***Q&A with Tom Dunlop at Summize***

As proud sponsors of the Northern Tech Awards, and with a portfolio of previous winners, we will be interviewing a number of our Northern Tech CEOs in the build up to April.

Today, I pose the hard-hitting questions to Tom Dunlop - CEO at Summize , to find out the secrets behind their rapid growth, and the two bits of advice he would give to the next crop of winners....

1.??????What is your name and what do you do at Summize.

I’m Tom Dunlop, CEO and co-founder of Summize. I founded Summize after working as a General Counsel at several high growth tech and SaaS businesses.

Every day, I experienced the challenges in-house legal teams face with manual contract processes, and saw the other departments such as HR, Finance and Sales all lead the charge with digital systems and processes, while legal was left behind. I still remember the piles of paper and manual checks I’d have to perform on huge piles of documents and thought “there must be a better way…” ?

2.??????Describe Summize and your competitive advantage.

Contracts are an essential part of business and have been around for thousands of years, but there aren’t many people who wouldn’t argue the case for shorter, simpler contract processes. Large organisations are managing an average of 350 contracts each week, with inhouse lawyers spending 85 working days a year reviewing contracts. Simplifying and speeding things up with technology innovation makes a big difference.

Summize is the world’s first Integrated Contract Lifecycle Management solution, meaning it uses familiar collaboration tools such as Microsoft Word, Teams and Slack as its user interface for internal business interactions with legal contracts. This makes processes smarter, faster and more productive. ?This approach to integrating contract touchpoints with the tools where users work every day is our competitive differentiator. We describe it as digital contracting, done differently.??

3.??????What were the keys that unlocked the growth of your business?

The first thing we did to unlock future growth was to go early on recruiting an experienced and proven senior leadership team who have all been on a similar journey before and can work at pace to execute the strategy. ??

Our first funding round was led by NPIF – Maven Equity Finance in March 2019, followed by another ￡1million investment in 2020 and a Series A investment from YFM Equity Partners and Maven Capital Partners in 2021. This funding fuelled our growth strategy as we expanded our original contract summary capabilities to become a full end-to-end CLM solution. We’ve also invested in sales and marketing to create go-to-market plans for our core territories of UK, Europe and North America.

The other major growth key has been in harnessing a strong culture based on core values that are much more than just words on the wall. We have a culture of continuous improvement, respect for others, teamwork and a competitive will to win. This alignment to our values has created a very strong, ambitious and dynamic team – the bedrock to growth.

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4.??????2022 hasn’t been plain sailing – what have you learnt and where did you need to adapt?

2022 has been a focus on continued scale and growth, but not “at all costs.” We’ve prioritised the wellbeing of our people, moving to a bigger and more collaborative office, product innovation and making our customer experience and implementation journey world-class.

We’ve learnt once again that resilience and agility has been crucial – not being afraid to change and adapt where you need to. Our product is all about creating efficiency, so ?you could argue that businesses need it more than ever in the current climate, so we’ve learnt that there are different buyers coming through – procurement, commercial and finance leaders are all more actively involved. ?

In recent years, the rise of home working has caused a rapid rise in the adoption of online collaboration tools (e.g. Teams and Slack.) We realised early that this could be transformational, and it changed the direction of our product roadmap. We found a way to embrace these tools, instead of building our own all-in-one legal platform, which went against the grain of other CLMs. It’s this “deliberately different” mentality that has given us clear focus and differentiation. ????

5.??????If you could pass on two pieces of advice to an NTA nominee, what would they be?

My first piece of advice would be to surround yourself with fantastic people and embrace ‘letting go’ of certain areas. Since Summize started we have been incredibly successful at bolstering our leadership team with people who have done this before. You can’t do it all on your own, and it is important to surround yourself with people who understand the vision and what it takes to scale a SaaS business.

My second piece of advice is to embrace the mantra of doing things that don’t scale. There are a lot of opinions for early-stage founders about the ‘way to do it’, but you recognise early that tech businesses in particular go through various phases, usually at pace, so don’t worry too much about something not being particularly scalable today or that your process isn’t the same as someone else who is much further ahead. Stick to the vision and you’ll get there, just focus on product market fit, then focus on go-to-market strategy for that product / market.

Entry to the Northern Tech Awards 2023 is now open: https://www.gpbullhound.com/events/northern-tech-awards/

This year's award ceremony will be held on 20 April 2023 in Edinburgh, UK.