The Mahindra Call

The first call had more people on it than our entire front office.

They introduced themselves one at a time. A title, then a name. Director of this. Head of that. Program lead for something I didn't know was a program. Each title was a department. Each department was full of people whose whole job was the thing the title said.

Then it got to our end of the line.

Me.

Hat count, for the record: still three. But one of them had just turned into a switchboard.

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What We'd Signed Up For

We'd landed the biggest account in the company's history. Mahindra — a multinational with operations on multiple continents and an org chart you could get lost in. The deal was OEM work: we built the machines, they put their name on them and sold them through their network.

For a family company in Batesville, Arkansas, this was the show. Real volume. Real validation. A global brand betting on what came off our line.

It was also my first time seeing "corporate" up close. Not the cartoon version — the real thing. Meetings with agendas that arrived in advance. Action items with owners and dates. Documents with revision numbers. A process for everything, and a person assigned to every process.

And their first, most reasonable, most corporate question: who is our point of contact?

Project manager wasn't a seat anybody was sitting in. The deal created the job. Something this big needed a quarterback — one person to own the whole thing end to end — and I was the one standing close enough to get handed it. That's how I got the title.

So the answer was me.

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The Switchboard Years

Here's what "single point of contact" actually means when the other side has a department for everything and your side has a guy.

Their engineering team had questions about a part — routed to me. Their quality people wanted process documentation — me. Scheduling wanted build dates, forecasting wanted numbers, their brand people wanted to know why a decal moved half an inch — me, me, me. Every function on their org chart mapped to a counterpart. On our side, every line terminated at the same phone.

I wasn't qualified for most of those calls. I just answered them, because there was nobody else to route them to. And somewhere in there — mostly by getting it wrong — I learned what the job actually was, the one no title described: conversion.

They ran on structure. The system knows, so the people don't have to. We ran on context. The people know, so there was no system. Those two operating modes can't talk to each other natively.

Somebody had to be the adapter. Corporate in, family-company out. Family-company in, corporate out. All day.

Inside our walls, decisions got made the way they always had — the owner had an idea, sketched it out, and we ran. No revision log. No approval chain. That's how a family company moves, and it's a strength right up until you bolt it to a multinational that needs everything in writing. My job was holding those two worlds together: informal on one side of me, formal on the other, and a translation happening in the middle every single day.

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Same Gap, Bigger Blast Radius

If you read the last issue, you already recognize the shape.

Inside the company, I was the place where what we built and what we sold connected. That was dangerous enough. A dropped handoff there cost us a photoshoot, a launch date, a scramble.

This was the same shape pointed outward. Now the gap was between two companies. The entire relationship with our biggest customer — every commitment, every open question, every thing-somebody-said-on-a-call-in-March — lived in one head. Mine. Not because anyone decided it should. Because nobody decided anything. The structure was missing, and I happened to be standing where it should have been.

And here's the trap I want you to see, because it's sitting in your shop right now wearing a different name.

"Single point of contact" sounds like discipline. Clean communication. One throat to choke. Every consultant and every corporate playbook will tell you it's a best practice.

Sometimes it is. But a lot of the time it's something else: the absence of structure, wearing a discipline costume. Mahindra had a system for the relationship. We had a person. The point of contact wasn't a communication strategy. It was the place where our missing infrastructure got outsourced to a human being — again.

If I'd taken another job in those years, the relationship with our biggest account doesn't transfer. It goes dark, and somebody gets handed a phone that never stops ringing and no record of what's already been promised.

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If I'd Had AI…

The tool-vendor version of this story writes itself: Matt never has to be a switchboard, because AI handles cross-functional coordination now. Meeting notes that write themselves. Status reports that generate from the project data. A CRM that holds every thread with every department. One person could be the contact for an account ten times that size and never drop a thing.

All true. That is literally what the tools do.

And it's exactly the wrong way to deploy them.

A faster switchboard is still a switchboard. If you point AI at making your point-of-contact more efficient, you've automated the symptom and left the disease: the relationship still lives in one person. It's just a better-organized person now. The day they leave, you lose the account history at higher resolution.

Here's the deployment that actually matters. At its core, AI is a conversion machine. Its whole trick is removing the translation files between systems that can't talk natively — corporate-speak to shop-floor-speak, their revision log to your napkin, structure to context and back. That conversion work was my entire job for years, done by hand, one call at a time. The machine does it now.

But conversion still needs somewhere to land. The real fix is the thing we never had: a shared record. What's been committed, what's open, what each side believes is true — held by the operation instead of by whoever answers the phone. AI builds and maintains that layer now at a price a 20-person shop can afford. That's not science fiction; that's the actual work I do for clients today.

The demos still skip the same part they always skip, though. The machine can convert every message and hold every thread. It can't tell you which thread is about to become a problem. Knowing that the question their quality team just asked is really a warning — that a tone shift on a Tuesday call means a forecast is about to move — that's judgment, and judgment is the residue of having been the switchboard yourself.

Multiply the judgment. Don't hand it away.

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The Question

When your biggest customer calls with a problem, where does the answer live — in your business, or in one person's head?

If it's the second one: what's your plan for the day that head takes another job?