How Seaside Equity Partners closed 15+ deals and built thousands of new relationships with Affinity

Introduction

Seaside Equity Partners is a majority buyout private equity firm with over $1 billion in assets under management. Founded in 2017, the firm focuses on mission critical services—including skilled trades like HVAC, plumbing, and roofing, as well as professional services like IT training and education—across the western half of the United States.

When Doug Parker joined as Head of Origination two years ago, he inherited a relationship management system built on Excel spreadsheets and a task management platform never designed for deal flow. The firm knew they needed to evolve to support their growing portfolio and increasing deal volume, but finding the right solution meant balancing ease of use, technical sophistication, and cost-effectiveness.

Since implementing Affinity, Seaside has:

• Closed 15+ deals with 10 more under exclusivity
• Built thousands of new relationships tracked in a centralized system
• Saved countless hours previously lost to manual data entry and relationship hunting
• Transformed Monday pipeline meetings with real-time visibility across the entire team

Challenge

Excel spreadsheets and missed opportunities

Before Affinity, Seaside's relationship management was fragmented and manual. The firm tracked all investor relationships, intermediary contacts, and deal sources in Excel spreadsheets—a system that worked in the short term but became unsustainable as the firm scaled.

"We were going through Excel sheets to find contact information. It was really, really antiquated," Parker explains. "If you're managing relationships in Excel, it's just one or two people that are really in that Excel sheet. The whole team is not combing through it and looking for contacts."

The pain points were clear:

• No visibility into relationship history - The team couldn't see when someone last reached out to a contact or what was discussed
• Duplicate outreach - Without centralized tracking, team members would reach out to the same contacts independently
• Missed follow-ups - Opportunities slipped through the cracks because there was no systematic way to track next steps
• Limited collaboration - Information stayed siloed with individual team members rather than being accessible firm-wide

Looking back, Parker is candid about the cost: "We probably missed out on so many opportunities by just not tracking our outbounds and our relationships. There were probably so many deals that we missed out on."

As Seaside prepared to deploy their third fund—$723 million in committed capital—the leadership team knew they needed to "grow up and figure out what was our next evolution as we continue to be a larger private equity firm."

Solution

Finding a tech-forward CRM that doesn't slow you down

Parker led the evaluation process, examining HubSpot, DealCloud, and several smaller CRMs. The criteria were clear: Seaside needed something user-friendly that wouldn't burden the team with heavy data entry, something tech-forward that would evolve with AI and automation, and something cost-effective.

"We're not super techie, so we needed something that was easy to onboard and easy to wrap our minds around," Parker says. "We wanted the whole team to navigate it pretty quickly."

Three factors made Affinity stand out:

1. Historical relationship intelligence

Unlike starting from scratch, Affinity aggregated years of email history to reveal existing relationship strength. "The team already had relationships that we weren't properly recording," Parker explains. "Affinity was able to aggregate a lot of our emails from the past. We could see how strong certain relationships were and continue to stay on top of those."

2. Effortless data entry

"When we're adding records, sometimes you can search a company and it automatically pops up and populates—we just have to add a couple other things," Parker notes. This was a stark contrast to heavier platforms that required extensive manual input.

3. Built for high-velocity deal flow

 "Affinity started off focusing on VC companies," Parker observes. "VC firms do a lot of deals and have tons of relationships—probably thousands for deal flow purposes. We have so many relationships and so many deals that we want to manage at one time. It kind of worked out in our favor to have that VC-ish focus, but you guys transitioning and adding private equity firms to the mix assisted us as well."

Transforming Monday morning pipeline meetings

Today, Affinity is central to Seaside's operations. While Parker serves as the power user managing origination, the entire deal team uses the platform daily.

Every Monday, the team gathers for pipeline meetings where they review active opportunities in Affinity, moving deals forward or making pass decisions based on real-time data. "Everyone on the deal team uses it for our pipeline meetings. We go through the pipeline and move deals forward or pass on deals," Parker explains.

Beyond pipeline management, the team uses Affinity to:

• Track all meeting notes and email communications automatically
• Monitor outbound call volume to maintain relationship cadence
• Identify top deal sources - "We track what deals came from who. What investment bank sent how many deals to us? We want to put those companies at the top of our list"
• Nurture add-on targets - The team uploads prospect lists from Grata into Affinity and systematically tracks outreach over time
• Follow up on IOIs - A custom field tracks how many indications of interest Seaside has submitted, enabling the team to circle back on broken processes
• Manage broader relationships - Beyond deal sources, the team tracks recruiters and lenders they want to build relationships with

Parker also uses Affinity's AI-powered Notetaker to capture meeting details automatically, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

Results

From spreadsheet chaos to deal-closing machine

The transformation has been dramatic. "It's night and day," Parker emphasizes. "We are way, way more organized when it comes to relationships. Everyone is on the same page. It's crucial to our function as a firm."

The quantitative impact speaks for itself:

• 15+ platform and add-on deals closed since implementation
• 10 deals currently under exclusivity that could add to that total
• Thousands of new relationships tracked and managed systematically
• Countless hours saved that were previously spent navigating Excel and hunting for contact information

But perhaps more important are the qualitative changes. The team now has complete visibility into their network, can see relationship strength at a glance, and never misses a follow-up opportunity. Duplicate outreach—a common source of embarrassment and inefficiency—has been eliminated.

"We’ve won a good amount of deals now that we probably wouldn't have won if we hadn't changed over to Affinity," Parker notes. "Looking back, if you have stuff in Excel, you're not seeing the last time you reached out to someone. There's probably so many deals that we missed out on."

For other PE firms evaluating CRMs, Parker's advice is straightforward: "It's really important to utilize a platform that's tech-forward, that's really easy to utilize and navigate, and that's cost-effective. We've looked at a lot of other CRMs, and Affinity is one of the top, if not the top. We're happy with it thus far."