The Complete Guide to GRC for Growing Companies

You've probably heard the acronym GRC tossed around in board meetings, sales calls, or security Slack channels. Maybe a prospect sent you a vendor security questionnaire and your stomach dropped. Maybe your investors started asking about your "compliance posture" and you smiled and nodded while Googling it under the table.

Let's face it — governance, risk, and compliance isn't the reason you started your company. But if you're growing, it's the thing that will determine whether you close enterprise deals, raise your next round, and sleep soundly at night.

This guide is for you. Not the Fortune 500 CISO with a 40-person compliance team. Not the consultant who's been doing this for 20 years. This is for the growing company — the 30-person startup that just landed its first enterprise prospect, the 150-person scale-up expanding into regulated industries, the founder who knows they need to "do compliance" but isn't sure where to start.

Let's break it all down.

What GRC Actually Means (and Why It Matters Now)

GRC stands for governance, risk, and compliance. Three words. Three disciplines. One interconnected system that, when done well, keeps your company protected, trustworthy, and ready to grow.

Here's the quick version:

Governance is about how decisions get made. Who's accountable? What policies exist? How does leadership steer the ship?
Risk management is about identifying what could go wrong and deciding what to do about it. Every company has risks — the question is whether you're managing them or ignoring them.
Compliance is about proving you meet external standards. Frameworks, audits, certifications, evidence — the artifacts that show the world you're doing what you say you're doing.

The key insight? These three things aren't separate projects. They're a system. Your governance decisions shape your risk appetite. Your risk appetite determines which compliance frameworks matter. Your compliance work surfaces governance gaps. It's a loop.

And here's why it matters right now for growing companies:

Enterprise buyers demand it. Try closing a six-figure deal without a SOC 2 report. Good luck.
Investors expect it. Series A and beyond, due diligence includes security and compliance maturity.
Regulations are multiplying. GDPR, CCPA, state-level privacy laws, AI governance — the list grows every quarter.
Breaches are expensive. The average cost of a data breach for companies under 500 employees hit $3.31 million in 2024. That's not a rounding error.
Trust is a competitive advantage. Customers choose vendors they trust. Period.

You don't need to be perfect. But you do need to be intentional.

The Three Pillars Explained

Let's go deeper on each pillar. Understanding these individually is the first step to making them work together.

🏛️ Governance

Governance is the "who decides what and how" of your organization. It's the structure that keeps things from being chaotic as you scale.

For a growing company, governance includes:

Policies — Written rules about how your company handles data, access, incidents, vendors, and more. These don't need to be 50-page legal documents. Clear, actionable policies that people actually read are better than perfect ones collecting dust.
Roles and accountability — Who owns security? Who approves access to production? Who's responsible when something goes wrong? If the answer is "everyone" or "no one," you have a governance problem.
Decision-making frameworks — How does your company decide which risks to accept? How do you prioritize security investments? Governance gives you a repeatable way to make these calls.

Practical example: You're a 75-person SaaS company. Your engineering VP wants to adopt a new cloud provider. Good governance means there's a process for that — a vendor review, a risk assessment, approval from the right people, and documentation of the decision. Bad governance means someone spins up an AWS account on a personal credit card and tells you about it three months later.

Governance doesn't have to be bureaucratic. It has to be clear. Write down who owns what, how decisions get made, and what the rules are. Then revisit it every quarter as you grow.

⚠️ Risk Management

Risk management is the discipline of figuring out what could hurt your business and doing something about it before it does.

Every company has risks. Market risks, operational risks, security risks, compliance risks, financial risks. The question isn't whether you have them — it's whether you know what they are and have a plan.

Here's how it works in practice:

Identify risks. What could go wrong? Think broadly — data breaches, key-person dependencies, vendor failures, regulatory changes, natural disasters, insider threats.
Assess and score them. How likely is each risk? How bad would it be if it happened? Use a simple likelihood × impact matrix to start. You don't need fancy software for this.
Treat them. For each risk, decide: mitigate it (reduce the likelihood or impact), transfer it (insurance, contracts), accept it (acknowledge it and move on), or avoid it (stop doing the risky thing).
Monitor and review. Risks change. New ones appear. Old ones evolve. Set a cadence — quarterly at minimum — to review your risk landscape.

A risk register is non-negotiable. This is your living document that tracks every identified risk, its score, its owner, and its treatment plan. It doesn't matter if it starts as a spreadsheet. What matters is that it exists, someone owns it, and it gets updated. Check out our risk register guide for a practical walkthrough on building yours.

The biggest mistake growing companies make with risk management? Treating it as a checkbox exercise. Your risk register should actually inform decisions. If you identify a critical vendor dependency as a high risk, that should trigger action — not just a row in a spreadsheet that nobody looks at.

✅ Compliance

Compliance is where the rubber meets the road. It's about meeting external standards and proving it with evidence.

At its core, compliance involves:

Frameworks — Structured sets of controls and requirements that define what "good" looks like. SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, NIST — each framework serves a different purpose and audience.
Controls — Specific practices you implement to meet framework requirements. "Encrypt data at rest" is a control. "Require MFA for all users" is a control. "Conduct annual security training" is a control.
Evidence — Proof that your controls are working. Screenshots, logs, configuration exports, policy documents, training records, access reviews. Auditors live and breathe evidence.
Audits — Formal assessments (internal or external) that evaluate whether your controls are designed and operating effectively.

Which frameworks matter for which industries?

SaaS / Technology: SOC 2 is the starting point. ISO 27001 for international credibility.
Healthcare: HIPAA is mandatory. SOC 2 is often expected on top of it.
Financial services / Payments: PCI DSS for anyone touching cardholder data. SOC 2 for broader trust.
Government / Defense: FedRAMP, CMMC, NIST 800-53.
Any company handling EU data: GDPR compliance is non-negotiable.
General best practice: NIST Cybersecurity Framework as a baseline, SOC 2 for customer-facing trust.

Not sure which framework fits your situation? Our compliance framework comparison breaks down the differences in plain language.

The biggest shift in compliance over the past few years is the move from "point-in-time" to continuous compliance. It's not enough to pass an audit once a year and forget about it. Modern buyers and regulators expect you to maintain compliance continuously — which means your evidence collection, control monitoring, and risk management need to be ongoing processes, not annual fire drills.

🛠️ Building Your First GRC Program

Alright. You understand the three pillars. Now how do you actually build a GRC program from scratch? Here's a step-by-step approach that works for companies of 30 to 500 people.

Step 1: Start with Why

Before you touch a single tool, policy, or framework, answer this question: why are you doing this?

Common triggers:

An enterprise prospect requires a SOC 2 report before they'll sign
Your board or investors are asking about security maturity
You experienced a security incident (or a near miss) and realized you need structure
A partner or customer sent a vendor security questionnaire you couldn't answer
You're expanding into a regulated industry (healthcare, finance, government)
Your cyber insurance application asked questions you couldn't confidently answer

Your "why" determines your priorities. If it's a specific enterprise deal, focus on the framework they're asking for. If it's board pressure, start with a risk assessment and governance structure. If it's a breach scare, start with incident response and access controls.

Write down your why. Share it with your team. It keeps everyone focused when the work gets overwhelming.

Step 2: Pick Your First Framework

Don't try to do everything at once. Pick one framework and do it well.

Here's the cheat sheet:

Building a SaaS product? Start with SOC 2. It's the most commonly requested framework by enterprise buyers and covers security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
Handling health data? HIPAA first. No exceptions.
Processing payments? PCI DSS is your starting point.
Selling internationally? ISO 27001 carries weight globally and maps well to other frameworks.
Not sure? SOC 2 Type II is almost always a safe first bet for technology companies.

The good news: frameworks overlap a lot. If you build a solid SOC 2 program, you've probably done 60-70% of the work for ISO 27001. Start with one, and expanding to others gets dramatically easier.

Check out our SOC 2 readiness roadmap for a practical four-week plan to get started.

Step 3: Assign Ownership

This is where most growing companies stumble. Compliance is not a one-person job, and it's definitely not "just a security thing."

Every control needs an owner. Here's what that looks like:

Access reviews → IT or engineering lead
Security awareness training → People ops or HR
Vendor risk assessments → Procurement or whoever manages vendor relationships
Incident response → Engineering or security lead
Policy approvals → Executive sponsor (CEO, CTO, or VP of Engineering)
Evidence collection → Distributed across teams, coordinated by a compliance lead

You need an executive sponsor — someone at the leadership level who champions the program, removes blockers, and signals to the company that this matters. Without executive sponsorship, compliance becomes "that thing we'll get to eventually."

You also need a compliance lead — one person who coordinates the effort, tracks progress, and keeps the program moving. In smaller companies, this is often the CTO, VP of Engineering, or Head of Security. At some point, you'll hire a dedicated person. But you don't need one on day one.

The key principle: make it cross-functional. Engineering owns technical controls. HR owns people-related controls. Legal owns contractual and regulatory controls. Finance owns financial controls. The compliance lead orchestrates. Everyone has skin in the game.

Step 4: Build Your Evidence Engine

Evidence is the currency of compliance. Without it, your controls are just promises. With it, they're proof.

Start by mapping every control to the evidence that proves it works:

MFA enabled? → Screenshot of IdP configuration
Access reviews conducted quarterly? → Documented review with timestamps
Encryption at rest? → Cloud provider configuration export
Security training completed? → LMS completion records
Incident response plan tested? → Tabletop exercise notes and action items

Then build a system for collecting, organizing, and maintaining that evidence. Our guide on building an evidence library that scales walks through naming conventions, ownership, and retention in detail.

Start simple. A shared drive with consistent naming and a spreadsheet tracking what's due when is perfectly fine for your first audit. You don't need to automate everything on day one. But you do need a system — even a manual one — so evidence collection is predictable, not panicked.

As you grow, automation becomes essential. Pulling configuration evidence from cloud providers, syncing training records from your LMS, capturing access review approvals automatically — this is where purpose-built GRC platforms start earning their keep.

Step 5: Run Your First Internal Review

Before an auditor ever looks at your program, you should look at it with a critical eye.

Run a gap analysis:

Framework mapping → For each requirement in your chosen framework, do you have a control in place? Is it documented? Is there evidence?
Control effectiveness → Are your controls actually working, or do they exist on paper only? Test them. Try logging in without MFA. Check if terminated employees still have access. Review your last incident — did the response plan get followed?
Evidence completeness → For each control, is the evidence current, complete, and accessible? Can you find it in under five minutes?
Ownership gaps → Are there controls with no owner? Controls owned by someone who left six months ago?

Then do a dry run. Pretend you're the auditor. Walk through a sample of controls end-to-end: requirement → control → evidence → owner. Where does the chain break? Those are your gaps.

Document everything you find. Prioritize fixes by severity. Address the critical ones before your actual audit. For a deeper walkthrough on preparing for an external audit, see our guide on audit preparation.

A clean internal review builds confidence — both yours and your auditor's. Auditors love working with companies that have clearly done their homework. It makes the process faster, cheaper, and far less stressful.

🚫 Common Mistakes to Avoid

Every growing company makes mistakes on their GRC journey. That's normal. But some mistakes are more painful (and more avoidable) than others.

We wrote an entire post on 5 common GRC mistakes, but here are the top three that trip up growing companies:

1. Treating compliance as a one-time project. You pass your SOC 2 audit, pop the champagne, and forget about it until next year. Meanwhile, controls drift, evidence goes stale, and your next audit becomes a scramble. Compliance is continuous. Build it into your operations, not your project plan.

2. No executive sponsorship. When compliance is a bottom-up effort with no leadership backing, it stalls. Teams deprioritize compliance tasks because "real work" takes precedence. Get a CxO to own it, talk about it, and hold people accountable.

3. Buying a tool before defining a process. Tools are powerful, but they amplify whatever process you put into them. If your process is chaos, your tool will be organized chaos with a nice dashboard. Define your workflows, roles, and evidence needs first. Then pick a tool that supports them.

🔧 Choosing the Right GRC Tools

Speaking of tools — let's talk about the evolution most growing companies go through.

Stage 1: Spreadsheets and shared drives. This is where everyone starts. Google Sheets for your control matrix, Drive for evidence, Docs for policies. It works for your first audit. It does not work for your second, third, or fourth — especially as you add frameworks, team members, and customers asking for compliance artifacts.

Stage 2: Cobbled-together tools. Maybe you add a project management tool for tracking tasks, a wiki for policies, a ticketing system for remediation. Better than spreadsheets, but now your compliance program lives across five tools and nobody has the full picture.

Stage 3: Purpose-built GRC platform. This is where things click. A single workspace that connects your frameworks, controls, evidence, risks, and workflows. Everything in one place. One source of truth.

When evaluating GRC platforms, look for:

Multi-framework support — You'll start with one framework but add more. Can the platform map controls across SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and others without duplicating work?
Evidence management — Can you collect, organize, and maintain evidence in a way that survives team turnover and framework changes?
Collaboration features — GRC is cross-functional. Can engineering, HR, legal, and leadership all work in the same system?
Workflow automation — Recurring tasks, reminders, approvals — the operational backbone that keeps your program running.
AI-powered assistance — Modern platforms use AI to help you draft policies, map controls, identify gaps, and reduce the manual grind.
Clear pricing — No surprise costs as you scale.

This is exactly why we built episki. We saw too many growing companies drowning in spreadsheets or overpaying for enterprise tools that assumed you had a 10-person compliance team. episki gives you frameworks, evidence management, AI-powered workflows, and team collaboration in one workspace — designed for companies that are building their GRC program, not maintaining a legacy one.

Curious how we stack up? Check out episki vs Vanta and episki vs Drata for an honest comparison.

📊 Measuring Success

You've built your program. It's running. But how do you know if it's actually working?

Here are the metrics that matter:

Control coverage — What percentage of your framework requirements have implemented, documented, and owned controls? Start tracking this from day one. Target 100% before your audit.
Evidence freshness — How much of your evidence is current versus overdue? Stale evidence signals process drift and creates audit risk. Set cadences and track adherence.
Issue remediation time — When you find a gap or a failed control, how long does it take to fix? Faster remediation means lower risk exposure.
Audit cycle time — How long does it take from audit kickoff to final report? This gets shorter as your program matures. First audit might take 3-4 months. Mature programs can do it in weeks.
Risk acceptance count — How many risks is your organization actively choosing to accept? This isn't inherently bad, but it should be a conscious, documented decision reviewed regularly.
Cross-framework reuse — When you add a second framework, how many existing controls satisfy the new requirements? High reuse means you built a solid foundation.

For a deeper dive on what to put in front of your leadership team, check out GRC metrics executives actually care about.

The key is consistency. Pick a small set of metrics, measure them the same way every time, and review them on a regular cadence. Dashboards are great, but only if someone looks at them and takes action.

🚀 What's Next

If you've read this far, you already understand more about GRC than most people at growing companies. That's not a dig — it's just reality. GRC is one of those domains where most people learn by doing, often under pressure, and usually with incomplete information.

Here's what I want you to take away:

GRC is a journey, not a destination. You won't "finish" compliance. Your program will evolve as your company grows, as frameworks update, as new risks emerge, and as customers raise the bar. That's okay. The goal isn't perfection — it's a system that improves over time.

Start small, start now. You don't need a perfect program to begin. You need a first framework, a few key owners, a basic evidence system, and the discipline to keep going. The best time to start was six months ago. The second best time is today.

Make it collaborative. The companies that succeed at GRC are the ones where it's not siloed in the security team. Everyone contributes. Engineering, HR, legal, finance, product — they all have a role. Build a program that includes them from the start.

Invest in your foundation. The controls, policies, and evidence you build for your first framework will carry forward as you add more. Build them well, document them clearly, and maintain them consistently. Future you will be grateful.

You've got this. And you don't have to do it alone.

Ready to build your GRC program? episki gives you frameworks, evidence management, and AI-powered workflows in one workspace — designed for growing companies, not enterprise dinosaurs. Start your free trial and see how fast you can go from zero to audit-ready.