Richard the Marbella Family Office Manager

Background

Richard is the Director / COO of Marbella Interests, the family office of principal Bryan. Small team — Richard + an analyst, a controller, a part-time bookkeeper, plus outside CPA and tax counsel. Portfolio is the usual single-family-office mix (public securities, PE/VC commitments, direct private investments, real estate, insurance / trust structures).

Richard's long-term job is what every FO COO does: tie out the GL, ship Bryan a monthly pack, manage compliance, run a clean close. The immediate job — and the one Marbella is using amble + Claude Cowork to attack first — is AI-driven operational transformation of the family office itself:

What does this office actually do every week / month / quarter? Which of those things can AI take off the team's plate? Which ones first, and what's it worth?

That's a scoping problem, not a portfolio problem. Marbella is using amble as the AI-transformation operating system: a structured whiteboard that lives next to Claude Cowork, where every workstream, SOP, recurring task, and observation gets captured, scored quantitatively, prioritized, and turned into a delegation. Phase 2 — the actual portfolio data layer (holdings, commitments, monthly pack) — comes once Phase 1 is delivering compounding value and the team has bandwidth to wire it up.

Richard came up through PE ops, has lived in QuickBooks / Sage Intacct / Addepar / Juniper Square, and has zero patience for software that promises "AI" without showing him what it would actually do, in numbers, before he commits a week of the team's time to it.

Mindset & Behavior (Phase 1)

• I'm scoping AI's role in this office. I am not buying a portfolio system today.
• Every meeting, every pain-point conversation, every "we always have to do X" comment is a capture opportunity. Friction between hearing it and recording it is friction I won't tolerate.
• I work in Claude Cowork. amble must meet me there — capture from Cowork should land in amble without me copy-pasting.
• I want every captured opportunity to have four numbers: AI-readiness, complexity, FTE-impact, ROI. Don't make me guess the priority. Compute it.
• I will ship a monthly "transformation report" to Bryan during Phase 1: how many workstreams captured, how many automated, hours saved, $ saved.
• I do not want a chat-with-AI sidebar shouting at me. I want AI to do — score the opportunity, draft the SOP, propose the priority order. Get out of the way.
• Once Phase 1 is humming, I'll come back to amble for the portfolio layer. Don't make me build it now.

Surface map (where Richard spends time — Phase 1)

What Richard does NOT want (Phase 1)

• A pre-built family-office dashboard with empty NAV / holdings / commitments tiles. That's Phase 2 and showing it now is noise.
• A chat-with-AI sidebar that interrupts capture or scoring. AI works inside the artifact (auto-score, draft SOP, suggest priority).
• Manual forms for every capture. Voice / paste / drop should work.
• "Entity", "criteria-set", "response score", "session_id" in any UI Richard or his team see.
• A "tasks" widget that mixes operational work-items with the captured opportunities. Operational ≠ scoping.
• A Phase 1 dashboard re-arranging itself because the AI thought it could improve it. The transformation pulse is templated for trust.
• Any feature that requires Richard to leave amble to capture or score. If it needs a separate tool, it's not built yet.

What Richard wants from Claude Cowork integration

Cowork is where Richard does the actual thinking — long meetings, deep document review, multi-step research. amble is where the artifacts live structurally. The integration must:

• Inbound from Cowork: When Richard finishes a Cowork session that surfaced an opportunity, Cowork should be able to push it to amble as a draft Opportunity record (with the original Cowork context attached / linked).
• Outbound to Cowork: When Richard wants to deep-dive on an Opportunity (scope the SOP, simulate the automation), he should be able to one-click "open in Cowork with this context."
• Source-of-truth split: Cowork = ephemeral working memory + drafts; amble = structured persistent record + scoring + prioritization.
• No double-entry: anything captured in Cowork that reaches amble should not need to be re-typed.

The four scores (Phase 1 quantification)

Every captured Opportunity needs these populated, ideally AI-suggested with one-click human override:

Priority = ROI ÷ Complexity (with AI-readiness as a gate — anything under 2 gets parked). Surfaced via priority-matrix and quick-score.

Phase 1 → Phase 2 transition

Phase 1 is "use amble + Cowork to figure out where AI helps." It runs on Process / Opportunity / SOP / Task entity types and the AI-scoring tools that already exist in the Marbella tenant.

Phase 2 is "use amble for the actual family-office data layer" — and only kicks off when:

• Phase 1 has shipped at least 5 automations
• Hours/week saved is materially > Phase 1 setup cost
• Bryan and the team trust amble enough to put real GL / holdings / commitment data in it
• Or: Bryan asks for the monthly pack to be assembled in amble

When Phase 2 begins, the surface map in the original v1 of this persona file (Holdings / Commitments / Compliance / Cash / Bryan's Pack / Close Calendar) becomes the active scope. Until then, those surfaces should be either absent or clearly labeled "Phase 2 — coming when Phase 1 has paid for itself."

Demo-day signals (Phase 1)

When Richard walks Bryan or the team through the Phase 1 use of amble, these are the moments that earn or lose trust:

• Capture-to-record is under 60 sec live. Voice memo or pasted Cowork summary becomes a draft Opportunity record on screen.
• Every Opportunity has the four scores populated — none are blank, none say "Score: —". (The platform "Score" column from generic entity views must not surface here; this is a different scoring concept and needs its own block.)
• Priority matrix view is glance-readable. Top-right quadrant is visually obvious.
• Drill into one Opportunity → see the auto-generated SOP draft, the four scores, the suggested next step.
• Monthly transformation report renders with real numbers — not "Not Tracked" placeholders.
• Cowork integration visibly works — at least one captured-from-Cowork record on the demo dashboard.
• No portfolio jargon (NAV, capital call, K-1) anywhere in Phase 1 UI. Save it.
• No platform jargon (entity, criteria-set, scored items) visible to Richard or the team.

Related personas (later, after Phase 1)

• Bryan the Principal — Phase 1 consumer of the monthly transformation report; Phase 2 consumer of the portfolio pack.
• Marbella Analyst / Controller / Bookkeeper — derivative roles; in Phase 1 they capture opportunities; in Phase 2 they own GL / holdings / AP-AR.
• Jordan the PE Analyst (pe-analyst.mdx) — adjacent fund-side analyst; not the Marbella use case.

Cross-references

• AI-scoring MCP tools (Marbella tenant): ai-readiness-assessment, complexity-estimator, fte-impact-calculator, priority-matrix, process-automation-scoper, quick-score, roi-calculator, time-savings-calculator, score_delegation_readiness_sweep
• Claude Cowork integration spec: TBD (this audit will produce the gap)
• Phase 2 family-office data model gaps: documents/work/2026-05-03-personas-and-gap-audit/audit-report.md §3 (deferred until Phase 2 begins)