Below is a Q&A session with Markus Mikola, CEO & Founder of ContractZen Ltd, a legal tech startup. Markus has been active within the corporate governance software solutions space for 20 years, including document and contract management and digitizing the way boards work. He is a seasoned expert on how organizations of all sizes should organize governance and compliance issues.
ContractZen is a governance software. Could you explain what that means?
Modern governance software, such as ContractZen, helps companies build and maintain strategic collaborative practices that enable them to handle all critical documents, board meetings, and responsibilities in a way that not only ensures governance with minimum effort but also maximizes growth opportunities. Businesses are fundamentally run by various kinds of stakeholders and the written contracts between them. Governance is about handling these processes and the related data and documents properly.
CEO & Founder of ContractZen
Tools like ours are essential for having governance practices in place, helping the company to its chosen strategic direction, and also as part of the risk management efforts.
Every company and organization, regardless of its size, is legally responsible for taking care of the governance issues.
Can you share with us what are the most common challenges/pain points companies are struggling with in the field of governance?
The absolutely most common challenge we’ve seen is lost documents. Important documents are being stored in inboxes, disks, and in various other systems not up to the task. The big picture of a company’s responsibilities is missing. Missing documents and contracts cause huge financial and legal risks on the company level – and lots of frustration on the personal level.
Another common pain point is missing the crucial contract due dates. One missed due date can cost a lot of money, I mean a lot. I do remember one case where a missed due date of a rental agreement cost 1M€ to the company. Our customers have told me that they not only saved costs but also gained new opportunities for profit when the big picture on contractual responsibilities and opportunities became clear.
Another area of difficulty is related to digitizing board work. Board meeting management is often very ineffective. Many tasks left to the top management and the external board members are too time-consuming for their pay grade. Scheduling and organizing board meetings must be done more easily – without sacrificing security. For example, sending highly confidential meeting materials via email is risky. Companies need to address this if they want to minimize the risks and embrace good governance. This matters to both large and small businesses, not to mention NGOs.
What the above-mentioned actually means is that the company’s so-called Due Diligence readiness is non-existent. The result of mismanaged governance is lots of stress in front of a tax audit, a funding round, or an upcoming due diligence process, knowing that finding the documents takes months, and some of those might be permanently lost.
Another sad consequence of mismanagement of governance? These companies are not being able to grow their business as fast as they wish.
What are the main benefits of ContractZen?
ContractZen is affordable and easy to use and deploy. We provide all the essential tools for modern corporate governance without the hassle and the unnecessary costs of deployment and staff training.
Our promise to decision-makers is that we help you save time, money – and your nerves.
The overall administrational efficiency grows. With our governance software, important documents are securely stored and instantly discoverable. This minimizes both contractual and financial risks, cuts costs, and ensures compliance.
The decision-making gets an extra boost: better and faster decisions are based on correct and up-to-date data our software provides.
By building a Due Diligence readiness, you don’t need to panic when the audit approaches. When you have collected all important documents and board decisions in one place, it is easy to run the audit.
In addition, post-Covid-19 worklife requires optimal accessibility anywhere, anytime. Increased global competition favors the fast, agile, and transparent. I recommend that every organization fix this: have your critical documents available at all times.
To summarize: we are helping organizations to be Due Diligence ready every day, enabling them to be more agile, more scalable, and ultimately more valuable. With improved compliance and transparency, smoother governance and business processes the company can indeed be more valuable in the eyes of a business partner or venture capital company.
Some of our clients have shared with us ROI periods of less than a week.
What are the main features of ContractZen?
The main features are contract management, board management, entity management, and virtual data room (VDR). In addition, we’ve integrated eSignature options from leading vendors.
When we developed our governance software suite with our customers and legal professionals, we started first with Contract Management. We wanted to design an easy-to-use but powerful solution that fits any organization. Our contract management software includes Microsoft AI-powered search, automated reminders on important dates, email import, and Outlook calendar integration. We had three verbs in mind – Save, Find, and Remember – and they’re still the core of our contract management software.
The second part of our Governance software suite is 100% paperless board meeting software. Our digital meeting management solution covers the entire meeting process. Starting from scheduling and invitations, setting up agenda, and further to creating, approving, and e-signing the minutes. In addition to our support for the basic meeting process, our clients compliment us on our secure material distribution functionality. Later we have complemented the package with useful task management for the board.
The third area that our suite covers is entity management software. Headquarters manage different processes related to the different wholly or partly owned legal entities of the corporation. With our solution it is easy to keep the subsidiary information up to date, e.g., corporate structure, ownership, the number of shares, board members, auditors, procuration rights holders, and so forth. Our customers appreciate the feature that shows corporate records with a clearly visualized organizational structure.
Our governance software includes a built-in virtual data room for due diligence situations such as M&As and audits. Mergers and acquisitions and different auditing situations have previously been very laborious processes. However, modern companies run these processes with the help of so-called virtual data rooms, VDRs. Setting up a VDR has traditionally been very expensive.
We wanted to offer affordable VDR that, naturally, is also easy to use. ContractZen’s secure virtual data room can be set up within minutes. The key features are dynamic indexing, audit logs and reporting, robust access rights management, and metadata-driven search. These enable you to move through transactions quicker. Our suggestion for any growth company is to be always ready for audits and due diligence situations.
Lastly, we have integrated the leading eSignature solutions into ContractZen: Adobe Sign, Assently, DocuSign, SignHero, and VismaSign.
Who should consider ContractZen?
Size-wise most of our customers are small and medium-sized businesses, departments of large corporations, and non-profit organizations from just a few users to up to one thousand users. Having said that, ContractZen is used by companies of all sizes.
Role-wise, it is the CFOs, CEOs, Business Owners, and Legal Counsels who bear the responsibility to fix governance issues, who benefit the most. We’ve found that CIOs and CTOs benefit as well. They are often responsible for digital transformation and our governance software forms a significant step in that development.
Management teams, board professionals, and investors in their board roles save time and improve work efficiency. And as mentioned earlier, they can sleep better when they know their organization is due diligence ready.
We have customers from every industry, but the most common ones are professional, scientific, and technical services providers, life sciences, manufacturing, banking and financial services, administrative and support services.
What separates ContractZen from competitors?
Compared to other solutions, we are – to put it short – a very affordable but comprehensive package, and genuinely easy to deploy and use. When you start to use ContractZen, you don’t need consulting and training. Using our governance software is “intuitive” in its nature and a very quick start is possible.
Earlier in my career, I’ve witnessed many unsuccessful document management and compliance-related projects, with an inflated price tag. Therefore, our goal was to create something with a scope that fits perfectly to the most common governance needs, and at the same time, it would be easy and affordable in every aspect. And I am very glad that our exciting customers have proved our success with this goal.
How can one start using ContractZen?
It is super easy: go to our website www.contactzen.com and register for a 30-day free trial. And if you are happy after this trial period, then you register the credit card information for billing. It is risk-free to give it a try. You can also ask for a demo if you feel like you need some guidance.
After you join the ContractZen users, you can freely choose from which corner you wish to start: getting your contracts into the system first, or starting to use it for your board and management meeting.
Our affordable pricing (9.50$/month/user) includes contract management, board meeting management, and entity management, on top of which you can use our VDR Basic (5 users) for $9.80 / month and VDR Pro (50 users, fine-grained access control with Access Groups) for $49 / month whenever needed for auditing, M&A or other due diligence situations.
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