A personal CRM for consultants
Who said what
A consulting engagement is a long series of conversations. Interviews with stakeholders, steering meetings, a quiet word in the corridor after a workshop. Out of them you build a picture: who wants the project to succeed, who is worried about it, what the CFO said the real constraint is.
That picture is only useful if you can trust it. "Someone mentioned the budget is frozen" is gossip. "The head of operations said in our interview on Tuesday that the budget is frozen until Q2" is information. In consulting, the source of a fact is part of the fact.
Why it rarely gets written down
Formal interviews get notes. Most of the valuable context does not come from formal interviews. It comes in the taxi to the airport, over lunch, in the two minutes before a call starts. By the time you are back at your laptop there are three more meetings, and the detail survives only in your memory — until it does not.
Across engagements it gets worse. The contact who helped you at one client moves to another company, and two years later you meet them again with no record of what you knew.
How Rucksack fits
After a conversation, speak into Rucksack for half a minute — or type. Say what you learned and from whom. Rucksack transcribes it, works out which people and organisations you meant, and files the facts under each of them.
Two things make it suited to this kind of work:
- Every fact keeps its source. Each one links back to the recording it came from, so you can hear exactly what you said and when.
- It does not guess between people. Large organisations have two Michaels in finance. When a name is ambiguous, Rucksack asks which one you meant, and remembers the answer.
Because the notes belong to you rather than to a client system, what you know about a person stays with you when an engagement ends.
What it does not do
Rucksack is a personal tool. There is no sharing with your team, no integration with your firm's CRM or document system, no import, and no reminders. It does not record meetings; you speak to it afterwards. It is a closed beta whose only user so far is its founder, with the first invited testers next, and its interface is in English. You can speak German or English.
Confidentiality
Consultants are usually bound by confidentiality agreements. Before recording details of a client matter in any tool — Rucksack included — check what your agreements and your firm's policies allow.