Cover Photo: This is a very remote and secret location in Patagonia
<aside> <img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios/250/000000/light-on.png" alt="https://img.icons8.com/ios/250/000000/light-on.png" width="40px" /> This template is free and there is no catch. We hope it helps you on your investment and learning journey. If you find that it adds a lot of value to your firm and you feel you should pay something then please donate what you think it is worth to the Rhodes Trust, which funds the Rhodes Scholarships to the University of Oxford. Donations can be made online here. Please reference Kalakau Avenue.
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This template is designed for an investment firm that performs research on companies and industries. However, it can be easily adapted to any firm. It is a research management system, CRM system, workflow management tool, decision log, client engagement tool, and web publishing system all in one. We write about building and designing research management systems and the value that a great one can bring here.
We designed this as a research system for our own investment research and process as well as that of my prior firm. We designed it because there really were no other good solutions on the market. We have used Microsoft OneNote extensively and it is not fit for purpose. We have trialled Evernote and the conclusion was the same. Both lack the power of databases and therefore lack the ability to properly sort, filter, link, and recall information sets. Both inevitably get to the point where information is disparate and inconsistent. We regretted ever using OneNote. We have looked at multiple SaaS-based investment research systems as well as Salesforce and HubSpot. Typically, these solutions are unnecessarily expensive and they never quite do everything you need. Notion is easy to customise so you can build on this template to perfectly suit your needs.
It may seem daunting and there are some switching costs involved in the transition from your old system, but it’s worth the switch. We use it multiple times per day and have never looked back. We only use this and have even stopped using Microsoft Word. Why email Word docs or PDFs when you can just share your great looking Notion page, complete with links to other shared material. Your client letters can move beyond PDFs to look more like Wikipedia or Stratechery with links between information sets.
As you will see on the left-hand navigation bar, it has all the things any team would use. A priorities board, a place for all your meeting notes and general notes, homes for your work and research, a contact database, a firm decision log, client communications etc.
It is best to think about Notion as OneNote + Excel. It combines the freedom of note taking with the power of databases so that all your meeting notes, contact lists, research notes, client communications etc can all be linked to each other. It also ensures you don’t end up with data duplication and inconsistency. This allows you to perform tasks such as:
Over time, your research and note taking will begin to resemble a Wikipedia-style structure with nested links to other pages.
The first basic command in Notion is the “/” symbol. Type this symbol and you will see all the useful options from changing fonts, headings, inserting tables of contents that link to headings automatically, inserting pages, linking databases etc.
The second basic command is the “@” symbol. Type this symbol and start writing the name of a page or person and you will automatically create a link back to that page.
