Five vendors, one building, and the cost nobody puts on the invoice

She kept a log for one month. Not because we asked her to — she was trying to work out why a job she used to finish by four was now running past seven.

Eleven hours. That was the total she spent on the phone to contractors in thirty days. Eleven hours is a day and a half of her working month, and none of it appears on any invoice.

Fragmentation is a tax you pay in attention

Every vendor you add to a building brings a second cost that never gets priced: the coordination overhead. One more number to call. One more standard to explain. One more person who can credibly say the problem started with somebody else.

What changed

We took over cleaning, fumigation and site oversight on the same contract. Same supervisor, same weekly report, same phone number. Her log for the following month came to forty minutes.