One strategy. Seven vendors, pulling in different directions.
How a company rooted in tech and innovation traded a fragmented vendor bench for a unified team, and turned an inflection point into an ongoing partnership.
Objective
Unify a fragmented vendor landscape across marketing, sales, product, IT, and operations around a single long term strategy, and give C level leadership a clear, holistic approach to execute it.
Focus Areas
Operational Design to map departments and vendors into one coordinated approach, Growth Strategy to reconnect execution with the business strategy it had drifted from, AI and Digital Transformation to advise on technology stack and platform selection, and Market Intelligence to evaluate vendor capabilities and value creation against what the business actually needed.
Outcome
Seven vendors reduced to three, a unified team operating against one strategy instead of seven separate ones, and an inflection point engagement that became an ongoing advisory relationship.
The Situation
The company had no shortage of expertise. It had seven vendors spread across marketing, sales, product, IT, and operations, each one competent in their own lane. What it did not have was coordination. Each vendor optimized for their own function, on their own timeline, with their own definition of success. Execution had quietly drifted away from the overall business strategy, not through any single failure, but through the accumulated drift of many smart people solving different problems in parallel.
The Real Problem
Leadership's first instinct was that they had a vendor quality problem. The real problem was structural. No one owned the whole picture. Each vendor reported on their own function, and each looked fine in isolation, while the sum of their work no longer added up to a coherent strategy.
More vendors did not mean more capability. It meant more seams, and seams are where strategy quietly leaks out of execution. The fix was not replacing underperforming vendors. It was establishing who was accountable for the whole, then deciding which vendors actually belonged inside that picture.
The Work
This began as a focused engagement at a clear inflection point, and the work itself is what turned it into an ongoing relationship:
- Worked directly with C level leadership across marketing, sales, product, IT, and operations to map a holistic approach that reconnected execution with long term strategy
- Evaluated every vendor's budget against actual output to determine real return on investment, not assumed value
- Assessed the full vendor list against the capabilities the business genuinely needed, separating real value creation from scope that had simply accumulated over time
- Reduced the vendor bench from seven to three, consolidating around the partners capable of operating as one coordinated team rather than seven parallel ones
- Advised on technology stack and platform selection to support the newly unified approach
- Supported leadership through the internal change management that a shift this size requires, so the transition strengthened the team rather than destabilizing it
The Outcome
- Seven vendors became three, cutting complexity and cost while raising the bar on what each remaining partner was accountable for
- A one team approach replaced seven independent ones, with every remaining vendor operating against the same strategy instead of their own version of it
- Leadership regained a clear, holistic view of execution across marketing, sales, product, IT, and operations
- What began as a focused engagement at an inflection point became an ongoing advisory relationship, because the coordination this required was not a one time fix
Why It Worked
Fragmentation rarely comes from bad vendors. It comes from no one being accountable for how their work fits together. Every vendor here was doing competent work in their own lane. The gap was coordination, and coordination is not a task any single vendor can be expected to own on their own behalf.
We were not brought in to grade seven vendors. We were brought in to determine which ones belonged inside a single strategy, and to hold that strategy in place going forward. That is the difference between a vendor review and an inflection point, and it is why the relationship continued well past the initial engagement.