4 vendors to 1 partner, 28% lower combined cost
Client: Mid-market B2B services firm, ~150 employees, UK · Timeline: 60-day discovery + 90-day migration
The challenge
The client was a 150-person B2B services firm running on a stack of four separate vendors: a marketing agency in London, a website development shop in Manchester, an outsourced bookkeeping firm, and an offshore BPO running their inbound support and lead qualification. Each vendor had a separate contract, a separate point of contact, and a separate monthly reporting cadence.
Nothing reconciled. The marketing agency reported MQLs, the BPO reported calls answered, the bookkeeper reported a P&L that was always two weeks behind, and the website vendor reported uptime. There was no shared view of what any of it added up to. The COO had spent the previous quarter trying to build a unified dashboard in a spreadsheet and given up.
Cost was the second problem. The four vendors combined cost roughly £42k a month, and a board review had flagged that the firm was paying senior-agency rates for work that mid-tier delivery could absorb. They also had three overlapping CRM and reporting tools the vendors had each insisted on installing.
The solution
We ran a 60-day discovery before we touched anything. Our team interviewed each vendor, mapped every workflow, and produced a consolidation plan that the COO could put in front of the board.
The migration ran across all four of our service lines in 90 days. Digital Marketing absorbed the agency’s SEO, paid, and content work onto our pod model. Website Development took over the existing site, audited and patched it, and put it on our monthly maintenance retainer. Accounting & Finance migrated bookkeeping to a single Xero instance with a standardized chart of accounts and took over month-end close. Call Center Outsourcing replaced the offshore BPO with a UK-business-hours pod that also handled lead qualification against the CRM.
We consolidated the three overlapping tools down to one CRM (HubSpot), one analytics view (GA4 + Looker Studio), and one project management surface for the client to see all work in flight. The COO got a single Monday morning briefing covering pipeline, web, finance, and support — replacing four separate vendor calls she had been taking each week.
We held a weekly business review for the first six months and dropped it to fortnightly after that. The client kept a single named account director on our side as their point of contact across all four service lines.
How we delivered
Days 1-60: discovery, not migration
We deliberately did not move any work in the first two months. We interviewed each of the four vendors, sat in on their reporting calls, mapped every recurring workflow, and produced a consolidation plan with a named owner on our side for every service line. The plan went to the client’s board for approval before we touched a contract.
Days 60-90: parallel migration
We ran all four migrations in parallel rather than in sequence. The risk was real — any one of them could have stalled the rest — but it cut the total cutover from a projected six months to 90 days.
- Digital Marketing absorbed the agency’s SEO, paid, and content work onto our pod model, with no campaign downtime
- Website Development took the existing site, audited and patched it, and moved it onto our monthly retainer
- Accounting & Finance migrated the books to Xero, standardized the chart of accounts, and closed the next month-end inside our SLA
- Call Center Outsourcing stood up a UK-hours pod and replaced the offshore BPO without a gap in coverage
The inflection point
The bookkeeping migration nearly slipped. The outgoing bookkeeper missed the agreed handover deadline by two weeks, and the books were less clean than the discovery had suggested. We absorbed an extra cleanup pass into the engagement at no extra fee, which kept the timeline intact and bought us trust with the COO that paid off later.
What ongoing looks like
The client now gets one Monday briefing covering pipeline, web, finance and support. A single named account director on our side owns the relationship across all four service lines. The fortnightly business review keeps the strategic conversation moving without taking up a full calendar slot every week.
The bigger result
The board approved a further expansion six months in: we picked up the firm’s procurement reporting and added a part-time FP&A analyst inside our Accounting pod. That second wave was only possible because the first 90 days landed clean.
Outcomes that matter
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