Ontra’s Atlas Automates and Streamlines Entity Management for Littlejohn Capital

Challenge

Family-owned private equity firm struggles with manual entity management processes

President of Littlejohn Capital, Angus Littlejohn III, recognized that his firm’s entity management processes were manual, fragmented, and inconsistent, but never considered looking for a better way. As a current Ontra customer, Angus was eager to participate when Ontra sought his input on their new AI-powered entity management platform designed for private equity.

Leading a small, family-owned firm, Angus often felt the burden of document retrieval, organization, management, storage, and sharing for portfolio companies. Entity management became even more onerous when a portfolio company underwent a change in upper management and hadn’t established consistent document filing and storage processes. A new officer or CFO would have to contact Angus to gain access to the company directors’ and officers’ slates, operating agreements, and other critical corporate documents.

While Angus could locate these documents and share them with the new management, he yearned for a central repository that would provide external parties with access to up-to-date entity information—requiring less of his time and freeing him for value-added work.

“I have one company where we have worked with multiple CFOs over the course of our investment. That’s a perfect example of the confusion I’m talking about. When a former CFO doesn’t save documentation in the same folder on a drive structure, the new CFO can’t find the specific documentation they need to access,” explained Angus.

The existing manual processes for surfacing corporate documents weren’t always straightforward. Information was compiled in spreadsheets, text documents, or slides and stored in a folder, a data room, or historical emails. To add to the confusion, Angus, the legal counsel, and the CFO often spent time determining who had the most recent and accurate version of the documentation.

“Before Atlas, entity information was cobbled together in spreadsheets, text documents, or slides. It was a triangle between legal, the CFO, and me, as we held the ‘holy grail’ of information,” said Angus.

Solution

Co-developing Atlas significantly improves collaboration for family office

As a co-developer of Atlas, Angus has advised Ontra on features to help him meet his firm’s specific needs and surfaced entity management obstacles.

“The team at Ontra was excellent about listening to my friction points and acting on them as they developed Atlas. Of course, I think many of my suggestions and areas of need probably matched the needs of other firms. Ontra recognized that and started working on a solution immediately,” Angus commented.

Atlas’s customizable sharing capabilities have solved a key challenge for Angus — aligning internal and external parties with up-to-date information. The platform’s permissions system has allowed Angus to offload relevant entity documentation to a portfolio company’s CFO for final review, and the automated workflow helps keep information up-to-date. Instead of participating in a time-consuming back-and-forth, Angus can now share the documentation for review and later collaborate on updates as necessary.

“Atlas has allowed me to put documentation in the hands of our portfolio company officers faster without losing version control and visibility. I’ve started with one of our smaller companies and intend to implement the platform across all our companies shortly,” said Angus.

Getting started with Atlas required simply uploading all existing documentation to the platform. Angus said the process—enhanced by AI-powered automation—was easy and intuitive, and the interface reminded him of working in a data room.

Working with a small team of less than three people, Angus found time to upload entity documentation between other tasks and completed the upload in under 20 hours. Now that Atlas is running 100% of the firm’s entity management, Angus is ready to use the platform with new investment companies from the outset.

“It’s nice to know that I can start with a clean slate and build our documentation library the way I want to from the beginning. I’m excited to see how this looks when it comes together,” Angus said.

Automated processes simplify entity management and save time

Ontra’s AI-enabled solutions — Contract Automation, an end-to-end contract negotiation solution, and Atlas, the new entity management product — have provided Littlejohn Capital with the automation it needs to free the firm’s small staff to focus on higher-value work.

With Atlas, Angus and his small team can rest easy knowing they have a single source of truth for every portfolio company. Structure charts in Atlas have eliminated the tedium of manually entering data into spreadsheets, creating greater efficiencies for the firm.

“I really love the Atlas structure charts. Previously, we had relied on slides, which require a decent amount of time and reformatting, especially as the legal structure changed,” Angus said.

Automating document retrieval and sharing has been instrumental in creating greater efficiencies for the firm. It has transformed the process from an exhaustive search of files and folders to a simple keyword search with an instant result.

“Ontra’s Atlas simplifies entity management immensely. It allows multiple people to have information at their fingertips and to make appropriate updates. The centralized platform also prevents information loss during workforce transitions,” stated Angus.

Although the firm is small, Ontra has been highly responsive and has demonstrated a commitment to creating a product that will meet the needs of private equity firms of all sizes.

“I’ve been impressed by Ontra’s drive and desire to invest in new technologies and thought processes constantly. Even though we may be too small for some of their services, the technology and services we’ve adopted have been valuable,” commented Angus.

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