Every company wants growth, but not every company can sustain it. In fact, a 2025 study from McKinsey found that 78% of high-growth companies failed to scale as momentum increased. Whether it’s hyper-growth, steady organic growth, or established growth, there’s more to manage – and the expectation to manage it better. Nowhere is this more evident than technology assets and expenses. What you thought couldn’t get any more complicated does, and rapidly so: more dollars, more devices, more vendors, and more contracts.
Let’s take a look at how IT complexity builds, and how to grow beyond the breaking point.
How Growth-driven Complexity Compounds
Optimizing costs and usage: Higher spend = higher exposure to waste
Growth doesn’t just increase spend. It amplifies every inefficiency hiding inside your environment. Teams spin up tools on their own, creating duplicate and unauthorized apps. AI experimentation drives costs in unpredictable new ways. Devices get overpurchased because there’s no clear view of current inventory. And the “small stuff” like shipping, provisioning, and managing equipment starts to add up fast.
IT cost stakeholders need deep visibility to know where they’re spending – and just as importantly, where they’re wasting. Every dollar counts, whether it’s for reinvesting to sustain growth or padding cash reserves to stay agile. The more you grow, the tighter you need to keep every IT dollar in check.
Managing vendors: Oversights cost millions
When you’re small, vendor management is housekeeping. As you grow, it becomes strategic and proactive. You need to start thinking about cost-savings tactics like vendor consolidation. You need comprehensive reporting on contracts, compliance, and performance, so you’re not relying on instinct or somebody’s word regarding vendor expectations. You need to be able to see everything clearly in one simple view. Over 70% of businesses admit they’ve lost track of vendor contracts – eek! – and it’s estimated that 40% of contract value is lost to poor governance. Vendor management is foundational to long-term resilience.
Expanding compliance: Delays threaten ROI
New markets mean new regulations, requirements, and laws. Existing policies may need to be validated, and systems likely tested for their ability to support new users, vendors, and workflows. Complexity and delays often build, to the point that expansion may never reach its full potential. Over half of businesses agree that compliance requirements hinder growth, and just about half (47%) say that they spend an exorbitant amount of time fulfilling regulatory requirements.
Maintaining efficiency: Manual processes create lag
It’s nearly impossible to sustain growth while manually handling the volume of work that increases across every layer of IT asset and spend management. Whether it’s managing the device lifecycle or tracking asset inventory, processing invoices or monitoring service usage – spreadsheets, emails, and disconnected systems just can’t keep up.
Strategies to Stabilize, Simplify, and Streamline Growth
Fast growth is the best kind of problem to have, and companies lucky enough to have it need the right strategies and support for both stability and speed.
Proactive planning so you’re never caught off guard
Complexity grows faster than teams can manage manually, which is why it must be addressed proactively before issues surface. That means finance anticipating cost spikes before they turn into surprise bills or overages, and IT predicting usage based on historical trends to cut waste and plan capacity more effectively. For procurement, it means using that same data-driven insight to lock in better terms and rates (more on this below).
Strategic sourcing so you’re always on the winning side
Vendor management is no longer about making the right decision once. It’s about making the right decision continuously – evaluating, negotiating, and optimizing relationships to keep costs in check and ensure vendors are delivering the bestvalue.
This is an ongoing, data-driven strategy.
- Using benchmarking intelligence to negotiate from a position of strength
- Pinpointing overlap across vendors and services to reduce complexity and strengthen purchasing power
- Continuously analyzing service usage, spend, and performance to align purchasing with actual need
Process automation so you can save time and move faster
Automation absorbs the complexity that comes with growth and turns it into repeatable, scalable processes. Standardized workflows create consistency, while policy-driven actions ensure every process stays aligned with compliance requirements. Whether it’s device lifecycle management, SaaS licensing, or bill pay – every automated workflow enables teams to do more with less.
Centralized visibility so you never have to guess what’s going on
Growth-focused companies often come to us completely burnt out. Their teams spend dozens of hours collecting asset inventory data and reconciling information across multiple systems yet still lack a complete, accurate view of their IT ecosystem. From mobility to cloud to telecom, maintaining control at scale requires a single, unified view across the entire IT ecosystem to effectively manage assets, enforce policies, and track spend.
Outside expertise – because you can’t go it alone
The approach that got you here won’t get you there. That’s why organizations leverage technology consulting and advisory services for guidance, structure, and strategy, so growth stays intentional.
- What should our IT cost structure look like at our current stage of growth?
- Where should we start automating to make the biggest impact?
- How do we stay compliant without slowing down?
Whether it’s reducing costs, implementing new technologies, or advancing key IT initiatives, leaders don’t hesitate to bring in technology consultants so they can navigate complexity with confidence.
What Happened When 3 Companies Turned to Tangoe
When hyper-growth hits
One fast-growing AI data center infrastructure company in the cloud computing industry experiencing hyper-explosive demand needed a way to manage its telecom and mobility expenses without building a massive internal team to handle it. Rather than shifting resources away from their core business, they partnered with Tangoe to centralize mobile policy management, device logistics, and bill pay so they could keep scaling while maintaining control over costs and assets.
The Tangoe solution allowed the company to manifest its entire mobile policy inside the Tangoe solution, automating many of the previous manual activities the team had to deal with on an ongoing basis. Automating employee onboarding alonesaved significant hours of support and intervention just to get the right devices in the hands of all new employees so they could immediately start being productive. Their mobile program now runs by itself, with Tangoe managing and tracking all mobile expenses.
When a company needs to shift overnight
One global professional services organization went from managing a small number of corporate devices to tens of thousands almost overnight due to a sweeping internal policy change requiring only company-owned assets to be used and connected to its network as an IT security measure. Devices needed to be procured, staged and kitted, shipped, tracked, and managed across the workforce fast.
Tangoe helped handle the massive forward logistics challenge to make sure every employee received their device. All asset tracking and ongoing expense management were an integral part of the overall program objectives, and the Tangoe solution met the challenge.
When growth is steady and support is at the ready
One global enterprise experiencing steady, organic growth needed a way to support an expanding workforce, increasing device volumes, and entry into new regions without introducing inefficiencies along the way. Rather than overextend internal teams, they partnered with Tangoe to support ongoing device logistics, streamline procurement, and ensure compliance as they expanded into new geographies. A scalable, repeatable approach enables them to grow at their own pace – adding what they need, when they need it – while maintaining control over operations, costs, and the overall technology environment.
Scale Without Losing Control
As a leader in IT asset and expense management who oversees more than $15B in technology spend, Tangoe’s solutions and services help keep the runway clear for stable growth. Click on any of the links below to learn more!
- Centralized visibility across mobility, cloud, and telecom – a single-pane-of-glass view into all costs, vendors, contracts and more in one dashboard.
- Intuitive data visualizations that make it easy to understand trends, patterns, cost drivers, and usage across telecom, mobile, and cloud.
- An AI assistant that turns insight into action with real-time recommendations and next best steps.
- Predictive analytics that help forecast spend, identify risks, and plan with greater confidence.
- Price benchmarking based on $34B in IT spending intelligence – compare current rates against market-leading prices across hundreds of global providers.
- Purpose-built FinOps for bringing financial accountability, governance, and optimization to cloud and AI spend.
- An expansive team of technology consultants who negotiates 400+ contracts each year and delivers $250M+ in annual customer savings.
IT asset and expense management is crucial for driving strategic growth. See why Tangoe has been the industry leader for 20+ years.