Why Don’t We Do More of a Vendorship?

March 25, 2020

Rahul Wahi

As a company at the intersection between digital and businesses, there are two main models of service that exist. The first is that of a vendorship. The act of providing services and solutions based on the asks that the client is providing. The second is partnership. The act of providing services and solutions based on the expert assessment of the client’s problems, then boiling down into a list of asks to fulfill those.

While it may sound like partnership is the more “desirable” state, that is not the case. Sure, it’s wonderful to have someone “looking out for you” and making sure you only build what you need, but the reality is that what it gains in overall direction of business value, it gives up in speed. That is why this idea of a vendorship vs partnership is such a hot topic, and has been for years. The truth is that many companies attempt to give a bit of both in their service model, with the reality that overtime in order to provide consistent service, structure and process you need to choose. 

Below we talk a bit about the decisions and reasons that overtime we have attempted to move out of a vendorship perception and into a partnership one. 

Tony:  Why don’t we do more of a vendorship?  Why don’t we just build it and walk away?

Rahul:  Because for us, it takes so much time to learn about a client and to build a digital experience the right way that that time invested, the RRY is not the deliverable for us.  The RRY is the years of partnership for us. It’s seeing that company hit the Fortune 500 list. It’s seeing that company grow from twenty people to two hundred. It’s seeing that company catapult in revenue.  It’s seeing that company lead ways on charts and lists.  

So for us, the amount of time that we spend in the Research and Discovery and that onboarding process, RRY as an agency isn’t just that one deliverable.  We need to have a partnership down the road. So, I think for us, theoretically, that’s what we really want to focus on, is how do we continually go past this?  How do we take this one list, one item that you might have said, “Hey, here’s a website, cross it off,” but saying, “Let’s bolt on a social strategy. Let’s bolt on a messaging strategy.  

Let’s bolt on a media strategy for you.” And let’s help grow this together, holistically, under one roof, versus giving you the product, that you’re going to be actually satisfied with, and ecstatic about, but sometimes it’s because we haven’t given you enough driving lessons.  You’re going to stay in the first and second gear, which is probably the speed that you’ve been traveling at, over the last 10 to 25 years, plus, and you’re happy with that, but we know that we can really kind of, you know, upshift that, to go a little bit faster.

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