The Hidden Growth Killer: How Manual Contract Processes Are Holding Your SMB Back

By Matt Lhoumeau, CEO of Concord

I’ll never forget the day I realized I was the highest-paid filing clerk in France.

There I was, 26 years old, working for the CEO of a $5 billion telecom company, and I was spending my days crawling through dusty filing cabinets looking for contracts. Six months of my life disappeared into building a 52-column Excel spreadsheet with 500 rows, just to understand what vendor agreements we had.

The worst part? This wasn’t 1985. It was 2009.

Today, as I talk to SMB owners across the US, I’m shocked to see the same pattern playing out. According to recent Salesforce research, small business owners are losing an average of 96 minutes every single day to manual processes and administrative tasks. That’s 8 hours per week – an entire workday – vanishing into the void of inefficiency.

The Real Cost of “We’ve Always Done It This Way”

Let me paint you a picture of what I see happening at most SMBs today:

Sarah runs a growing marketing agency with 45 employees. Every new client contract takes her team 3-4 days to process. First, someone customizes the Word template. Then it goes through 5-7 email rounds for revisions. Someone prints it, scans it, emails it for signatures. Then manually enters the data into their CRM. And their project management system. And their billing software.

Sound familiar?

Here’s what this really costs Sarah’s business:

• Revenue delays: Those 3-4 days of processing time are days you’re not billing
• Human error: Manual data entry across systems leads to mistakes in 15-20% of contracts
• Opportunity cost: Your best people are doing data entry instead of growing the business
• Customer frustration: In an age of instant everything, waiting days for a contract feels prehistoric

Why SMBs Stay Stuck in Manual Mode

After 10 years of building Concord and working with over 1,500 SMBs, I’ve identified three core reasons why businesses stay trapped in manual contract processes:

1. The “Too Small” Myth “We’re not big enough to need contract management software.” This is like saying you’re not successful enough to deserve efficient processes. The truth? SMBs need efficiency even more than enterprises because every hour counts.
2. The Integration Fear “We already have 4-5 different tools, and adding another will make things worse.” Valid concern, but modern contract automation software actually reduces complexity by connecting your existing tools.
3. The Change Resistance “Our team knows the current process.” Yes, but they also hate it. I’ve never met anyone who enjoys manual data entry or chasing signatures via email.

The Digital Transformation That Actually Matters

When people talk about “digital transformation,” they usually mean AI chatbots or blockchain something. But for most SMBs, the transformation that matters is much simpler: stop doing manually what software can do automatically.

Think about what happens when you automate contract processes:

Before: Your sales rep closes a deal, then spends 45 minutes creating the contract, another hour coordinating approvals, and a day chasing the signature.

After: Deal closes, contract generates automatically with the right terms, approvals happen in parallel, signature request goes out immediately. Time to revenue: hours, not days.

One of our customers, a recruiting firm in Chicago, cut their contract turnaround time from 5 days to 4 hours. They calculated this saved them $67,000 annually in recovered productivity. For a 30-person company, that’s meaningful money.

The Compound Effect of Small Efficiencies

Here’s what most people miss about automating business processes: the benefits compound.

When you save 2 hours per contract, and you do 20 contracts per month, that’s 40 hours. But it’s not just about time. It’s about what happens next:

• Faster contract execution means faster revenue recognition
• Less manual work means fewer errors and disputes
• Better data capture means smarter business decisions
• Happier employees means better retention and performance

We had one customer who started using contract data to identify that 73% of their deals over $50K required custom payment terms. They created a new pricing tier that included flexible payments, and revenue jumped 18% in six months. That insight was always there – it was just buried in filing cabinets and Excel sheets.

Start Small, Think Big

I learned something important during our journey from startup to serving thousands of businesses: you don’t transform overnight. Remember when I talked about trying to please everyone and becoming the “Cheesecake Factory” of contract management? That was a mistake.

Instead, here’s the approach that works:

• Week 1-2: Pick your most painful contract type (usually sales or vendor agreements)
• Week 3-4: Implement a simple contract repository software to centralize everything 
• Month 2: Add electronic signatures and basic automation 
• Month 3: Connect to your other systems and eliminate double entry

The key is to start with one process, nail it, then expand. As we say at Concord: you don’t invent simplicity, you craft it.

The 2025 Reality Check

In research by TrackingTime, they found that top-performing SMBs are 3x more likely to have automated their core business processes compared to their struggling competitors. This isn’t about having the latest technology – it’s about freeing your team to do what humans do best: build relationships, solve problems, and grow the business.

If you’re still managing contracts like it’s 2009 (or 1985), you’re not just wasting time – you’re actively limiting your growth potential. Every hour spent on manual processes is an hour not spent on innovation, customer service, or strategic planning.

Your Next Steps

Look, I get it. When you’re running an SMB, there’s always something more urgent than fixing your contract processes. But here’s what I learned the hard way: those “urgent” things will always exist. Meanwhile, the inefficiency tax you’re paying compounds every single day.

So here’s my challenge to you:

1. Calculate how many hours per week your team spends on contract-related tasks
2. Multiply that by your average hourly rate
3. Ask yourself: what could your business achieve with that time and money back?

Fifteen years ago, I wasted six months of my life because we thought manual contract management was “just how things are done.” Today, you don’t have to make that same mistake.

The tools exist. The ROI is proven. The only question is: how much longer will you let manual processes hold your business back?

Matt Lhoumeau is the co-founder and CEO of Concord, a contract management platform used by over 1,500 SMBs and mid-market companies worldwide. After his miserable experience with manual contract management at a French telecom company, Matt moved to the US with a few thousand dollars and built Concord to ensure no one else would have to suffer through what he did.