The problem
Jess founded The Doers and grew it into a creative agency with real revenue, real clients, and a real risk profile that nobody had ever stress-tested. Commercial contracts were going out and coming in without a structured review process. Some were signed on gut feel, some on a phone call. The team had grown to the point where this was no longer sustainable, and Jess knew the documentation wasn't keeping pace with the business.
The specific worry, she told me up front, was the one most founders share: she didn't know what she didn't know. She couldn't point at a contract and say "that one's a problem." But she could feel that the risk had been quietly building, and that if anything went wrong on a major client, the contracts wouldn't protect the business.
What we did
The engagement was a focused commercial contracting workstream, run over a few weeks.
1. Full contract suite review
We pulled every active commercial contract: master service agreements, statements of work, NDAs, supplier contracts, freelancer contracts, and the one-off agreements that had accumulated over the years. Each one read end-to-end. Each one assessed against a structured risk framework: liability, IP ownership, payment terms, termination, indemnities, and the boring-but-critical stuff founders never think about (governing law, dispute resolution, change control).
2. Risk assessment, ranked by what actually matters
The output wasn't a 50-page legal report nobody reads. It was a ranked list of material risks, plain English, with a clear recommendation against each one: leave it alone, renegotiate at next renewal, or address now. Jess could look at the list and immediately see what mattered and what didn't.
3. A commercial contracting framework the team could run
The point wasn't to make Jess dependent on a lawyer. The point was to give the team a structured process for new contracts so this wouldn't keep happening. We built a contract review framework: a one-page risk checklist for client work, standard templates for the most common contract types, an escalation path for anything outside the standard, and a clear rule for when something needs senior review. The team can now run most contracts in under 15 minutes per agreement.
What changed
The engagement gave Jess two things she didn't have before.
- Real confidence in the existing contract documentation, with the riskiest items either remediated or on a renegotiation plan.
- A repeatable process the team could run going forward, so the risk doesn't quietly accumulate again.
"Mitch reviewed our entire contract suite, flagged the risks we didn't know we had, and gave us real confidence in our commercial documentation. It's the kind of thing you don't realise you need until someone shows you what you're missing."
Jess, Founder, The Doers
The honest reflection
This is the engagement type most founders should run before they need it, not after. Contract risk is quiet. Nothing bad happens for years, then one client dispute exposes everything at once. The cost of the review is a rounding error compared to the cost of a single unfavourable termination clause.
Want the same for your business?
Two options:
- Done with you. The Contract Confidence Kit is a self-serve version of the framework we use, £97. Good fit if you'd rather run it yourself.
- Done for you. The contract review work above sits inside our Fractional COO retainer, or we can scope it as a one-off engagement. Book a discovery call to talk through which fits.
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