Are Your Vendors Built for You, or Are You Built Around Them?
July 5th, 2026 by Roger Wentowski
A few years back, we went to work right-sizing our vendors, and that process changed how we think about partnerships.
When it comes to sales, mentorship, or thought leadership, you often want to be a small fish in a big pond. Bigger environments can teach you a lot. They can sharpen you, stretch you, and expose you to better ways of doing business.
Vendors should work differently. When it comes to the companies you rely on to keep your business moving, you want to be a big fish in a small pond.
When you call, your business should matter. You want a vendor who knows your name, understands your urgency, and moves because your issue carries weight. You want the kind of relationship where they not only pull the part from the warehouse, but overnight it at no cost or throw it in someone’s car and get it to you now.
That level of service does not happen when you are account number 47,392 sitting in a national queue. We work hard to ensure our vendors, whenever market realities allow, operate in our pond, not the other way around.
This matters more than many businesses realize. Vendor relationships directly impact downtime, responsiveness, margins, and operational stress. If your provider treats your emergency like a standard processing timeline, that problem becomes your problem fast; and it absolutely applies to IT.
I have heard too many stories from business owners who wait three or four days for onsite help while systems stay broken. Tickets sit untouched for weeks because nobody owns them. Calls bounce around. Issues stall. Somehow, many owners have accepted this as normal. It is not.
Inertia can convince businesses that mediocre support simply comes with the territory. It does not. When you call for help, you should get help.
Mid-year offers a great time to ask some hard questions:
- Which vendors actively protect your business?
- Which vendors create friction?
- Who treats your problems like priorities?
- Who treats them like paperwork?
Not every vendor deserves your loyalty simply because they have your contract.
Sometimes right-sizing means finding partners who understand that when your business hurts, theirs should move.
Posted in: Solutions