Meet The Company
blq invest is a Stockhom based investor focusing on digital infrastructure within B2B SaaS. They work with business critical companies with a proven model, helping those companies scale and expand more efficiently, working hands-on with founders, bridging the gap between early traction and sustainable growth.
The team is lean but they have built an impressive sourcing engine. They screen thousands of European companies each year through a proprietary process refined over 8-9 years.
The process was rock solid. The tools? Not so much.
The Problem
“The biggest thing that’s been holding us back is data and information being scattered across multiple systems.” – Erik Halvord, blq invest
blq’s sourcing workflow had evolved organically over nearly a decade. What started as PowerPoint decks exported to PDF eventually migrated to Airtable — a step up, but still not quite right.
The result?
A classic case of what I call the 17 Inboxes Problem – when your team has to check multiple disconnected systems just to know what needs attention.
- Airtable for the pipeline.
- Google Docs for meeting notes.
- Google Drive for documents.
- Email for follow-ups.
The mental overhead of context-switching between tools adds up fast.
The symptoms were familiar:
Manual timestamp torture. Every stage transition required updating a yes/no dropdown, entering a date manually, and changing the overall status. Three clicks minimum. Every single time.
Meeting notes in exile. Weekly “pipe progression” meetings lived in Google Docs — completely disconnected from the deals they discussed. Context scattered across tabs.
Fields that nobody used. Years of incremental additions had left Airtable bloated with properties no one remembered creating. As Erik’s colleague Mazdak put it: “We have too many fields that we are not using. What we need is data that is reliable and valid.”
This wasn’t just about friction, but also about lost context. Once a deal moved past the initial screening phase, information fragmented. Meeting notes here, financial models there, bid documents somewhere else entirely. Every conversation required mentally reconstructing a company’s history from scattered sources.
And here’s the thing: blq knew their process worked. They’d been doing it successfully for years.
This wasn’t a team that needed fixing.
This was a brilliant team fighting an uphill battle because their tools simply couldn’t keep up with their ambitions.
How We Worked Together
We ran an 8-week transformation from late October through mid-December 2025 — our proven signature process at MF Consulting.
One of the keystones of our philosophy?
You shouldn’t have to hit pause on your day-to-day business to revamp your operations.
At the time, Erik was deep in multiple acquisition processes for one of blq’s portfolio companies. As he put it: “There is never a good time to do a project such as this.” (Sound familiar?)
But that’s exactly when operational improvements matter most. You can’t wait for a quiet quarter that never comes.
Week by week, we:
- Mapped every stage of their sourcing pipeline from entering the deal process through to “deal won”
- Rebuilt the core workflow in Notion while maintaining their proven 8-year process
- Migrated 50,000+ active and historical deals from Airtable
- Trained the internal Notion champions
- Set up meeting templates that finally connected notes to the deals they discussed
The goal was simple: one place for everything.
What We Built
1. A Unified Deal Pipeline
Gone are the triple-click status updates. Now when a deal moves to “First Meeting,” the timestamp happens automatically. The status reflects reality without manual data entry.
But more importantly, everything about a company now lives in one place: the initial one-pager research, meeting notes, follow-up logs, financial snapshots, even the bid documents. Click into any deal and you see its complete story.
What’s more, BLQ is leveraging AI to process more deal opportunities than ever.
When new deals enter the pipeline, Notion automatically triggers AI research and enrichment — extracting key company details and updating the database without manual work.
The team members responsible for pre-qualifying deals now have all the context they need immediately available. Less time spent researching. More time spent putting together briefings. The AI handles the data gathering; the humans focus on analysis and decision-making.
2. The Meeting System (and Why It Matters for Adoption)
This was Erik’s favorite part. And honestly, ours too.
There’s a concept that we call Tool Gravity.
Tool Gravity describes how much pull a tool has on your daily work. The more reasons you have to open a tool every day, the better adoption sticks. A tool you touch once a week becomes optional. A tool you need every morning becomes essential.
Meetings are the ultimate gravity source. blq runs weekly pipe progression meetings and constant deal discussions. By making Notion the place where meetings happen, we made it the first thing they open.
Every meeting now happens inside Notion. Before the call, you see the embedded pipeline view showing exactly which deals you’re discussing. During the call, notes connect directly to the relevant company records. After the call, AI summarizes the discussion and flags action items.
Erik tested this immediately during live acquisition negotiations:
“I just opened the Notion app, transcribed everything. For one of the revised bid letters going out later today, I needed to summarize my reasoning for revising our first bid. That turned out to be super helpful because I would have never been able to remember three hours worth of discussion.”
The meeting flow went from “notes floating in Google Docs” to something Erik called “10 times more robust than what we previously had.”
3. Follow-Up Accountability
Remember those forgotten emails? We added a simple forcing function: an Updates database that tracks the last touchpoint on every active deal.
Now during pipe progression meetings, there’s a clear view: which companies are waiting for follow-up, and for how long. No more surprises. No more gaps.
The Results
I’ll let Erik take the lead on this one. Here’s what he said when asked about the most useful feature:
“The overall setup, with everything connected in one place. Just today, discussing a new potential investment case, where we now have everything from sourcing to meeting notes in one place. So much easier.”
That’s the real measure of success. Not the features we built, but the daily friction we removed.
Beyond the technical implementation, Erik highlighted another critical dimension:
“One of the greatest values we got was your experience and expertise relating to efficient internal operations and workflow management.”
This wasn’t just about building in Notion — it was about understanding how investment teams actually work, where bottlenecks emerge, and how to structure systems that enforce good habits rather than require them.
The Unexpected Insight
During our wrap-up call, Erik shared something that stuck with me:
“I came into this with the thought that we need to improve our internal structures and processes, and then build a system that correlates with that. But the biggest positive aspect for me was realizing you can do it the other way around — if you have efficient systems in place to enforce structures and processes, those structures and processes by default become more efficient.”
This is the shift that separates teams who “use Notion” from teams who transform how they work. The tool shapes the behavior. The structure creates the discipline.
Erik got it. And that’s why blq is set up for long-term success with this system.
The Bottom Line
blq didn’t need a new process.
They needed tools that could finally keep up with the process they’d already perfected.
The 17 Inboxes collapsed into one. Tool Gravity keeps them coming back daily. And the system enforces the discipline that scattered tools never could.
8 weeks later, they have a unified workspace that:
- Connects sourcing → meetings → bids → close in one flow
- Eliminates manual timestamp torture
- Keeps follow-ups from falling through cracks
- Scales with their growth
We can’t wait to see what blq will do in 2026 with this new setup.
“It’s far exceeded my expectations what we actually got out of this project.” — Erik Halvord
