Neal Goldman, chairman and CEO of Relationship Science, has built a fast-growing company that provides its clients with what it describes as a “relationship map” that interconnects 3 million of the nation’s most influential people and their organizations. In the following interview, Goldman talks about his firm’s technology and how private wealth industry professionals are using it to create new business opportunities.
Prince: Relationship Science is about to reach its one-year anniversary. Can you tell us about the company?
Goldman: RelSci is an online relationship capital platform that helps organizations and individuals generate greater business opportunities as well as make smarter business decisions by leveraging their relationship capital. We bring a big-data, analytical approach to helping organizations and individuals figure out the “who you know”—and the “who they know.”
Since launching a year ago, we’ve signed more than 350 clients that are leaders in their fields across investment banking, wealth management, private equity, the Fortune 1000, hedge funds, professional services, creative services, the nonprofit community and the legal sector. We’ve grown incredibly quickly.
We’ve raised about $90 million from some of the most sophisticated individuals and institutions on Wall Street. With the money, we’re significantly upgrading our services. We’re very proud of where we are in only a year.
Prince: Can you define what you mean by relationship capital?
Goldman: Relationship capital refers to the contacts and connections that individuals have collected and can leverage to create new possible opportunities and improve business outcomes. It is the most valuable business development resource anyone has, but most people and the organizations they manage are not realizing its full potential.
Prince: What problem is Relationship Science solving?
Goldman: Most businesses fail to maximize the collective relationships of their employees, executives, board members and advisors—leaving countless new business opportunities, potential investors, philanthropic donations, partnerships and clients untouched. Executives within these companies are missing opportunities every day by failing to turn the individual assets of personal relationships into business results.
At the same time, most professionals are not capitalizing on their relationships. For example, the hedge fund general partner is often not getting maximum benefit in raising capital from his or her close business relationships. The same can be said of other professionals. There’s extensive empirical research that shows wealth managers can dramatically increase their assets under management by understanding and working the networks of their clients. It’s not only wealth managers. Accountants, attorneys and life insurance agents can also significantly increase their revenues by focusing on the relationship capital they have and aren’t using.
Many multifamily offices are excellent examples of the failure of businesses to capitalize on their principals’ relationship capital. When they do concentrate their efforts on leveraging and strategically expanding outsourced providers, they’re able to meaningfully and quickly grow revenues from generating new client referrals to maximizing opportunities with their outsourced providers. The complication is that very few of them are doing so.
Relationship Science is solving this problem by providing a unique technology platform that executive teams in corporate environments or professionals can use to tap into their most underused asset: the relationships they have and the relationships people within their organizations have with key influencers and decision-makers.
We’re empowering people and their firms to fully leverage their relationship capital. The platform’s curated database of over 3 million top executives and high-net-worth individuals offers detailed portraits of the country’s most important influencers. The RelSci platform bridges the gap between large and small institutions and provides pathways to reach some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the country. It allows our clients to map the clearest set of connections to 1 million public and private organizations. Also, by encouraging and rewarding the sharing of individual knowledge across an enterprise, we help clients be more efficient, collaborative, agile and opportunistic. We help them build better businesses.
RelSci also does a lot more than just helping people figure out how they can meet decision-makers. Before any meeting, RelSci helps executives and professionals understand the full scope of the other person’s business network, experiences, board memberships, donations, recent news and more. Profiles on the platform include work history, board connections, deal history, education, non-profit donations and affiliations, political donations, personal interests, creative works and awards, business relationships and relevant family connections.
We continuously update profiles on those 3 million influential people and the organizations they work for. I’m sure many of your readers will already be in the database.
Prince: Who benefits from your services?
Goldman: Anyone who wants to gain a competitive advantage. Public and private businesses and non-profit organizations are all benefiting from the platform, including investment banks and law firms sourcing clients, private equity firms sourcing deals and raising capital, nonprofit organizations looking for donors and wealth management firms trying to better leverage existing clients for referrals or hedge funds looking to gain insights.
Prince: Can you give me a few examples of the firms that have used Relationship Science’s services?
Goldman: We have hundreds of clients, but because of the highly competitive nature of these industries, many of these clients require anonymity. However, a few of our high-profile clients have given us permission to use their name as they have experienced the benefits of the platform and feel strongly about how it’s become a game-changer for their business. A few examples of our clients are Geller & Company, Guggenheim Partners, the World Economic Forum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nasdaq, Jones Lang LaSalle, Silver Lake Technology Management and Odyssey Investment Partners.
Prince: What matters more, what you know or who you know?
Goldman: I would ask your readers to think of all the deals they’ve closed, of all the clients they acquired, of all the money they raised in the last year. How many were the result of a cold call? Probably very few, if any. How many were the result of a previous relationship or an introduction from a colleague, partner or a friend? I think we can all agree, the “what” you know matters, but it’s the “who” you know that gets the deals done.
For many organizations, the personal relationships of every employee, board member and executive are your foot in the door. But, unfortunately, most organizations have no idea who they really know. Similarly, as I mentioned, there’s considerable empirical validation that professionals have enormous untapped opportunities, but don’t know how to take advantage of them. That’s where we come in. Closing the deal is still up to you. But the idea with our platform is to make getting the meeting easier—and making it a warm one.
Prince: Where do you source your data and how do you keep the platform updated and accurate?
Goldman: All of our data is collected from publicly available sources. We use our own proprietary technology coupled with a team of several hundred people working solely on content to collect and confirm the information displayed on the platform. It is the combination of technology with human controls that makes the platform so clean and precise. We utilize and cross-check thousands of publicly available sources, and the platform is updated literally every minute.
Prince: How do you see your business growing in the near future?
Goldman: Most companies and most professionals look at their resources in a two-dimensional sense: time and money. We believe we’re helping to tap a third exceedingly important resource: relationships.
If we accept that real connections and warm meetings matter as much or even more than ideas or expertise, then professionals and organizations need to take advantage of their relationship capital to achieve success. Any high-caliber advisor or institution that can mine their internal network for external relationships will gain an advantage over the competition. I would argue that within five years, platforms like RelSci will be viewed as required business development tools.
