A CEO who could no longer explain her own technology footprint to the board.
The situation
Over eight years, the company had grown from four locations to twenty-seven. Each location had made its own technology decisions. Finance chose one accounting platform. Operations chose another. Field teams used whatever worked fastest on the ground. IT, understaffed and reactive, kept everything connected just well enough to function.
By the time leadership called HaveSight, the company was paying twenty-three different technology vendors. Several tools did the same thing. A few critical processes depended on a single employee's workaround. Nobody could produce a complete list of what the company was spending, let alone explain why each vendor was necessary.
The CFO knew the number was too high. The COO was tired of hearing that integrations were 'almost done.' And the CEO wanted to know whether the company could scale to fifty locations without the technology stack collapsing under its own weight.
The approach
We applied the HaveSight Framework™ across the executive team and the technology environment.
- Discover
We began with the executive team, not the server room. We mapped the business strategy — growth targets, acquisition plans, margin goals, and risk tolerance — before reviewing a single vendor contract.
- Assess
Over four weeks, we inventoried every vendor contract, use case, integration, and owner. We interviewed leaders across finance, operations, field management, and IT. We also modeled the true total cost of ownership, including hidden support hours and manual workarounds.
- Align
We surfaced redundancies and misalignments in plain language. Leadership could see, for the first time, which tools supported the business and which had simply accumulated over time.
- Prioritize
We produced a twelve-month roadmap: which vendors to consolidate, which contracts to renegotiate, which tools to retire, and which gaps to fill. Every recommendation included business impact, risk, cost, and a clear owner.
- Advise
We stayed with the executive team through vendor negotiations and the first consolidation phase, advising on communication, timing, and the decisions that arose once implementation began.
The outcome
- Vendor count reduced from twenty-three to eleven within the first year.
- Annual technology spend reduced by a meaningful double-digit percentage.
- Three automatic renewals were renegotiated or replaced before increases took effect.
- A single source of truth for vendor spend and ownership was established.
- The acquisition integration plan had a clear technology playbook instead of another ad-hoc merge.
“For the first time, we could explain our technology footprint to the board in one page. More importantly, we could defend every remaining vendor with a business reason.”