What managing five suppliers really costs you in time
A method for pricing the coordination time five marketing suppliers take from you. Plus a plain test for when consolidating would cost you more.
Nobody plans to end up with five suppliers
A designer arrived for a brochure. A developer was brought in for the website. A freelancer took the ads because the agency quote looked high. A social media firm came on for a product launch and stayed. Two years later the marketing function is five relationships and none of them speak to each other.
The cost that hurts here is not the invoices. It is the hour most days that somebody senior spends working as a switchboard between people who all need the same context explained separately. That hour sits on no budget line so nobody ever questions it.
What the coordination costs and what it does not
This cost never appears in your profit and loss. There is no line item for context switching and no invoice for the afternoon spent explaining the brand to a replacement freelancer. Consolidating suppliers also removes none of the underlying work. It only changes who carries it. You still pay each remaining fee in full.
Price the time directly instead. Take the loaded hourly cost of whoever coordinates. Usually that is the owner or the marketing lead. Multiply it by the hours spent each week briefing chasing reviewing and reconciling. Then add the cost of decisions that sit idle while one supplier waits on another. Service fees also carry GST at 18% on every invoice. Five suppliers means five sets of input credit to track rather than one. How input credit works for your particular registration is something a qualified chartered accountant should confirm for your situation.
When consolidating helps and when it is the wrong move
Consolidation earns its keep when suppliers do overlapping work and nobody owns the outcome. If a designer an ads freelancer and a social agency all touch the same campaign and all report separately then you are paying three times over for joining-up you still have to do yourself.
It is the wrong move when your suppliers are genuinely specialist and genuinely working. A manufacturer with one excellent export-market consultant and one technical writer who understands the product should keep both. Swapping a specialist for a generalist to tidy your admin is a poor trade and you will feel it in output quality long before you feel the saved hours. It is also wrong where one supplier is a family member or a long-standing partner. The political cost of removing them will swamp any time you recover. And if total marketing spend is small enough that each supplier does one modest job a quarter then there is barely any coordination to remove. Leave the arrangement alone and spend the attention elsewhere.
How to measure it before you change anything
Run a two-week log. Every time you touch a supplier note the minutes. Calls messages file transfers reviews approvals. Record them as they happen rather than reconstructing the fortnight on a Friday. Reconstructed estimates always run low.
Then map the overlaps. List every supplier against the assets they produce and the metrics they report on. Where two names sit against one asset you have a handoff. Where no name sits against a metric you have a gap nobody is paid to close. Handoffs and gaps are where the hours disappear.
Decide one overlap at a time rather than tendering the whole function. Removing the single worst handoff usually recovers more of your week than a wholesale reorganisation and it leaves you able to reverse the decision cheaply.
The number that matters and the number that flatters
Supplier count is the flattering number. Going from five names to two reads well in a review meeting and tells you almost nothing. Two suppliers who need daily direction can eat more of your week than five who run on a monthly cycle.
The number that matters is your own hours per month spent on marketing coordination measured the same way each month. Track time from decision to live alongside it. That is how long a straightforward change takes to reach the market. If supplier count falls and that figure holds steady then you rearranged the chart without fixing the problem.
The common mistake
The expensive error is consolidating on price rather than on handoffs. A business tenders the whole marketing function hoping to compress five fees into one cheaper one. The saving is real for a month or two. Then the undocumented work the departing specialist quietly did stops happening and nobody notices for a quarter. Rankings drift. A feed breaks. A seasonal campaign that used to be prepared in advance simply is not.
Before you remove any supplier write down everything they produce including the parts nobody briefed them to do. The parts nobody can name are usually the parts that were holding something up.
Keep the accounts in your own name
Whatever you decide about suppliers the ad accounts the analytics property the domain registration and the social profiles should sit in your own company's name with your suppliers added as users. This costs nothing to arrange while a relationship is healthy and it is the single thing that makes consolidation survivable later. A supplier who owns your ad account owns your history and your audience lists. Recovering them is slow and sometimes it is not possible at all.
This guide explains how something works. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rules change. Confirm anything regulatory with a qualified professional before you act on it.