Vendors & Contracts
Read with your interests alone in mind.
Somebody should read your agreements on your behalf who is not selling you anything and not the counterparty. Most mid-sized companies have never had that. The result is contracts written for a company half their size, renewing automatically, with scope boundaries that only become visible when you need something urgently.
Vendor agreements are where money leaks quietly and leverage expires silently. Renewal dates are the only moments you hold real negotiating power, and they pass unnoticed when nobody owns the calendar.
What good looks like at your size
We score against this benchmark, meaning what a well-run company of 50 to 500 employees should reasonably have in place, rather than against theoretical perfection.
Someone on your side has read the agreement
A person who does not work for the vendor can state what is in scope, what is excluded, what the service levels promise, and what happens when they are missed.
Renewals are tracked with lead time
Every material agreement has a renewal date, a decision owner, and enough notice to actually negotiate or leave rather than to simply notice.
Performance is reviewed against agreed measures
Vendor reviews happen on your cadence with your agenda, measured against things both sides accepted in advance, not a quarterly sales conversation.
Concentration and exit risk are understood
You know which vendors could genuinely hurt you, how long a forced migration would take, and where your data would come out.
Nothing material renews by default
Auto-renewal is a deliberate choice for the agreements where it makes sense, and a tracked decision everywhere else.
What we typically find
Patterns common enough to name. None of them indicate a bad team. They are what happens when a company grows faster than the decisions that shaped its technology.
A contract written for a smaller company
Per-device or per-user pricing set when you were half the size, with a scope that no longer matches how the business operates, quietly renewing each year.
Unlimited support that excludes what you need
The headline promises everything; an exhibit carves out projects, after-hours work, or the specific systems that generate most of your tickets.
Auto-renewals found after the window closed
Notice periods measured in months, discovered in the month it renews, locking in another year, often with an uplift nobody agreed to explicitly.
Service levels with no teeth
SLAs stated without measurement, without credits, and without anyone on either side reporting against them.
Overlapping vendors from urgent decisions
Three providers doing adjacent work because each was engaged to solve one crisis, and no one has since asked whether all three are still needed.
How we assess it
Where a document does not exist, that is itself a finding, and we say so plainly rather than treating the gap as an obstacle.
- MSP agreement: scope, SLAs, and what the contract actually commits to
- Licensing agreements and renewal dates, including the auto-renewals nobody tracks
- Vendor accountability: who reviews performance, and against what
- Concentration risk: which vendors could hurt you and how locked in you are
- All provider agreements in full, including exhibits, statements of work, and amendments
- Software licensing agreements and the renewal calendar
- Vendor invoices for the trailing twelve months
- Any quarterly business review materials or performance reporting the vendor supplies
- Working sessions on what the relationship is actually like day to day, at staff level as well as executive
Questions the readout answers
Is our MSP contract fair for what we have become, and how would we know?
Which renewals in the next 12 months are negotiating opportunities?
What this domain contributes to your report
- A plain-language summary of each agreement: what you are owed and what you are paying for
- A renewal calendar with negotiation windows and a target outcome for each
- Benchmarked pricing with specific, named renegotiation levers
- A concentration and exit-risk assessment for the vendors that matter most
How this domain is scored
Every domain is scored 0–10 on the same scale, so the scorecard shows you where to look first rather than a single undifferentiated grade.
Something here can hurt the business now. These findings lead the roadmap.
Functioning, but behind where a company of your size and stage should be.
In good shape. Worth maintaining rather than investing further right now.
A genuine strength, and often something to build on elsewhere.