Case Study: A 45 Day Plan to Implement a Contracts Database
Background
Assets of OldCo (national transportation and services company with revenues of ~$185million) transferred to NewCo in foreclosure sale. CRO retains David Maginsky as General Counsel. With 1,750 separate customer contracts, each containing terms specific to three separate legacy companies and located in different parts of the country. Owing to the lack of integration, there was simply no way to (a) tie NewCo’s revenue to its contracts, (b) determine when they renew, (c) whether they were still in effect, and (d) take price increases resulting from increases in the cost of living, fuel and other costs.
Process
David and his team take steps to uncover the key customer/account information that is needed by NewCo’s sales and account management teams, and develop a system of tracking key contract information to augment the company’s strategic initiatives. Following collaborative meetings to identify key service offerings, pain points and current needs, a method of rationalizing customer contracts is devised and quickly implemented by Well Advised. Our approach takes six weeks. We deploy a method of OCR scanning every contract, utilizing hourly temps to enter key contract data into a contracts log. This method does not involve buying a single software program, hiring any additional permanent staff, or incurring any ongoing fees.
Result
After implementing our system, over seven (7) years and two sale transactions later, the company is still using the same methodology. It is estimated that using the new system, NewCo was able to identify over $750,000 of immediate price increases and surcharges across its customer accounts. Moreover, because our method identified contracts coming up for renewal, the company’s account management team was able to proactively identify expiring customer contracts and renew them at more favorable pricing, significantly affecting profitibility.
NewCo’s former President & CEO had this to say about our contract management process:
“It cannot be overstated how David and the Well Advised team’s approach buoyed our account managers and salespeople, and how important their solution was to our success. They met with us individually and as a group in a collaborative quest to deploy a tool that we all could quickly understand and use. This approach quite literally contributed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to our revenues. It is worth noting that in just under three years NewCo was sold to a publicly-traded company, and the buyer’s auditors gave us high marks following their quality of earnings audits. This is directly attributable to David’s efforts in “ticking and tying” all of our contracts to customer accounts.”