The Reset Programme: your questions

You can, and some clients do. What tends to happen in practice is that internal capacity is stretched, the political weight of pushing an agency conversation without an independent voice is high, and the recommendations drift into a wish list that never lands. The report gets read, actions are logged, urgency fades, and the same issues sit inside the renewed contract for another cycle.

Reset is the discipline of actually landing the amendments. Mosaic runs the internal alignment, sits between you and the agency in the negotiation, and packages the outcomes into documentation your legal and procurement teams can act on. It is the follow-through that most reviews never get.

IMVR asks whether you should keep the agency. Reset assumes you are keeping them and asks how you land what you agreed. Different questions, different products.

The qualifying question is simple. If continuation is in doubt, that is IMVR. If continuation is settled and the work is to fix what needs fixing, that is Reset. In practice Reset most often follows an IMVR that recommended renew with amendments, but it also stands alone when a client walks in knowing the relationship is worth keeping and needs work.

Three workstreams. Internal alignment first, to convert the recommendations or the drift into a tested negotiation position. Agency-facing negotiation second, with Mosaic as an independent intermediary. Renewal documentation third, packaging the agreed outcomes into a working map covering the SOW, commercial schedule, contract addenda and media plan template.

The scope is deliberately the renewal-shaped work, not the broader relationship. It ends with a documented handover ready for your legal and procurement teams to draft the renewed contract. Ongoing day-to-day management stays with you.

Reset may reveal that. The honest recommendation in that case is to consider a Fit-First Search rather than force a fix that will not hold. That possibility is what keeps the process credible, and finding out early costs less than discovering it mid-contract.

Where the fix does land, Partnership Health Check is often the natural next step. It sustains the relationship through a six-monthly rhythm, catches drift early, and saves the cost of another Reset engagement further down the line.

In practice, agencies engage. The commercial logic points the same way for them: constructive participation in a proportionate renewal conversation is a better position than defending against a forced tender in twelve months' time.

If an agency actively refuses to engage constructively, that is itself a signal about the underlying relationship, and would prompt an honest conversation about whether Reset is still the right route or whether the answer has quietly become search.

Mosaic sits as an independent intermediary in the detailed renewal conversation, with the position pre-agreed with you. That means the technical and commercially sensitive points get worked through cleanly before you and the agency come together on the agreed way forward.

You retain ownership of the relationship, final decision-making and internal approvals. Mosaic's role is to make the negotiation structured, honest and defensible, not to replace your voice with the agency.

Typically four to eight weeks from brief agreed to handover, allowing for the natural cadence of internal sign-off, agency negotiation and back-and-forth on the documentation.

Compare that with the cost and disruption of a forced tender in twelve to eighteen months, or the cost of the same issues surfacing mid-contract, and the asymmetry is the point.

A working renewal documentation map. It captures the agreed position area by area, the documentation route for each (SOW, commercial schedule, contract addenda, media plan template), the wording direction where relevant, and a clear read on status. Not a legal redline, and honest about that boundary, but everything your legal and procurement teams need to draft the renewed contract.

Plus a set of honest watchouts. Where a point was not fully agreed, that is recorded. Where drafting needs further legal tidying, that is flagged. The document is designed to be used, not filed.

Reset is bounded. It has a start, a finish and a defined deliverable, typically four to eight weeks. It is not day-to-day agency management, and it is not open-ended advisory work.

At handover, ownership returns to you and your team. Where the client wants an ongoing rhythm to catch drift early and protect what has been landed, Partnership Health Check picks up. Where a specific piece of bespoke follow-up work is useful, that can be scoped separately.

That is often the case, especially where an IMVR has already done the diagnostic. The value in Reset is not in generating new insight; it is in the sequencing and the negotiation itself. Doing internal alignment as its own deliberate phase means the position that reaches the agency has been tested, ordered and made defensible under pressure, which is when most client positions soften.

If you already know the answers, Reset is what turns knowing them into landing them.

No. Reset is a fixed-scope engagement with a defined deliverable, ending with a documented handover. Mosaic is engaged and paid by you, not your agency, and does not stay on as ongoing advisor once the handover lands unless you separately scope that.

The point of the Reset Programme is to make the renewal cleaner, the amendments defensible and the next phase of the relationship set up properly. Once that is done, the work is done.