Six Vendors, Multiple Invoices, and Nobody in Charge

A commercial lighting company of roughly 40 people across two locations had built up its technology one purchase at a time. Whenever something was needed, somebody bought it from whichever vendor was in front of them that week.

Six vendors later, nobody had looked at the whole picture. The business had an IT support company, a web and domain host, a phone company, a firewall and security vendor, a Microsoft 365 reseller, and a backup and disaster recovery provider. Each one was doing its own job, and the trouble sat in the gaps between them:

• Six contracts with six renewal dates, and nobody tracking them
• Seven separate invoices on mixed monthly and annual cycles, each coded to a different account
• Every fault started with a round of calls to work out whose problem it was, and each vendor could reasonably point at another
• Nobody who understood how everything fit together across both sites
• No plan, so equipment got replaced when it failed
• No answer to the question the owner cared about most, which was what technology would cost next year

That cost rarely shows up on an invoice. It shows up in the owner's time and in the hours the business spends acting as the switchboard between its own suppliers. For a construction trade business whose people are quoting jobs and working out of trucks, those hours come straight out of the work that pays.

The first job wasn't technical. Before proposing anything, Tech Dynamix built a full inventory of every contract with its renewal date and monthly cost, and of what each vendor was delivering compared with its invoice.

The inventory turned up what you'd expect when six vendors each look after their own piece:

• Duplicate equipment. More than one vendor had solved the same problem with its own hardware, and both sets were still running and still being paid for
• Missing or unreliable security. Protection the business assumed was in place in some areas wasn't, and where it did exist, nobody was monitoring it
• Old vulnerabilities still open. These were basic exposures that get closed on day one when somebody owns the environment, and nobody had been asked to look
• End-of-life equipment in production. Hardware past vendor support was still running because it hadn't failed yet

None of this was one vendor's failure. Each had been hired for a narrow slice and delivered that slice, and the gaps between six narrow scopes are where duplicated spend and open risk collect.

From there, Tech Dynamix took over all of it as the company's managed IT services provider. Some services were replaced outright with our own. Others, Microsoft 365 among them, were brought under our management and kept, because the licensing was sound and what it lacked was an owner.

We sequenced the transition around the existing renewal dates, so nothing was paid for twice and no contract was broken early to shorten the timeline.

What replaced it is deliberately simple. One managed services agreement, billed on one invoice, covers a documented environment across both sites. The owner also has a technology roadmap with dates and budget figures on it, which we review together on a schedule.

The owner went back to running the business, and managing vendors became our job.

• One number to call for any problem, including the ones that turn out to belong to another supplier. Chasing those down is part of our vendor management
• One invoice a month, on a predictable date, for a predictable amount
• Lower monthly spend. The duplicate hardware was retired, and the overlapping contracts collapsed into one agreement sized to what the business uses
• Substantially more support at the same time, because the money stopped paying six vendors to each watch one corner
• Security gaps closed, and end-of-life equipment moved onto a replacement schedule
• One documented environment across both sites, so the knowledge is written down and doesn't depend on whoever answered the phone last

The roadmap runs twelve months out. The company plans to grow headcount by around 50 percent in that window, and the goal we're working to is absorbing that growth at or below what it spent on technology before consolidating.

That goal is realistic because the duplication is gone and the environment is clean, so new hires don't bring another vendor or another contract with them. For the owner, the change is that a technology problem is now somebody else's job to chase, and the budget is settled at the start of the year with no surprises during it.

Most businesses don't set out to have six IT vendors. They get there one purchase at a time, and the cost stays hidden until somebody adds it up. We wrote more about that in what six IT vendors cost you.