We are two years away from a planned exit and need to establish an IP Audit and Customer Contract Compliance seat on our Accountability Chart to ensure all our client agreements have clear intellectual property ownership clauses. No one on our leadership team wants to own this seat because it is boring compliance work. How do we assign this?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a vital seat for your exit readiness because clean intellectual property rights are a primary driver of valuation and a key target during buyer due diligence. If your contracts are messy, a buyer will discount your acquisition price or walk away entirely. To get this seat owned, you must stop treating it as an optional chore. It must be a formalized seat on your Accountability Chart™, likely reporting to your Integrator or your Finance head. If your internal team truly lacks the legal and audit capacity to run this seat, you should assign the accountability to a designated leader who will then manage an external legal contractor to do the actual audit work. The internal leader is still accountable for the outcome, ensuring all contracts are updated and organized in a secure virtual data room. This ensures that the work gets done without pulling your operational leaders away from their primary growth Rocks. Track the percentage of compliant contracts as a key metric on your weekly Scorecard. When your leadership team understands that completing this audit directly removes transaction risk and protects their exit payouts, the compliance seat will get the attention it deserves.