k_Street Consulting, LLC Blog

If your business works with many different vendors, then you know that your vendor management strategy can very much take on a life of its own and spiral out of control. The more time you spend working with vendors, the more time you’re not spending on the actual tasks associated with your job responsibilities. This means that you’re leaving a lot of wasted productivity and time on the table. We’re here to help you get the most out of managing your vendor relationships, as well as one secret that can help you get the most out of them.

Every business has vendors and most of them take up more time than they probably should. Some of the relationships are pragmatic and fulfilling, but many take up too much time and effort and tend to distract decision makers from focusing on what is truly important within the business. As far as technology goes, depending on your company, you may have a dozen or more vendors contacting you sometimes a couple of times a month looking for you to expand your investment with their companies. Let’s talk about how vendor management can help your business.

The COVID-19 outbreak has a lot of business owners looking over their supply chains and their budgets wondering how they are ever going to make things work. If yours is like most businesses, you use IT to make your business smarter, more efficient, and help your workforce be more productive. Unfortunately, with recessionary winds swirling around as a result of this terrible situation, it may become inevitable that your business will have to do more with less for some time. 

Businesses use a lot of different vendors and many of them demand a certain amount of attention. Any attention you are spending on your vendors is attention that you aren’t spending on your business. Fortunately, there is a service that can reduce your exposure to unnecessary vendor calls.

Small business owners have a lot on their minds and a ton of responsibilities that the average employee doesn’t have. Small businesses often force business owners into taking on various roles that may or may not fit their specific skill set, including CIO or CTO. Of course, the Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer are responsible for technology-related decisions, but the reality of the matter is that you only want technology professionals in these roles… not just professionals who happen to be the most knowledgeable folks in your office.

In a sense, your business relies on its vendors to provide the goods and services needed to make your organization function. Think about your Internet service provider. They provide you with a service that connects you to important assets. The software your business utilizes is also provided by vendors, and work probably can’t get done without it. Therefore, it’s natural that you will want a good relationship with vendors… provided they are actually decent vendors themselves.

Who manages the relationships that your organization has with its various vendors? Do you have someone who specifically handles this role, or is it pushed onto your already-full schedule? If this is something that takes up a significant portion of your day, vendor management (though necessary) can become a detriment. Thankfully, there is a better way to handle your vendor relationships, and it doesn’t involve stretching yourself thin.

It’s important to understand that you as a business owner wouldn’t be as successful as you are today if it weren’t for the talents of your professionally-trained team. You need to understand that the complexities and time constraints of running a business put a lot of responsibility on your shoulders, and you can’t take matters into your own hands as often as you’d like. The ideal situation is one where your team’s professions encompass all aspects of your business. This is especially true for IT.

Have you ever wondered where some of the top talent in the world comes from? Not everyone knows how to find the best vendor for their needs, but with our IT service called vendor management, we find fixes to problems which lie outside our area of expertise. Despite what you might think, you may not be entirely unfamiliar with vendor management. In fact, you use it for several everyday services as it is.

Having the right technology vendor can go a long way. How can you be sure that your business has partnered with the proper technology vendor? If you’re unfamiliar with the ways that a tech vendor operates, they might even try to rip you off and weasel more money out of you. One way you can know for sure you’ve made the right decision is by having your IT provider do the dirty work.

Because technology plays such a crucial role in everything you do, you would benefit from a single service that covers all of your tech needs. Trying to keep track of every vendor for every piece of equipment can make using technology complicated--which is the opposite what technology is supposed to do.