Why supplier sprawl is quietly eating UK SMEs — and the maths most MDs haven’t done.

Picture the MD of a £14m turnover business in the Midlands. Lovely company, growing fast. Frustrated, and can’t quite name why.

So count the suppliers.

Web agency. SEO firm. CRM provider. IT support. Cybersecurity consultant. Hosting company. Two freelance designers. A “fractional” marketing person. The accountant’s IT nephew, who’d “just helped out a few times.”

Eleven. He’d genuinely thought it was four.

The bill no one writes down

The line-item cost of these suppliers isn’t the real problem. The hidden tax is the time the team spends stitching them together.

The marketing manager can’t ship a campaign without three Zoom calls, one with the web agency, one with the CRM provider, one with the freelance designer, to make sure the form on the landing page actually writes to the right CRM field. None of those three suppliers wants to own the join. So she does. Every time.

The ops director can’t roll out a new process because the workflow tool doesn’t talk to the project tracker. Each vendor’s solution is “we can build a Zapier integration for £4k.” Three integrations later, nothing reliably works.

When the website goes down on a Tuesday morning, four suppliers each say it’s one of the other three’s problem. By the time it’s fixed, two enquiries are gone and a half-day of credibility with them.

Why this happens

It’s nobody’s fault, really. Specialism is good. The problem is that buying software from one supplier, IT from another, and creative from a third made sense when those things lived in different filing cabinets. They don’t anymore.

A CRM, a website, a network, a security setup, a data layer, a design system, they’re all the same thing now. They just have different vendor invoices.

The alternative isn’t “buy everything from one place”

It’s “make sure one team can hold the whole picture, even if they don’t build every piece.”

That’s the model Shoothill has built over 20 years and 400+ projects. Custom software. IT support. Creative. Consulting. Same team, same building, same accountability when something breaks at 9am on a Tuesday.

Not because Shoothill wants to be everything to everyone, but because the joins between systems are where most businesses lose money. And the joins are where Shoothill lives.

A small ask

If you’re an MD or ops director reading this, do the count. Pull out last month’s invoices. How many suppliers have logins to something that matters to the business?

If the answer is surprising, that’s probably this article working.

Next week: what actually changes when a single team owns those joins. With receipts.