Almost a year ago to this day, I was sitting in hospital, waiting to welcome my first child into the world. It was a daunting and beautiful moment and, as all sorts of thoughts started rushing into my head, I decided I needed to write them down in a letter to my son. So, I put down my phone and ran down to the nearest convenience store to find pen and paper. I wanted the letter to be meaningful and something that he could treasure, hold in his hands and read when he was older!

There is something special about interacting with an original document that cannot be replicated by copied-and-pasted, automated content. David Rubenstein, Chairman of Carlyle, knows this, and it is for that reason that he has dedicated his philanthropic efforts to preserving original documents of historical importance and displaying them in museums and exhibitions, even though detailed scanned copies of those documents can be found online. If people are going to see something in person, they might read about it beforehand. They might have a deeper experience when they physically see it, so they might remember it more afterwards.  As he puts it: “People still want to see the original of something. By having these historic documents where people can see them, they might learn a little bit more about American history.” 

If this is true for our most personal milestones and culturally important moments, I wonder why many professional interactions have forgotten the human, hand-written touch. As a professional, I receive an enormous amount of cold outreach emails every day and almost all of them are completely impersonal and inaccurate in a way that shows that the sender has not even bothered to do more than 30 seconds of research. In fact, knowing the automation tools available on the market right now, I know that they have most likely not considered who I am or what I do, but generated an automated task through a CRM. My personal favourites are the ones that tell me how they can help Norte Partners gain new customers, or if I can connect them to the right decision-maker on IT spend within my company (spoiler alert: we don’t have customers, and we are a husband-and-wife team, so we are the only decision makers…although I will confess that sometimes I do refer them to my wife just for fun!)

Whilst this mass automation outreach approach might work in some high-volume, low-value interactions and might increase certain brand awareness, it certainly feels cold, disengaged and signals the little importance placed on the relationship. The global volume of daily emails has been estimated to have grown by ~50bn in the past 5 years. No wonder that so many emails are getting ignored or lost into spam folders!

When we started Norte Partners, we decided that we would only reach out to people that we want to have a meaningful conversation with, and put pen to paper in the same way that I have done in the past for the most important people in my life. Using our real voices to communicate, and not hiding behind AI-generated written output, reflects one of the central tenets of our team culture: to bring our full, authentic human selves to work every day. Meaningful, human connection – in all its messiness and imperfections – matters to us  because we are aiming to protect people’s legacies by succeeding in the running of their lifelong mission. Business starts and finishes with people –  individuals with their own personal stories that can’t be replicated easily by an AI-generated message. (Sorry ChatGPT, you aren’t that good yet)

Let’s have meaningful conversations!