How work gets done·29 July 2026·4 min
The cost of five vendors
The agency, the freelancer, the designer, the developer and the lawyer are each doing competent work. The bill you cannot see is what happens between them.
A brand at a certain size ends up with five suppliers, and each of them is good. That is what makes the problem hard to see. Nobody is failing. The ads are well made, the site is well built, the identity is well drawn, the trademark is filed.
The cost sits in the gaps. The ad promises something the landing page does not repeat. The landing page uses a tone the brand guidelines retired last year. The developer ships a change that quietly removes the thing the campaign was driving to. Nobody owns the number, so nobody notices for six weeks.
Nobody is failing. That is what makes it hard to see.
Why coordination does not fix it
The usual answer is a weekly call. It does not work, because the problem is not communication, it is authorship. Five suppliers produce five strategies that are each internally coherent, and no amount of talking merges them into one. Somebody has to be accountable for the whole argument a customer meets.
The honest test
Ask each supplier the same question: what is the one number your work is meant to move, and what did it do last month. If you get five different numbers, you do not have a marketing programme. You have five projects with a shared logo.
The fix is not necessarily one supplier. Plenty of brands run this well with several, when one person inside the business holds the strategy and has the authority to overrule any of them. What does not work is nobody holding it, which is the arrangement most brands arrive at by accident.