The Scummy Ecosystem Of Multiple Vendors
I’ve seen this concept at a ton of places I’ve worked, although it was extremely pronounced at the last 2–3 places I’ve had contracts with: basically, the place has 10–12 vendors, often with overlapping roles. They’re paying six arms and six legs worth of money each month to these vendor retainers, and during periods where internal leadership isn’t clear, often the vendors are just billing for a month where they did no work — and because there’s so little oversight, no one really notices and if someone at the top does and asks, “Why are we paying vendors so much?” the response is usually “Cost of doing business!”
On one contract I was recently on, we lost two “heads of marketing” (loose term) in about four weeks, largely because marketing at this place had become a complete joke — sales guys were making their own slide decks and graphics. You know the deal. You’ve probably seen these places yourself. I’ve worked at 6–7 versions of this.
When we lost the second “head of marketing,” as a search was conducted for hopefully a final solution (bad term) marketing honcho, a bunch of us convened for a meeting. The CEO and CFO were concerned about marketing spend relative to output. At this meeting, someone put a spreadsheet on the video call (shared…
