My worst job became my best business idea.

Way back in 2010, I was reporting directly to the CEO of France’s second-largest telecom company. He tasked me with reviewing 500 vendor contracts, and looking for savings. We estimated that renegotiating these contracts would save us millions of euros.

The project sounded like a dream come true for a young business school grad like me. But it turned out to be a worse nightmare than I could’ve dreamed possible.

I spent the next six months digging through filing cabinets, manually reading through paper contracts, building enormous spreadsheets, and emailing Word documents back and forth across the company. I came home every night why we were managing contracts like this was the Dark Ages.

Let me reiterate: This wasn’t back in the 90s. This was 2010.

You can probably hear my frustration, even across all these years. That frustration give birth to the idea for Concord.

My worst job ever became the business idea that changed my life.

Looking back on 10 years as CEO, though, I realize that our biggest breakthrough wasn’t technological at all. It was the realization that contracts were never legal documents in the first place. Instead, they’re business processes.

This single shift in mindset changed everything:

• When we stopped treating contracts as legal artifacts and started seeing them as blueprints for relationships, our customers’ workflows were revolutionized. Deals that used to take weeks now suddenly started closing in days.
• When we embraced this mindset internally, we found ourselves blasting through bottlenecks and growing faster than we believed possible. We did this by putting our Operations team in charge of contract compliance, because they were best positioned to optimize these processes.
• Most profoundly, out customers started reporting this same structural 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 just a blip on the roadmap. Today, a full 75 percent of our customers don’t have in-house legal teams at all. That would’ve been inconceivable 10 years ago.

Our customers are realizing for themselves what we discovered along the way: When you treat contracts as business processes rather than legal artifacts, you unlock their true potential as sources of business intelligence.

The future belongs to companies that put contracts in the center of their operations, instead of locking them away in legal departments.

Has your company made this shift in mindset yet?

Matt Lhoumeau is the CEO and co-founder of Concord, a leading provider of Agreement Intelligence solutions. Concord empowers growing businesses to make smarter operational decisions by unlocking actionable insights from contracts, and is trusted by over 1,500 companies worldwide.