Vendor and Spend Strategy
An audit of the vendor stack and the spend behind it, naming what to renegotiate, consolidate, or cut.
A 3 to 4 week engagement that audits the vendor and technology spend, identifies the 8 to 12 percent of addressable spend most likely to be recoverable, and recommends where that capital should go to create growth rather than just save money. Built for CFOs and COOs whose budgets have been growing faster than the business.
Where is our spend not earning what it costs, and what should we move it to instead? The deliverable names the contracts to act on, the renewal dates that matter, the recommended action against each, and a reallocation thesis that turns saved dollars into growth instead of lower expense.
| Week 1 | Spend inventory. Pull the full vendor and technology spend by category, by contract, by renewal date. Identify the long tail and the concentration. |
| Week 2 | Value audit. Score each contract on usage, alternatives, and what it actually returns. Surface the items where the business has changed but the spend has not. |
| Week 3 | Recommendations. Cuts, renegotiations, and consolidations, each priced. The reallocation thesis: where saved dollars should go, with the growth math. |
| Week 4 | Working session. With finance, procurement, and operating leadership. Lock the priorities. Approve the renegotiation playbook for upcoming renewals. |
- Vendor spend by line item, twelve trailing months. AP detail or GL by vendor is enough.
- Active contracts list with renewal dates and current annualized spend.
- Technology and software inventory, including the things finance and IT do not always agree on.
- Access to procurement, finance, and the operating leaders who use what is being audited.
- The one or two upcoming renewals you are most worried about.
Representative deliverables:
1. Spend map. One page that shows the full addressable spend, broken into the categories where action is recommended, where the picture is fine, and where there is not enough data to act yet.
2. Ranked recommendations. Ten to twenty actions, each with the current annualized cost, the recommended action (cut, consolidate, renegotiate, leave alone), the dollar impact, the effort, and the named owner.
3. The reallocation thesis. Where the saved dollars should go, with the growth math under each move. This is the page that turns the conversation from cost cutting to capital reallocation.
4. Renegotiation playbook. Talking points and walk-away positions for the three to five upcoming renewals that matter most. Written so your procurement lead can carry it into the room.
If the issue is that the company does not yet know what it should be spending on rather than what it is spending too much on, Growth Strategy comes first. If the spend in question is concentrated in a single vendor relationship that is otherwise healthy, a focused renegotiation engagement is cheaper than this full diagnostic.
“We were three weeks from a renewal we did not want and did not have the leverage to walk away from. The teardown showed us we had been over-spending on the wrong category by half. The renewal conversation got short.”
CFO, Specialty distribution, $61M revenue
Illustrative. Composite of recent mid-market engagements, not a single named client.
RLK Consulting is Ryan King, sole founder. She spent nearly 15 years at McKinsey and Deloitte advising Fortune 50 clients, and now runs a strategy practice in Richmond, Virginia serving the mid-market. The person you pay is the person who does the work.
To begin
If a renewal cliff or a budget cycle is bearing down, do not wait. A 30-minute scoping call.