One Call, Every Vendor Answers
A firewall alert fires at 2pm. The ISP says the line is fine, so it must be the firewall. The firewall vendor says the config is clean, so it must be the line. Twenty minutes vanish relaying messages between two support queues while the office sits offline, because no single vendor is contracted to fix the other's blind spot. Our IT vendor management services close that gap: one call, with authority over every vendor already in your stack, chases the fault instead of you. It sits inside Advisory, running the vendors your Virtual CIO engagement has already chosen.
Before You Hand Us Vendor Contact, Here's What Changes
Handing over the number for your ISP, your security vendor or your software reseller naturally raises questions before it raises confidence, especially once more than one of them is in play. These are the five we get asked most about multi-vendor IT support, in the order they usually come up, answered straight.
Do You Push Renewals Toward Your Own Partner Products?
No. Every renewal gets benchmarked against the market first, including vendors we hold no partnership with, and where the answer is to renew as is, that is recommended.
Does This Get In The Way Of Our Existing Account Manager?
No, it sits alongside that relationship rather than replacing it. What changes is that someone on our side is watching their renewal date and chasing their SLA when it slips.
What Authority Do You Get, And Can We Take It Back?
A signed letter of authority names us as the point of contact with a specific vendor for renewals and fault escalation only, nothing wider.
Is This A Separate Cost, Or Is It Included in our cost?
Whichever applies, you see that pricing model before anything is signed, not buried inside a wider quote you have to unpick later.
How Is This Different From Your Virtual CIO Service?
Virtual CIO decides on technology. Vendor management is the operational layer underneath: it runs the contracts, renewals, and escalations for your vendors.
Most businesses have an ownership problem: five different providers, each confident their piece is fine, and nobody whose job it is to ask why the whole thing still doesn't work together. That's where accountability disappears, into the gap between "that's not our system" and "that's not our fault."
Vendor management means one point of contact who chases the ISP, the software vendor and the hardware supplier on your behalf, and who owns the outcome even when the cause sits with someone else's contract.
Everything Vendor Management Actually Covers, Start To Finish
This isn’t a vague oversight retainer. It’s six defined pieces of work that run whether you’re juggling three vendor contracts or fifteen, active from the day the letter of authority is signed.
Contract Inventory
Every licence, line, agreement and subscription gets logged, with its renewal date, notice period, cost and the internal owner who signed it.
Renewal Calendar
One IT contract management calendar is built from that inventory, so a renewal or cancellation window gets flagged well ahead of time.
Letter Of Authority
A signed letter names Executive Solutions as the contact on file with each vendor, so it’s us on hold with the customer care centre, not you.
VENDOR SLA ESCALATION
Renewal Benchmarking
Before a contract renews, we check the current conditions against the market, and either negotiate or renew as is.
Overlap Consolidation
Where two vendors cover the same ground, we flag it and recommend consolidating at the next renewal.
Bundled Into ESMS
Already on an ESMS managed IT support package? Vendor management runs alongside it as part of the same relationship.
Works Standalone
You don’t need an existing ESMS contract to start this journey. We’ll help you work the way you need.
What We Show You Before You Trust The Process
Anyone can say they’ll chase your vendors and track your renewals. Before you take that as given, here’s what we actually hand over, so the mechanism is visible, not just described.
Contract Register Sample
A real example of the register format itself: vendor name, renewal date, notice period, current terms and internal owner, laid out exactly as you would receive it, not a mock-up built for a sales deck.
Vendor Count, Before And After
A real, anonymised before-and-after vendor count from an actual consolidation engagement we’ve run, showing how many separate vendor relationships existed before and after.
One Logged Escalation
A specific SLA breach, logged, escalated and resolved, shown with its timestamp trail, a real anonymised example of how long the escalation took from log to resolution.
The Letter Of Authority Itself
The actual template, so you can read exactly what authority you are and are not signing away before you sign anything, not a summary of what it supposedly covers.
What Actually Sets The Price Of Vendor Management
There’s no flat per-vendor fee here, because what you’re carrying decides it: contract count, how tangled the renewal dates are, and how urgent the SLA gaps have become. Every engagement opens with the same contract inventory below, then we quote one fixed monthly figure against it, not an open retainer.
01 How Many Contracts, And How Tangled Renewals Are
02 SLA Escalation Timing And Where The Cost Sits
03 Consolidation Savings Once Overlaps Are Found
04 How Often The Register Gets Reviewed
Who this is for
This fits a business running three or more vendor contracts (telco, cloud, software, hardware) with nobody tracking renewals or chasing faults across them. It also fits one already burned by an auto-renewal, a missed rate hike, or a vendor issue nobody owned. It is not for a single-vendor business with nothing to consolidate.
How it works
frequently asked questions
Do you take commission from the vendors you deal with on our behalf?
We hold formal partner status with a number of the vendors in a typical client’s stack, and where that could look like a conflict, we say so before we act. Every renewal we negotiate is benchmarked against the open market first, not steered toward our own partnerships.
Can we revoke your authority to deal with a vendor at any time?
Yes. The letter of authority only covers the vendors you name on it, and you can withdraw it in writing whenever you choose, for one vendor or for all of them. Revoking it has no effect on your existing support agreement with us; it only removes our standing to act on that contract.
Is vendor management billed separately, or is it part of ESMS?
Whichever model applies to your account, it is itemised on your invoice so you can see exactly what you’re paying to have each contract managed.
What happens if a vendor gap shows up during a compliance review?
If a review flags a vendor whose contract, certification or data handling falls short of what’s required, we log it against that vendor and chase the fix through the same escalation process as any other SLA breach. Where the gap needs a wider response than one vendor fixing one thing, we carry it into our compliance advisory work rather than trying to close it out from inside vendor management alone.
Close The Accountability Gap Before Your Next Multi-Vendor Outage Call
One party, every vendor accountable.