My worst job became my best business idea.

15 years ago, I was working for France’s second-largest telecom company when the CEO tasked me with reviewing 500 vendor contracts to save millions.

For six months, I hunted through filing cabinets, manually read contracts, built massive spreadsheets, and sent Word documents back and forth. I came home every night wondering why we were managing contracts like it was 1990.

That frustration birthed Concord.

But our biggest breakthrough wasn’t technology – it was recognizing that contracts aren’t legal documents. They’re business processes.

This single mindset shift changed everything:

– When we stopped treating contracts as legal artifacts and started seeing them as relationship manuals, our customers’ success metrics transformed. Deals that once took weeks now closed in days.

– When we embraced this philosophy in our own operations, we eliminated bottlenecks and accelerated growth. We put our operations team in charge of contract compliance because they’re best positioned to optimize these processes.

– Most profoundly: Our customers started reporting the same transformation. One CFO told me: “I am in charge of everything CLM now. And our legal counsel does more with the law itself.”

This wasn’t an anomaly. Today, 75% of our customers don’t even have dedicated legal teams.

They’re realizing what we discovered: when you treat contracts as business processes rather than legal handcuffs, you unlock operational efficiency that drives growth.

The future belongs to companies that put contracts at the center of their operations, not locked away in legal departments.

Has your company made this mindset shift yet?