Why Growing Companies Can't Afford to Deprioritize Privacy

Privacy leaders at high-growth startups and mid-market companies face an increasingly complex set of challenges—tasked with an ever-growing to-do list around meeting fragmented privacy regulations, supporting strategic business initiatives, and addressing new risks surrounding AI.

Balancing tight budgets, these teams often opt for surface-level point solutions, manual processes such as spreadsheets, or even inaction—waiting until the company grows to comprehensively address privacy requirements.

Making these challenges more difficult is the fact that consumers are more concerned about personal data privacy than ever before, as reflected in a 2024 Cisco survey:

When a company chooses not to invest in privacy technology, they’re forced to rely on a fragmented set of tools: spreadsheets to track consent, asks to engineering for data subject requests (DSR) fulfillment, siloed systems to manage user preferences across departments, and time-consuming manual surveys to identify data system owners.

Ultimately, it’s a decision that increases the risk of regulatory scrutiny, negatively impacts consumer trust, and throttles the program’s (and the company’s) ability to scale.

Growing companies and their privacy leaders might prefer to wait for the “perfect time” to invest in privacy, but there is no truly perfect time and waiting only compounds the problem. The reality is that day-one is the best time to invest in privacy—giving companies the space to proactively improve their privacy programs when it makes sense, rather than having to do so under external pressures in the future.

Why mid-market companies procrastinate (and why that’s a mistake)

Many growing organizations operate under a set of comforting, yet risky, assumptions. Believing they won’t be targeted by regulators at their current size, they opt for manual processes over robust technical solutions—often convinced their approach is "good enough" and that privacy software is an expensive fix for a non-urgent problem.

This mindset is rooted in the view that privacy is solely a compliance obligation: a cost center that impedes business operations. Seen through this narrow lens, some organizations treat privacy teams as bottlenecks that slow down strategic projects and marketing campaigns, a forced stop at the end of an initiative.

The consequences of this perspective—and resulting inaction—can be direct, damaging, and self-fulfilling: slower product launches due to inefficient privacy reviews, constrained marketing campaigns based on patchy data with unclear consent, and a pervasive sense that privacy slows, rather than empowers, the business.

What looks like cost-saving today becomes a bottleneck tomorrow. The question isn't whether your organization will need to modernize its privacy operations, but whether it will do so proactively to gain a competitive edge.

Privacy as a competitive advantage

The traditional view of privacy as a reactive, risk-mitigation function is quickly becoming outdated. In its place, leading brands are deploying unified privacy platforms to reshape privacy into a proactive enabler of growth, trust, and innovation.

Until recently, time-consuming manual tasks like fulfilling data subject requests or compiling data protection assessments represented a significant drain on privacy professionals' time and resources. Now, they have access to next-generation solutions powered by automation and empowering smarter, more efficient workflows. These platforms help companies to:

• Manage user consent with automatic network-level enforcement
• Continuously detect and classify all objects and properties across data stacks, and
• Manage risks through live automated risk scoring and categorization

These capabilities prove this transformation isn't just theoretical, but delivers tangible results. With reliable and accurately consented data, organizations can personalize customer experiences more effectively—directly improving engagement and driving revenue. Furthermore, automated workflows reduce the risk of compliance gaps and give privacy teams more bandwidth to contribute to innovation and strategic growth.

This evolution is critical for startups and mid-market companies building out or scaling their privacy programs for the first time.

The business case for privacy automation

Transitioning from spreadsheets and surveys to an automated privacy platform delivers clear results—such as reducing DSR processing time by between 70-90%, ensuring consent management remains active through website updates or when new trackers are added, and giving privacy professionals the tools they need to build accurate assessments and comprehensive data inventories.

Beyond DSR fulfillment, any organization with moderate web traffic will see significant returns from a seamless consent management solution. For consumers who have more choice than ever in where they do business, a good consent experience is a must, delivering less friction, fewer website bounces, and more time spent on your site.

For regulators, broken consent is one of the easiest violations to spot, and has been the basis for numerous enforcement actions in the U.S. over the past few years, hitting Sephora, Advocate Aurora Health’s $12M settlement, and most recently, clothing retailer Todd Synder.

With the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) more than doubling its staff in the past three years and nearly a dozen other state privacy laws in effect by the end of 2025, regulators are only ramping up—and consent is low-hanging fruit.

It’s true that smaller companies often face budget constraints. But the ROI for privacy automation has a proven track record, especially when businesses understand the resource drain and hidden costs of manual privacy operations.

Gartner estimates that manually completing a single data subject request costs nearly $1,500, driven by expenses like manpower and opportunity cost. For organizations receiving hundreds or even thousands of subject requests a month, an automated privacy platform will quickly yield significant savings.

Consumers are also increasingly sophisticated in their understanding of their data privacy rights, with the CPPA receiving 3797 consumer complaints between July 2023 and December 2024. One complaint can spur a CPPA investigation, and with regulatory penalties thus far starting at around $50,000, any company deprioritizing privacy and compliance is taking on unnecessary risk.

Enter modern privacy platforms designed for rapid deployment. Implementation for lean privacy teams typically takes only a few weeks to get fully operational, meaning companies can confidently close compliance gaps quickly.

While some initial engineering resources might be necessary, manual privacy processes often rely full-time on IT to help complete DSRs, compile data inventories, and understand data provenance. Adopting a purpose-built solution saves untold engineering resources in the long-term, as automation efficiently clears the technical debt that manual processes inevitably accumulate over time.

Making the strategic decision

While any spend requires justification, switching from broken, time-consuming manual processes to an automated privacy platform is more than just an expense—it’s a strategic investment that will significantly raise operational efficiency, deliver automated compliance enforcement, and drive real business value.

Mid-market companies face the same regulatory requirements as large enterprises, yet operate with far fewer resources. This reality makes automation essential. Even if a company believes its manual processes are "good enough for now," the hidden costs of wasted time, delayed initiatives, patchy AI adoption, and missed opportunities carry a collective price tag that would never be approved if presented as a budget line-item.

Modern privacy operations have the power to transform how businesses build trust and manage risk. The longer you wait to implement them, the further behind you fall compared to early adopters—making immediate action not just smart, but essential.