Running the technology ecosystem for a multi-location business.

Microsoft 365, ParPOS terminals, back-of-house hardware, in-store A/V, and dozens of SaaS subscriptions had accumulated over years without a single owner. Renewals auto-charged, licences sat unassigned, and store-level issues were escalated by whoever happened to be available.

Support was slow because there was no intake path, and technology decisions were reactive because nobody had a full picture of what we were already paying for.

I started with a full inventory: every tool, owner, cost, renewal date, and who actually used it. That alone surfaced duplicate subscriptions and licences assigned to people who had left.

I set up a single support intake so store teams had one place to report issues, and I standardized hardware and configuration across locations so a fix at one store applied everywhere. Where standardizing would have cost more than it saved, I left things alone deliberately rather than for consistency's sake.

On the vendor side, I consolidated relationships, renegotiated at renewal with usage data in hand, and built a simple roadmap so leadership could see what was coming instead of being surprised by it.

Employee support got measurably faster because requests had a path and common issues had documented fixes. Onboarding and offboarding became a checklist rather than an improvisation.

Tool sprawl shrank, renewals stopped being surprises, and technology decisions started being made against a roadmap and real usage data instead of the loudest current problem.

A lot of operational knowledge lived with me longer than it should have. Building the runbooks alongside each fix — rather than as a separate later project — would have made the whole function less dependent on one person.