The challenge
The client was a 150-person B2B services firm running on a stack of four separate vendors: a marketing agency in London, a website development shop in Manchester, an outsourced bookkeeping firm, and an offshore team running manual data operations and lead qualification. Each vendor had a separate contract, a separate point of contact, and a separate monthly reporting cadence.
Nothing reconciled. The marketing agency reported MQLs, the data team reported records processed, the bookkeeper reported a P&L that was always two weeks behind, and the website vendor reported uptime. There was no shared view of what any of it added up to. The COO had spent the previous quarter trying to build a unified dashboard in a spreadsheet and given up.
Cost was the second problem. The four vendors combined cost roughly £42k a month, and a board review had flagged that the firm was paying senior-agency rates for work that mid-tier delivery could absorb. They also had three overlapping CRM and reporting tools the vendors had each insisted on installing.
How we delivered
Days 1–60: Discovery, not migration
We deliberately did not move any work in the first two months. We interviewed each of the four vendors, sat in on their reporting calls, mapped every recurring workflow, and produced a consolidation plan with a named owner on our side for every service line. The plan went to the client's board for approval before we touched a contract.
Days 60–90: Parallel migration
We ran all four migrations in parallel rather than in sequence. The risk was real — any one of them could have stalled the rest — but it cut the total cutover from a projected six months to 90 days.
- Digital Marketing absorbed the agency's SEO, paid, and content work onto our pod model, with no campaign downtime.
- Website Development took the existing site, audited and patched it, and moved it onto our monthly retainer.
- Accounting & Finance migrated the books to a single Xero instance, standardized the chart of accounts, and closed the next month-end inside our SLA.
- AI & Automation replaced the manual data operation with automated lead-qualification and document-processing workflows, without a gap in coverage.
We consolidated the three overlapping tools down to one CRM (HubSpot), one analytics view (GA4 + Looker Studio), and one project management surface where the client sees all work in flight. The COO now gets a single Monday-morning briefing covering pipeline, web, finance, and support — replacing four separate vendor calls.
The inflection point
The bookkeeping migration nearly slipped. The outgoing bookkeeper missed the agreed handover deadline by two weeks, and the books were less clean than discovery had suggested. We absorbed an extra cleanup pass into the engagement at no extra fee, which kept the timeline intact and bought trust with the COO that paid off later.
What ongoing looks like
A single named account director owns the relationship across all four service lines. We held a weekly business review for the first six months, then dropped to fortnightly — enough to keep the strategic conversation moving without occupying a calendar slot every week.
The bigger result
The board approved a further expansion six months in: we picked up the firm's procurement reporting and added a part-time FP&A analyst inside our Accounting pod. That second wave was only possible because the first 90 days landed clean.