Vendor Management for Growth-Stage Companies

Vendor stacks don't become problems at once; they grow one reasonable decision at a time until duplicate tools, phantom seats, and missed auto-renewals are quietly costing you six figures a year.

This playbook shows how founders, finance leads, and ops teams at growth-stage companies build a lightweight vendor management system that scales from Seed to Series D without hiring a procurement team, adding approval layers, or living in spreadsheets.

You’ll learn:

• How to build a renewal system that doesn't rely on memory, calendar reminders, or the one person who knew where the contracts were
  
  
• Where the real money goes: duplicate tools, unused seats, auto-renewals, and the shadow stack finance doesn't know about
  
  
• What a five-minute pre-purchase check and a simple tier system can do to stop waste before it starts
  
  
• What breaks at 100, 150, and 200+ vendors — and how to build a system that scales before sprawl forces your hand