What It Actually Looks Like to Work With Us
If you’ve read any of our other posts, you know what we think is wrong with the traditional vendor selection process. What we haven’t explained in detail is what we propose to do instead — and what that experience actually looks like from the buyer’s side.
This is that post.
The short version: most of the work is ours, not yours. You’ll spend a few focused hours with us at the beginning, a few more reviewing what we’ve found, and then you’ll make a decision from a small set of options we’ve already vetted, compared, and prepared to present. The whole process typically runs four to six weeks. You won’t manage a procurement process. You won’t review dozens of proposals.
Here’s how it unfolds.
Phase One: We Learn Your Problem
Everything starts with a two-hour intake conversation with your core team — typically two to four people who understand the project, the organizational context, and the constraints. This is not a sales meeting. We’re not trying to impress you. We’re trying to understand your situation well enough to find vendors who can actually address it.
What we want to know goes beyond the project scope. We want to understand your institution’s internal dynamics: how decisions get made, what the approval chain looks like, who the key stakeholders are and what they care about, what has been tried before and why it didn’t work. We want to know what a successful outcome looks like in six months, and in two years. We want to know your budget — and yes, we require that you share it with us. Not a range so wide it’s meaningless, but a genuine number you’re prepared to work within.
This last point tends to generate some resistance. Organizations are accustomed to keeping budget information close, on the theory that sharing it invites vendors to price up to the ceiling. In our experience, the opposite problem is more common: vendors who don’t know your budget can’t calibrate their proposals to your reality, which means you get responses that are either dramatically over or under what you can actually spend, neither of which helps you make a good decision. We treat your budget as working information, not a negotiating chip, and we use it to identify vendors who can genuinely deliver within it.
Following the intake, we spend time internally synthesizing what we’ve learned. We’ll come back to you if we have follow-up questions. By the end of phase one, we have a clear picture of what you need — and equally important, what you don’t.
Phase Two: We Find Your Vendors
This is where we do the work that organizations typically try to offload onto an RFP process, and that RFP processes handle badly. We also maintain detailed guides on conducting reference checks and evaluating vendors thoroughly if you want to run this phase yourself.
We research the vendor landscape for your specific project type: the firms with relevant experience, demonstrated capability, and a track record of working with organizations at your scale and complexity. We’re not running a search engine query. We’re drawing on an actively maintained network of vetted partners, supplemented by direct outreach and current reference conversations. We want to know who is doing good work right now, not who has an impressive website or a long client list from five years ago.
Our evaluation happens in layers. The first layer is threshold criteria — basic questions of financial stability, delivery capability, and professional standards that a vendor either meets or doesn’t. Firms that can’t demonstrate three or more years of operation, relevant portfolio work, clear process methodology, and clean references don’t make the list regardless of how interesting their pitch might be. This filter alone eliminates a significant portion of the vendor landscape that would otherwise consume your evaluation time.
The second layer is fit assessment — the harder, more qualitative work of matching vendor strengths to your specific challenge. This is where institutional context matters: a firm that excels at fast-moving startup engagements may not be well suited to the decision-making rhythms of a large university. A vendor with deep technical capability may lack the stakeholder communication skills your environment requires. We’re looking for alignment on multiple dimensions simultaneously, and we’re doing it with the knowledge of your organization that we built in phase one.
We typically assess forty to sixty vendors at the threshold layer and bring eight to twelve through to deeper evaluation. From those, we identify the three that best fit your project, your budget, your timeline, and your institutional context.
Three is intentional. We’ve thought carefully about this number. More than three and you’re back to managing a process; fewer and you don’t have genuine choice. Three well-chosen options, clearly differentiated and honestly compared, is what good selection actually requires.
Phase Three: You Choose
We present our three recommendations to your team in a structured briefing. For each vendor, we provide a clear rationale — not marketing language, but a specific account of why this firm, for this project, for this organization. We include a comparison across the dimensions that matter for your decision: relevant experience, team structure, process methodology, budget alignment, and our assessment of institutional fit. We name the tradeoffs explicitly. Vendor A may have stronger technical depth; Vendor B may have more experience with your type of institution; Vendor C may offer more scheduling flexibility. These are real differences and you should understand them before you choose.
From there, we coordinate directly with the three vendors. We brief them on your project using a standardized format that requires each firm to address the same questions in the same structure. This is one of the places where our process differs most sharply from a traditional RFP: because every vendor is responding to an identical brief, with a disclosed budget and consistent requirements, you are reviewing genuinely comparable proposals rather than three documents that happen to be nominally about the same project.
You review the proposals. You meet with the vendors — typically a single presentation from each, in a format we help you design to surface the information that actually matters. We’re in the room, and we debrief with you afterward: what we observed about how each vendor engaged with your project, where the verbal presentation aligned with our prior assessment, where it raised new questions.
Then you decide. Our job at that point is to make sure you have everything you need to make the decision confidently — and to help you think through the final tradeoffs if you want that conversation. The choice is yours. It should be.
Once you’ve selected a vendor, we support the contract process: reviewing the scope of work, flagging terms that warrant attention, making sure the agreement reflects the project as you actually discussed it rather than the version the vendor’s template assumes. This is often where institutional buyers with less procurement experience are most exposed, and it’s where a second set of expert eyes has the most straightforward value.
What This Costs You
Your time investment across the full process is typically eight to twelve hours, distributed across a four-to-six week timeline. Most of that is front-loaded in the intake phase and the vendor presentations; the middle of the process, where we’re doing research and evaluation, requires almost nothing from you.
Our fee is a percentage of project value — the same percentage regardless of which vendor wins. We don’t have preferred vendors. Our network is maintained on the basis of performance, and the structure of our evaluation framework is designed to surface fit, not favor.
The Point
We built this process because we’ve both worked inside the broken one — as agency directors managing pitch responses to RFPs that didn’t have enough information to respond to honestly, and as institutional stakeholders watching selection processes produce outcomes nobody could fully defend. The waste in the traditional model is real, and it falls unevenly: on the designers pulled off billable work to build pitch decks, on the internal staff who spend months managing a procurement process that was never their job, on the vendors who invest weeks in proposals for projects that were already spoken for.
What we’re offering is a process that takes that work seriously — and does most of it for you. If that sounds like what you need, let’s talk.
