Wheelock Street Capital: Tracking Fund Metrics With AtlasX

As Wheelock experienced headcount growth and raised additional funds, standardizing metrics and reporting on performance became a substantial obstacle. With the opening of a new West Coast office, the geographic footprint of the team became even more distributed, demonstrating cracks within their existing process. The team’s heavy reliance on individual documents and fragmented pipelines caused significant productivity setbacks as information had to be manually centralized for IC meetings each week, resulting in a major drag on productivity.

Even once pipeline updates were consolidated, the team faced the problem of dealing with unstructured deal notes and metrics. It became an arduous task to track deal progress and extract valuable insights retroactively or forward looking. Moreover, the lack of standardized metrics for each deal hindered the ability to monitor the performance of different investment strategies and fund rollups. With fragmented pipelines and manual tracking, the team had limited visibility into fund-level deployment, lacking real-time access to the most up-to-date information.

Collaboration on deals also proved to be another major challenge, siloed documents and deal knowledge impeded consistent communication of next steps within the team. This created barriers to timely decision-making, lengthening the time required to build investment cases, and introducing friction in circulating updated information.

Suffered from: 

• Inconsistent and static deal metrics making it difficult to stay updated on fund progress 
• Fragmented and siloed documents increasing the time required to make decisions 
• Manual report generation for both pipeline and fund-level tracking causing additional friction to stay up to speed  

AtlasX provided an answer to these issues, enabling Wheelock to more efficiently generate insights into their deals, collaborate more effectively across the company, and reduce the time needed to track pipeline performance. 

In order to gain a more accurate understanding of deal performance, Wheelock utilized AtlasX’s customizable deal templates and fund-level tracking. On each deal, this ensured a framework of data points to be tracked for each point in a deal lifecycle, while mandating its data capture for team members. As a result, the team has developed a deeper quality of metrics and thus a better understanding of fund-level insights. With this base of proprietary data, Wheelock has been better able to leverage information and make investment decisions. 

AtlasX helped Wheelock to reduce data silos through a collaborative pipeline with centralized storage of information. The team now has a centralized store to retrieve deal narratives, metrics, documents, and more. Through this digital deal workspace, the team could collaborate on next steps around a centralized deal or portfolio profile. Moreover, AtlasX’s mobile functionality allowed increased engagement while out of pocket, ensuring that Wheelock’s pipeline always reflected the latest information, whether in the office or on-the-go

The platform also played a crucial role in the process of reporting. Leveraging AtlasX’s customizable reports, Wheelock created standardized reports to monitor pipeline progress, fund performance, dry capital deployment, and post-close asset management metrics. These reports can be easily distributed to key stakeholders and can be automated at regular intervals, eliminating the manual hassle for team members and freeing up time for higher value tasks. The team could also make slight modifications or adjust on the fly as needed, running reports with ease. This streamlined reporting process fostered greater confidence in decision-making and a deeper understanding of firm-wide performance.

AtlasX has provided Wheelock with dramatically improved visibility into pipeline performance and key metrics. According to Chris Mejia, Principal at Wheelock Street Capital, AtlasX has had a profound impact, “AtlasX played a key role in automating our pipeline reporting, saved us time on manual tasks, and made information more easily digestible for senior management, saving us crucial time across the board.”

Furthermore, the platform has enabled the team to achieve remarkable time savings in preparing for IC meetings, resulting in a 70% reduction compared to their previous process. The automated reporting also enables them to have great flexibility in analysis and provide clear visibility into their pipeline status. Having up-to-date insights in a user-friendly format has expedited information processing and ensured alignment among team members.

By standardizing their pipeline metrics, Wheelock has also been able to generate a robust internal database of deals they can leverage in the future. With the collaboration from their team, they are able to more quickly process & underwrite deals, progressing high-quality deals faster and killing unattractive deals.