ConnectivTech Insights

Vendor Strategy, Simplified

Practical guidance on vendor selection, procurement strategy, and how to build vendor relationships that actually work for your business.

Vendor Strategy · 2 min read

The Five Vendor Mistakes That Cost Businesses the Most — and How to Avoid Them

Most vendor relationships don’t fail because of bad luck. They fail because of predictable, avoidable mistakes made before the contract is signed. Here’s what we see most often — and what to do instead.

1. Choosing Based on Price Alone

Price is a valid consideration — but when it’s the dominant filter, you’re almost always setting yourself up for a difficult relationship. The lowest-cost vendor is frequently the one that cuts corners on service, response time, or quality control. A vendor relationship is a partnership, and cheap partners rarely make great long-term allies.

The right question isn’t “what does this cost?” It’s “what is the total cost of this relationship, including the risk of it going wrong?”

2. Relying on a Single Reference

Vendors provide references that are likely to give a positive review. That doesn’t mean you should skip them — but it does mean you should supplement them. Ask vendors for clients in your industry, your company size, and your geographic region. And then ask those references the uncomfortable questions: What’s gone wrong? How did the vendor respond?

3. Not Defining Success Upfront

Before you sign with any vendor, define in writing what success looks like. What metrics will you track? What does good performance mean? What would warrant a contract review? Vendors who resist this conversation are often the ones who know they can’t meet specific standards — which tells you something.

“The best vendor agreements are ones where both sides are completely clear about what winning looks like — and can point to the same number to prove it.”

4. Underestimating the Switching Cost

Once a vendor is embedded in your operations, switching is painful. The longer a bad relationship runs, the more entrenched it becomes. Most businesses wait too long to make a change because of the perceived switching cost — but that cost is rarely as high as the ongoing cost of a vendor who isn’t performing.

5. Skipping the Onboarding Phase

The vendor relationship is at its most fragile in the first 90 days. This is when expectations get calibrated, processes get established, and working norms are set. A vendor who gets a clean handoff and clear direction in this phase is much more likely to deliver consistently. Assume nothing is understood until it’s been confirmed.

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HR & Operations · 2 min read

PEO vs. In-House HR: What Growing Businesses Actually Need to Know

The debate between using a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) and building an in-house HR function comes up constantly as businesses scale. Here’s a framework for thinking through it.

What a PEO Actually Does

A Professional Employer Organization enters into a co-employment arrangement with your business, taking on responsibility for payroll, benefits administration, HR compliance, and often workers’ compensation. In exchange for a monthly fee (typically 2–12% of total payroll), you offload a significant portion of HR administration.

The appeal for growing businesses is obvious: you get access to enterprise-level benefits packages, HR expertise, and compliance infrastructure without building the function internally. For businesses under 150 employees, this is often a more cost-effective path than hiring a full HR team.

When In-House Makes More Sense

In-house HR starts to make financial sense around the 100–150 employee mark for most businesses — though the calculus varies significantly by industry, turnover rate, and geographic complexity. It also makes sense if HR is a core competency for your business model, or if you have culture-specific needs that a PEO can’t accommodate.

Questions to Ask Any PEO

  • What is your client-to-HR-representative ratio?
  • How do you handle multi-state payroll and compliance?
  • What happens to our benefits if we terminate the relationship?
  • How are benefit renewals structured — can rates increase mid-year?
  • What is the average tenure of your HR representatives?

The right PEO is one that can answer all of these with specificity and without hesitation. Vague answers are a red flag worth taking seriously.

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Technology · 2 min read

What Your IT Provider Isn’t Telling You (And Why It Matters)

Most managed IT service agreements contain gaps that only become visible when something goes wrong. Here’s what to look for — and the questions that will tell you whether your current provider is the right one.

The SLA That Doesn’t Mean What You Think

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in IT contracts often promise response times — not resolution times. There’s a significant difference. A provider that guarantees a 1-hour response to a critical issue has done nothing more than promise to answer the phone. What matters is how long it takes to fix the problem.

Ask your provider for their average resolution time by issue severity over the last 12 months. If they can’t produce this data, that’s informative.

The Backup Assumption

Most businesses assume their IT provider is backing up their data. Many IT providers assume the business knows they need to configure and pay for backup separately. This gap — the backup assumption — is one of the most common sources of catastrophic data loss we’ve seen. Confirm in writing, with specifics: what is backed up, how often, where, and how long recoveries take.

Security vs. Compliance

These are not the same thing. A provider can make you compliant with HIPAA or SOC 2 requirements without actually making you secure. Compliance frameworks describe minimums; security describes actual risk posture. If your provider talks more about your compliance status than your threat landscape, push back.

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