IMVR from the agency side: your questions

Because the alternative is usually worse. When a renewal approaches, procurement, finance or the board need something to point to. If the agency offers nothing, the default answer is a tender.

A review the agency helped initiate, run independently and paid for by the client, is a far stronger position than a pitch the agency didn't see coming. Agencies confident in their work have little to lose and a lot of evidence to gain. Agencies with fixable issues get those issues surfaced while there is still time to act.

The structure does most of the work. The agency doesn't commission the review, doesn't pay for it and can't influence it. Suggesting the client commissions independent scrutiny of your own performance is a mark of confidence, not defensiveness.

The practical framing is simple: Rather than defaulting to a pitch, there's a proportionate independent option, and we'd welcome the scrutiny. Mosaic can support the introduction with client-facing material or talk it through with you before you raise it.

It can. That possibility is exactly what makes the review credible: a process that could only ever recommend renewal would persuade nobody.

Two things are worth weighing. First, if the relationship is genuinely that weak, a tender was coming anyway; the review changes when you find out, not whether. Knowing early is worth a great deal. Second, in most cases where issues exist, the realistic outcome is renewal with amendments: a practical list of things to fix, not an exit. The review improves the odds for relationships that deserve to continue. It doesn't rescue ones that don't, and it shouldn't.

The report is commissioned by and belongs to the client. In practice, findings that require agency action only work if they are shared, and the recommended actions normally become the basis of a joint conversation between client and agency.

What the agency sees, and when, is agreed upfront between the client and Mosaic, so there are no surprises about visibility on either side.

Less than you might expect, and nothing pitch-shaped. The review works largely from documentation that should already exist: contracts, scopes, plans, reporting and billing, plus a small number of structured conversations with your team. No credentials, no spec work, no response document.

If your documentation is in good order, the burden is light. If it isn't, that is a finding in itself and better discovered now than during a procurement process.

Nothing directly. Mosaic is engaged and paid by the client. The agency's only cost is the time to supply documentation and take part in a small number of conversations.

Compare that with the cost of defending the account through a competitive pitch: senior time, opportunity cost and months of distraction. The asymmetry is the point.

Earlier than feels natural. Once the notice period is live, or procurement has started talking about a tender, the options narrow quickly and there is rarely a route back to a lighter-touch process.

A practical rule: raise it within roughly twelve months of renewal, before any formal process discussion starts. At that point it reads as good governance. Six weeks before notice, it reads as a rearguard action.

Some organisations (charities and other highly governed bodies in particular) have procurement rules that mandate periodic tendering, however healthy the relationship. The review doesn't pretend otherwise, and it still earns its place in both situations.

Where discretion exists, the review gives trustees, procurement and finance a defensible, evidenced reason to use it, often the difference between a proportionate process and a default tender. Where a tender must run, the review sharpens it: clearer scope, an evidenced benchmark of the incumbent, and an agency entering the process on the front foot rather than from a standing start.

No. The review is a standalone engagement with a fixed fee and a defined outcome: renew, renew with amendments, or review the market. Mosaic earns nothing extra from recommending a market review, and the reasoning behind the recommendation is set out in full in the report. It can be tested, not just taken on trust.

The purpose of the review is to make unnecessary pitches avoidable, not to generate them.

That is often when the review is most useful. Known problems surfaced through an independent review, with recommended actions attached, become a managed fix. The same problems discovered by procurement late in a renewal become a reason to tender.

Renewal with amendments exists for precisely this case: the relationship continues, and the issues get fixed with the client's confidence rather than despite their doubts.

Defending an account through a forced pitch is expensive, slow and uncertain, and incumbent win rates in pitches the client was pushed into are not comforting. A renewal supported by independent evidence protects the same revenue at a fraction of the cost and disruption.

Even where the review is critical, it buys the thing agencies rarely get in a renewal: time. Time to fix what needs fixing before the decision is made, rather than after it has gone against you.