Scaling a business in general means that your team has achieved product-market fit, and now it’s time to accelerate everything around business operations while keeping the company compliant and in control (!). But how can you achieve this on the go, with minimal resources, and without relying on new hires (since everyone knows it takes at least a quarter for new hires to familiarize themselves with the business and its challenges)?
We know that the solution is to adopt AI-powered Operational Intelligence Platforms (OIPs) — an end-to-end solution that rapidly upgrades your manual or semi-automated operations to data-driven, automated, and integrated processes.
But before diving into the "how," let’s start with the "who" and "when."
What Is a Scaleup?
A scaleup is a company that has moved past the startup phase (still being a startup in most definitions) and is experiencing rapid growth in terms of revenue, customer base, and team size. Typically characterized by:
- Team expansion: 50–500 employees.
- Revenue growth: €5M–€50M annual revenue, often doubling year over year.
- Go-to-Market: Expanding operations into new verticals, markets, or geographies.
Scaleups face challenges unique to their vertical, team strengths, and growth stage, and let’s be honest, it’s a mix of excitement and chaos. Here’s what keeps most scaleup founders awake at night:
- Applying the same complex processes (your team learned for years) now across expanding teams in days: Suddenly, your small, agile team has exploded into multiple departments spread across regions (and time zones) you need to enable and keep on track.
- Managing compliance risks and regulatory demands in existing and new markets: Expanding into new territories is thrilling until you realize you’re drowning in a sea of new regulations in addition to GDPR, DORA and NIS2. It’s like playing a game of regulatory bingo — and you really don’t want to shout "non-compliant."
- Applying expansion collateral in a controlled way and monitoring the data: With all the new data, contracts, and processes flying around, how do you ensure you’re scaling responsibly without losing track of key rules of a game and metrics?
- Ensuring operational efficiency to compete with established players: The big players have armies of resources, while you’re building the plane mid-flight. Operational inefficiencies can quickly snowball, turning what could be a winning game plan into an overwhelming bottleneck.
Data-Driven Operations: Know Your Business Better Than Anyone Else
You’ve probably heard the saying — and experienced it on platforms like Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, and Google — that data-driven platforms often know you better than you know yourself. The same principle should apply to your business: no one should know your operations better than you.
Data-driven operations use real-time data to inform decision-making, leverage automation, and boost efficiency. For scaleups, this means moving from siloed, manual systems to connected platforms that leverage data as a strategic asset.
What do data-driven operations enable? It is tackling multiple problems with smart unified processes: data-driven operations enable you to solve multiple challenges simultaneously — whether it’s achieving compliance on autopilot, streamlining workflows, or maintaining live, actionable data on the go. Your key objectives:
- Get full transparency of your operational data: gain a complete view of your business relationships, contracts, data, and workflows.
- Maximise efficiency to run longer with limited resources: use structured data and automation to reduce manual tasks, errors, HR costs, and inefficiencies.
- Apply a simple but efficient risk management framework: use data-driven platforms with built-in compliance, use automated templates and agents to run the pre-configured workflows, and proactively manage compliance and regulatory risks through a unified central knowledge base and with real-time tracking.
- Scalability: Easily replicate operational success across teams and geographies using built-in playbooks.
Why This Matters: What the Experienced Users Say
Modern organizations require tools that not only manage documents but also provide actionable insights and ensure seamless collaboration across departments. Here are some reasons collected from our customers:
- Improved Sales Efficiency: Sales representatives need instant access to NDAs to confirm whether client names can be mentioned publicly, ensuring they do not cause a costly breach during sales calls or other communications.
- Pricing Transparency: Teams can quickly locate and review terms related to price adjustments, ensuring compliance and avoiding miscommunication with clients.
- Enhanced Decision-Making: With operational intelligence, managers have real-time insights into contractual obligations, such as renewal deadlines, price adjustment terms, and termination options to take faster actions.
- Reduced Risk: Party and data registry smart data fields enable data reuse, reducing the risk of referring to incorrect terms. Automated contract generation eliminates the need for repetitive legal reviews while maintaining control over regulatory and contractual requirements.
- Faster Collaboration: Teams across departments can collaborate on live documents with shared visibility, improving speed and accuracy in decision-making and enabling faster closing times.
- Operational Continuity: During employee turnovers, mergers, acquisitions, or scaling across regions, data-driven platforms ensure uniformity and transparency across all agreements and workflows, so no contract goes missing.
Automation: More Than Eliminating Boring Repetitive Tasks
Automation isn’t just about eliminating repetitive tasks — it’s about optimizing workflows, improving speed, and ensuring consistency. Here’s where and when scaleups should prioritize automation.Here are the key areas where scaleups should prioritize automation during their growth phase:
- Document Lifecycle Management: Automatically generate, approve, sign, and store contracts and data. With an Operational Intelligence Platform (OIP), you can easily connect any party to contract data and associated documents, ensuring a seamless and traceable data and party registry for compliance and reporting.
- Compliance Monitoring: configured regulatory and internal compliance means that data-driven systems enable you to track every interaction and data on the go while applying rules for data retention and access rights so your growing company complies with existing and emerging compliance rules on autopilot. It also means that you can run all internal compliance rules, e.g. execution rights, working rules, etc per locations, and people groups and track their interactions with documentation.
- Data Integration: Syncing data between CRMs, HR systems, and financial ERP platforms keeps data integrity and system of record in a place where data origins- in documents-data registries, which enables data reuse, analytics, and pattern detection across functions and locations and document generation based on triggers.
- Operational Workflows: Automate approvals, reminders, and notifications to reduce manual bottlenecks. With emerging Agents' capabilities, tasks can now be automated based on conditional logic. For example, once a lease agreement is signed, the system can automatically generate acceptance documentation or related workflows, removing the need for manual follow-up.
When to Start Automating?
Actually, there are clear signs, and the best indicator is when the manual system has become a broken blocker, causing stress within the team. If you notice this, you’ve already missed the ideal time—but the next best time to start automating is now. Here’s a list of red flags to watch for, before things escalate:
- Early-Stage Scaling: When team expansion creates operational inefficiencies.
- Entering New Markets: To manage increased compliance demands across regions.
- In Response to Growth: When manual systems no longer suffice for increased transaction volumes and manual processes slow down approvals, and signing and create bottlenecks, or increase the chances of human error in key operations like contract management or vendor agreements.
- People Change: When team leads change, causing loss of documents and knowledge about customers, vendors, procurement contracts, and related terms.
- Excel is Getting Full of Wrong Data: Excel works until it doesn’t. Live transactional data related to documents and parties is needed to keep easy track and avoid errors.
- Compliance Complexities: When regulations (e.g., GDPR, NIS2, DORA) require more rigorous and auditable workflows for data management and contracts.
- Audit and Reporting Requirements: If your scaleup faces regular audits in fundraising, and reporting obligations that require accurate, up-to-date, and easily accessible records.
- Distributed Teams: When managing remote or geographically dispersed teams requires centralized systems to maintain operational visibility and accountability.
By recognizing these signs early, organizations can proactively transition to an automated operating system, reducing stress, inefficiencies, and risks, and enabling smoother scaling and operational continuity.
Integrating Operations, Automation, and Data: LDD Readiness on Autopilot
Legal and Due Diligence (LDD) processes are often a bottleneck for fundraising faster or entering new markets or obtaining necessary licenses. By combining operations, automation, and data into one Operational Intelligence Platform (OIP), scaleups can achieve LDD readiness on autopilot.
How Does It Work?
- Centralized data: all contracts, agreements, and operational data are stored in a single platform, ensuring easy search, accessibility, and usability.
- Access management: easily enable access to required auditors to relevant folders and documents, share or revoke permissions on the go, and create secure data rooms or closing rooms directly within the platform where contracts are created and stored. With OIP, zero time is wasted on LDD preparation work.
- Automated workflows: from onboarding new employees to vendor compliance, every step is streamlined and transparent with OIP. Party and data registries are updated automatically once contracts are signed, with documents stored and shared according to predefined automated rules.
- Real-Time Insights: dynamic data and party registries provide risk assessments, compliance tracking, and performance metrics, ensuring proactive management of potential issues.
- Scalable processes: OIP makes it easy to replicate operational success as the company grows. Whether expanding into new regions, opening more offices, or implementing new operational rules (e.g., HR, revenue management), scalability is seamless.
This integration of operations, automation, and data ensures that LDD readiness becomes a natural extension of your company’s growth. For scaleups aiming to stay ahead in a competitive landscape, adopting AI and Operational Intelligence is no longer optional — it’s a necessity. By automating workflows, leveraging data-driven operations, and integrating processes, scaleups can achieve efficiency, compliance, and readiness for the next phase of growth.
Ready to Scale Smarter? Explore how Avokaado’s Operational Intelligence Platform can transform your operations. Book a demo today!
