Most entrepreneurs running multiple ventures keep those ventures in separate tools. Different email logins, different organizational structures, one stack per company. Tabaibo's André Loja did the opposite.

Loja runs Tabaibo, a parent company based on the Portuguese island of Madeira that sits above a portfolio of 12 companies, 2 nonprofits, and a sports club. The largest entity in the group is An Island Apart, a vacation rental management business with about 40 people overseeing roughly 400 properties on the island. Add up the rest, and Loja's portfolio employs about 60 people. Six or seven of those entities are fully operational; the others exist for institutional or legal reasons but still receive email and still need a place for that email to live.

For Loja, that place is Missive, a collaborative email client built for teams. Every entity in the portfolio runs through it, and starting a new venture means starting a new team space. "It's mandatory to use Missive in my case, and whenever I start a new business or a new association, I make sure I demand that people start using Missive as well. Because if they don't, I'm lost. It's where I have everything."

The setup is unusual enough that even Loja seems mildly surprised more entrepreneurs aren't doing it. "I was expecting that Missive would be a no-brainer for these people. Because as soon as you have to log into different emails for different companies, it's a nightmare."

Companies and departments, side by side

The architecture is simple to describe and unusual to encounter. Every entity in the portfolio gets its own team inbox in Missive: Tabaibo, Archipelago, Boganga, An Island Apart, Madeira Racket Club, and on through the list. Some of those team spaces are entire standalone companies. Others are departments within a company (accounting, booking, sales). They sit next to each other in the same workspace, which means the team-inbox concept is quietly doing two jobs at once: separating a company from its sister companies, and within a company, separating departments.

That side-by-side arrangement matters because it lets Loja blend the boundaries when he wants to. Tabaibo, the parent company, hosts the accounting and administrative teams that serve the rest of the portfolio. When an invoice arrives anywhere in the group, a rule auto-routes it to the accounting inbox. When a new venture spins up, that accounting infrastructure is already there waiting.

Specialists who can be tagged across the entire portfolio

The piece that ties this all together sits inside one specific team space. Loja's financial advisor and his lawyer are partners in Archipelago, one of the companies in the group. Because they're partners, they have full Missive access. And because they have Missive access, they can be tagged on emails in any of the other team spaces, regardless of which company the email belongs to.

"For example, the financial advisor and my lawyer, they're actually partners in one of the companies. So they have access to Missive. I can tag them on all the other companies if I need their help on something on some legal stuff or financial stuff. There's not much secret within the whole group to everyone."

That single design choice converts two specialists into shared resources for all 15 entities. Cross-company collaboration that would normally require forwarding emails to outside experts happens inside a single thread. The lawyer comments. The accountant comments. The conversation stays in one place.

It's the same underlying mechanic that makes Missive useful for any team: a shared inbox plus inline comments. Applied across legal entities instead of departments, though, it solves a problem most multi-company operators just live with.

An Island Apart and the rules that keep it moving

The scale test for this setup is An Island Apart, the vacation rental business. With 400 properties under management on Madeira, the booking team alone handles hundreds of emails on a typical day, sometimes 150 to 200 if they take a day off. Eight people sit on that team, with five or six of them in the inbox at any given time. The booking team has also brought WhatsApp and Instagram into Missive, since a meaningful share of guest communication starts on those channels.

Most of the inbound email comes through the main triage address. The team triages and either handles the email themselves, sends it to the right department, or tags an internal coworker for input. The rest of the time, rules do the routing automatically, especially for recurring categories like supplier invoices.

Front got expensive. Missive could handle the structure.

Loja was an early customer of Front, the previous shared-inbox tool the group used. The reason he switched is simple: Front got "crazy expensive" after a pricing change. He went looking for an alternative that could handle the structural complexity of separate legal entities with separate VAT numbers, and Missive cleared that bar at a price the group could absorb.

Before that? He doesn't really want to remember. "I don't remember my life before it, and I don't want to, because it feels like a nightmare. I had to log into different emails for different companies. My God, it would be the same mess again."

Onboarding by repetition

Adding a new venture to the system is now mostly a repeatable process. Loja creates a Google Workspace for the new entity, connects it to Missive as a new team space, and adds the relevant collaborators. The accounting setup is already in place from Tabaibo. The legal and financial advisors are already accessible by tag. The team space inherits all of that infrastructure.

New collaborators learn Missive by doing what they already know how to do, namely email, plus a thin layer of collaboration features (tagging, commenting, assignment). "If people already use Outlook or some email client, it's just collaboration, tagging people. The simple parts. Most of them don't need to know about the rules and everything else that's set up internally."

The result is a portfolio of 15 entities running on a single workspace, where a new venture is one Google Workspace and one team space away from being onboarded into infrastructure that took years to build out. For Loja, that's the difference between running 12 companies and being run by them.