actually know, and the next you're supposed to keep 10,000 people straight. The human brain can't track 10,000 people. You can't hold them all in your head. You'd forget Jeffrey and how he loves his motorcycle, or Samantha and how she's really good at tennis. Those little details that tell you who a person is, you can't keep tens of thousands of them at once. They start falling out.

There's a name for the limit. Dunbar's number. The brain holds about 150 real relationships. A few more if you're sharp, a few less if you're not. It was never built to track an org.

So you build systems. And here's where people overcomplicate it. You'd be surprised how far you can get on well-organized spreadsheets and a few standards, doing it the same way every time.

The spreadsheet stops being enough when the work turns repetitive and heavy. If you're emailing the same 500 journalists every six months, stop copying between five spreadsheets. That's when you get a real tool, tag people as you add them, and pull a list in one click instead of rebuilding it by hand every quarter.

The tool was never the point. It's just there so your brain isn't doing work it was never built to do. A good system remembers the little details so you don't have to.

Jeffrey stays the motorcycle guy, Samantha stays the tennis player, and you get to show up like you actually know them. That's the part worth building.

draft from corpus — based on Brandyn's GCV relationship-management talk (4KgdezzKaB0.en.vtt)