When Ana, founder of NorthStar Realty (18 people), missed a DocuSign signature window the week before closing, a $500,000 transaction hung in the balance. The signature went to a stale inbox, the buyer’s question sat unanswered, and the listing agent escalated. Ana’s calendar was overloaded; her inbox was a triage zone. That single failed handoff could have been prevented by a discipline founders ignore until it costs real dollars.
Counting assistant hours disguises the real value: continuity and predictable outcomes. In real estate every delayed email, missed reschedule or untracked document increases leak risk. An executive assistant who reduces scheduling friction by 70% and triages inboxes to reclaim 8–12 hours a week for a founder changes conversion math, not just calendars.
Small teams under 25 fail deals for predictable reasons: inconsistent access to documents, no single point of owner in communication threads, and brittle calendar ownership. These are process failures, not people failures. Fixes are procedural: documented handoffs, SSO/MFA-secured access, endpoint protections, and an AI-enabled capture layer that preserves context.
We built the Sigrid Relay to make an EA a growth multiplier. The Relay has three layers: Capture, Coordinate, and Continuity. Capture uses structured inbox rules, Slack threads and Zapier/Make automations to surface deal triggers. Coordinate formalizes scheduling (Calendly + Google Calendar or Exchange with defined rules), stakeholder templates, and a single source of truth in Notion. Continuity layers include recorded SOPs, Notion onboarding playbooks, and AI summaries so any EA can pick up the thread without loss of context.
Set two inbox buckets: Actionable and Reference. Use Gmail filters or Outlook rules to route proposals, signatures, and buyer/seller questions into Actionable. Trigger a Zapier workflow: when an email lands in Actionable, create a Notion deal page, post a Slack thread in a private#deals channel, and assign a priority flag. Use DocuSign and Salesforce integrations so signatures and contract updates update the Notion page automatically.
Implement hard rules: founder-owned priorities, EA-owned scheduling, and a 24-hour response SLA on buyer/seller communications. Use Calendly or Chili Piper connected to Google Calendar and Outlook; create buffer rules for same-day changes. The EA owns meeting preparation—Loom pre-reads, 3-bullet agendas in calendar invites, and follow-up note templates that populate into CRM and Notion.
Every deal gets an onboarding card that includes the timeline, stakeholders, signed documents, and the “failure triggers” list (what will break the deal). EAs record 3–5 minute Loom briefings after critical meetings. An AI summarization layer (Gmail Smart Compose + an internal LLM summarizer tied into Notion) produces executive one-pagers so the founder spends time on decisions, not reconstruction.
Real estate data is PII-heavy and often tied to wire instructions. MySigrid enforces Okta SSO and MFA, endpoint protection like CrowdStrike or Jamf, and conditional access policies that restrict downloads by role. Access to closing documents is role-based, logged, and retained in AWS or Google Cloud with versioning. Those controls reduce fraud risk and make transitions auditable.
Documented onboarding beats tribal knowledge. Our onboarding template includes a Notion playbook: calendar rules, email routing, signature provider access, wire instruction verification checklist, and a list of escalation contacts. Within the first 14 days the EA completes a fail-safe test: simulate a signature routing failure and validate the Relay steps recover the flow. If the test fails, fix the SOP—don’t blame the person.
Move beyond tasks completed. Track: average scheduling time per meeting; time-to-first-response for buyer/seller inquiries; signature-to-close cycle time; and percentage of deals with zero communication escalations. Example goals: reduce scheduling time by 70%, respond to inbound deal emails within 4 hours, and cut signature-to-close by 15% in 90 days.
Outsourcing scheduling and inbox triage introduces dependency risk if the EA lacks continuity processes. The opposite risk—keeping everything in-house—creates bottlenecks and hidden costs. The Sigrid Relay accepts a small management overhead up front to eliminate disproportionate downstream risk and to scale predictable outcomes with low latency.
At NorthStar Realty the EA noticed a DocuSign was undelivered due to a changed email domain. Using the Relay the EA re-routed the signature, updated the Notion deal card, and sent a Loom explaining the fix to the founder. The issue resolved in 90 minutes instead of multiple days, preserving the deal and preventing a $500K setback.
Hire for pattern recognition and process-first thinking. Look for candidates who can map a 5-step checklist for a contract closing, who know Calendly, Google Calendar or Exchange, Notion, Slack, Zapier/Make, DocuSign and a CRM (Salesforce or HubSpot). Test them on a continuity scenario and evaluate how they document the solution.
MySigrid provides vetted EAs who arrive with the Sigrid Relay playbook, documented onboarding templates, and secure operations (Okta SSO, MFA, endpoint controls). Our EAs use Slack, Notion, Calendly, Zapier and DocuSign integrations to automate handoffs and enforce SLAs. If you need retention-friendly staffing with measurable outcomes, see our Executive Assistant service and our Plans & Pricing for options.
Start with a 30-day fail-safe: document your worst-case handoff, assign an EA to own it, and run the Relay test. If you can’t get to that in two weeks, you have process debt that will compound. Reclaim time, reduce deal risk, and make your founder hours strategic.
Ready to transform your operations? Book a free 20-minute consultation to discover how MySigrid can help you scale efficiently.