$180k in SaaS,
politely declined.
Pemberton Industrial, a regional B2B distributor, was being pitched seventeen AI tools across one fiscal year. We took the retainer, told them which three to consider, and which fourteen to ignore.
Vendor fatigue meets real budget.
Pemberton's leadership team had decided AI mattered to their next five years. They started taking meetings. By month four, the COO had a spreadsheet of seventeen vendors, dozens of demos, and a quarterly budget cycle closing in.
They needed someone in the room who wasn't selling anything. They didn't want another Roadmap, they wanted ongoing pressure-testing as decisions came up.
A standing seat at the table, not a one-time deck.
Pemberton bought the retainer. Every month, we sit in on vendor pitches, run buy-vs-build math, pressure-test rollout plans, and translate AI roadmap claims into real operational risk. When something would be wrong-fit, we say so before they commit, not after.
Of the seventeen vendors they evaluated, we backed three. The other fourteen would have cost Pemberton $180,000 in annual contract value collectively, and produced marginal returns. Two of the three priority builds Pemberton commissioned afterward were ones we built for them as Custom Employee deployments.
“Midnite told us notto buy three of the tools we were already pricing. That's the meeting that won me.” Linda Patel, COOBook a discovery call