Nobody sets out to have six IT vendors. It happens one reasonable decision at a time. The phone company was there first. Someone set up the website years ago.
A copier contract arrived with print management attached. A security product got added after a scare. A consultant built the system your business runs on and stayed on retainer. Each one made sense on the day you signed it, and together they add up to something nobody actually chose.
The monthly invoices are the part you can see, and I'd add them up, because almost nobody has. They aren't the expensive part.
The problems that live between vendors
I see versions of this same morning all the time. Email isn't arriving. The email vendor says the service is running fine and tells you to check with whoever manages the domain.
The domain company says the records look correct and points at the firewall. The firewall is the internet provider's box, and the provider says the connection is up, so it's not their problem.
Every one of them is telling the truth. The problem I keep running into lives in the space between them, and nobody there has that space as their job. So it lands on you. The office manager or the owner spends the day relaying technical answers nobody fully understands between companies that have never spoken to each other, while staff sit there unable to send email.
The invoice for that day never shows up, which is why it never gets counted. In my experience it should be.
What sprawl costs past that one morning
- Overlap you pay for twice, when two products quietly do the same job because vendor four did not know what vendor two already provided
- Gaps nobody covers, when every vendor assumes someone else handles backups and you find out late that no one did
- Security drift, when six companies hold some level of access to your systems and each has its own standard for how carefully that access is handled
- No plan for where any of it is going, because each vendor tends to its own corner and no one is accountable for whether the whole thing still serves the business
- Knowledge in fragments, because the full picture of how your systems fit together lives in no single place, including inside your own building
What consolidation actually fixes
Fewer invoices is a nice side effect of consolidation. The real gain is ownership. When one partner is responsible for the result, the email-not-arriving morning goes differently. You make one call, and the back-and-forth becomes their problem to sort out instead of your whole Tuesday.
We wrote up a real version of this in a case study, six vendors, multiple invoices, and nobody in charge, and it describes the untangling honestly, including the parts that were tedious.
I'll say this plainly: consolidation doesn't always mean replacing everyone. I've watched this go the other way too, where a vendor is good at its piece and stays, with someone now accountable for how the pieces fit together. What I want for you is one company responsible for the outcome, so a problem has a clear owner. That's the situation our page on when nobody owns your IT describes.
How to start without a leap
You don't have to fire anyone to find out where you stand. Our IT consulting and vendor management work often starts with exactly that. We list every vendor, what each one actually provides, what each one costs, where they overlap, and where the gaps are. That document is useful whatever you decide to do next, and it's usually the first time anyone has seen the whole picture on one page.
If some version of that email morning has happened to you, schedule a call. Bring the invoices. I'll help you add up what this is really costing, including the parts that never land on one.