Why I built a Contract Management Habit (Before I built the software)
Introduction
For most of my career, contract management wasn’t something I thought about proactively. Like a lot of leaders, I dealt with contracts when I had to; during renewals, audits, budget reviews, or when something broke.
But over time, I started to notice a pattern:
Contract terms became more complicated and difficult to understand renewal terms.
Renewals were often a difficult process if I didn’t let them auto-renew.
Finance was helpful, but had the same blind spots that I did.
Excel Spreadsheets became too complicated to maintain.
None of this was because people weren’t doing their jobs. It was because contracts weren’t being treated like what they actually are: financial instruments that shape budgets, risk, and strategy.
That realization fundamentally changed how I think about contract management, and it’s why I believe every growing business needs to develop a contract management habit, not just buy a tool.
The Moment I Realized Contracts Were a Blind Spot
What finally clicked for me wasn’t a single big failure, it was a series of scenarios that lead to a greater understanding.
A renewal that quietly rolled over with no warning from the vendor.
A renewal cycle that had specific terms for completion of negotiations 30-60 days ahead of renewal.
A tool still billing months after usage dropped to zero.
These challenges because more of the norm rather than the exception and I was getting seriously frustrated with how vendors will treat you if you don’t follow the letter of the contract, to the period. Having to absorb these costs led to uncomfortable conversations with finance and company leadership that left me in only one position, exhausted.
Industry research confirms this experience isn’t unique. Gartner estimates that organizations overspend on SaaS by 25–30%, largely due to poor renewal visibility and contract oversight. That number felt uncomfortably familiar.
What bothered me greatly was the fact that I planned to stay within the budget boundaries, but I started to discover hidden clauses that usurp those plans, if you don’t look carefully.
Why Spreadsheets and Shared Drives Stop Working
Like many teams, mine tried to “fix” the problem with better spreadsheets and shared folders. It helped briefly, but it didn’t scale.
Manual systems fail because:
They rely on perfect human memory
They break when ownership changes
They don’t surface issues early or at all
Financial planning became a guessing game without understanding all of the contract details
McKinsey has pointed out that organizations lacking structured contract governance see significantly higher financial leakage, not because of bad intent, but because visibility breaks down as complexity increases.
This is where I found that all of the discipline in the world won’t help you if you can’t bring structure and norms to the equation.
Contract Management Is Really About Decision Timing
Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough: Most bad contract decisions aren’t bad decisions, they’re late decisions. I had this happen on more than one occasion where timing was buried in the language so deep that you needed AI just to surface it.
Timing is critically important, otherwise, renewals get approved because there’s no time to review them. Your budgets get adjusted because costs were discovered after the fact and this decreases your strategic plans for the upcoming year. Negotiations lose leverage because vendors know you’re already up against a deadline and will stick to the contract that keeps them on the winning side of the arguement.
IDC reports that more than 60% of renewals happen without meaningful review. That’s not laziness, it’s a timing problem. So much of my time is dedicated to running my department that it becomes burdensome to deal with the number of contracts without some form of notification and organization.
Once I started thinking about contracts as timelines instead of documents, everything changed.
The Habit That Changed Everything: Proactive Visibility
The biggest shift wasn’t software, it was altering my behavior to treat contracts just projects, with timelines.
I started asking different questions of myself and my team to reinforce the habit and spread it amongst the team:
What renews in the next 90 days?
Which contracts will impact next quarter’s budget?
Where are we paying for capacity we’re not using?
Which vendors have leverage over us, and why?
PwC notes that organizations with proactive contract visibility reduce financial leakage by 12–15% simply by acting earlier.
Some would call it optimization, I would say it is basic practice that all leaders with budgets need to adopt, especially in the modern SaaS era.
Once contract visibility became a habit, I found that better decisions were being exercised across the organization. It wasn’t just my team that was practicing this habit, it quickly led to other leaders adopting the same habits.
Why I Believe Contract Management Is a Leadership Skill
At scale, contracts touch everything:
Budgeting
Risk
Compliance
Vendor strategy
Operational continuity
Harvard Business Review has highlighted that financial planning breaks down when operational decisions (like IT spend) aren’t integrated into leadership workflows.
Strategic Contract Management IS what you should be doing. Far to often we are reacting to things in business that keep us in “fight or flight” mode. Developing this skill for me was essential to regaining control over something that had caused stressed, not just in my team, but company wide.
I found when I had clear contract data:
Budgets become more predictable
Negotiations become balanced
My team stop reacting and start planning
Cost-cutting is always the goal of CFO’s, but if you can show them good cost management, you’ll find that you have wide support for the tools you work with and the ability to execute a wider strategy.
Why This Ultimately Led Me to Build ElephanTrax
After years of watching teams struggle with the same issues, one thing became clear: most solutions were built for enterprises, not for SMBs that needed simplicity and clarity.
ElephanTrax exists because:
SMBs need visibility without complexity
Leaders need predictability without overhead
Teams need reminders, not more spreadsheets
The goal was never to “manage contracts.” The goal was to remove friction from decisions that shouldn’t be hard.
Final Thoughts…
I didn’t start out believing contract management software was essential. Experience taught me otherwise.
When contracts are scattered, leaders react. When contracts are visible, leaders plan.
The difference isn’t technology, it’s opportunity to be proactive and plan. This is essential if you want your businesses to grow without surprises.