Replacing an agency mid-engagement without losing the team
Changing supplier is a contract problem, not a people problem — unless you handle it in the wrong order, in which case the engineers leave with the agency.
client came to us with four engineers they liked, supplied by an agency they did not. The work was good, the relationship was not, and the question was whether they could change supplier without losing the four people — who were, after all, employed by the agency and not by them.
They could, and did. Here is the order it has to happen in, and what it costs when it happens in a different one. Client details are withheld; bracketed figures are theirs to release.
Read the contract first
Before a single conversation with anyone, including internally: what does the existing service agreement actually say about the people?
The clauses that matter are non-solicitation, any transfer or buy-out provision, the notice period, and whatever the agreement says about work product and access. In this case there was a non-solicitation clause with a [length]-month tail and a buy-out fee set as a percentage of annual salary — which is the ordinary shape of these agreements, and entirely workable once you know it exists.
What you cannot do is find it afterwards. We have seen a company open conversations with four engineers, discover the tail clause a fortnight later, and end up unable to proceed for most of a year with every one of those relationships now awkward. The contract is the cheapest thing to read and the most expensive thing to read late.
Tell the engineers early
Second, and before any paperwork is finalised: tell the people.
This feels backwards to most clients, who want everything settled before unsettling anyone. It is still right, for a plain reason — the agency will find out, the engineers will hear something, and a team that learns its employer might be changing through a rumour will protect itself by looking for other work. By the time you are ready to make a formal offer, two of your four are in processes elsewhere.
What we said, in the first week, to each of them individually: the client wants to keep working with you, the supplier arrangement is changing, here is roughly when, here is what we expect it to mean for your package, and here is who to ask. We did not have all the answers at that point and said so. Honesty about an unfinished process holds people better than certainty that arrives a month later.
Match everything, not the headline
A transfer offer that matches the gross monthly and nothing else is a pay cut, and it will be read as one.
Go through the whole package line by line: the monthly rate, the statutory contributions, the 13th month and how it is computed, any night differential attached to the shift pattern, leave balances, HMO coverage and — the one most often missed — tenure. Length of service carries real weight in Philippine employment, and an offer that quietly resets someone to zero after three years is not the same offer.
Where something genuinely cannot carry across, name it and compensate for it explicitly. Three of the four moved on matched terms. The fourth had an arrangement the agency had made informally that we could not reproduce, so we priced it into the base instead and said exactly that.
All four accepted, and all four were still in place at [how many] months.
The order is the whole method
Contract, then conversations, then paperwork, then a switch date everyone knows in advance. Each step depends on the one before it.
The two failure modes are both reorderings. Paperwork before conversations produces a transfer offer landing on someone who did not know this was happening, which reads as a decision made about them rather than with them. Conversations before the contract produces commitments you may not be able to honour.
One more thing, which is not strictly in the sequence: be straightforward with the outgoing agency. The service agreement has a notice period, honour it, pay what is owed including any buy-out, and do not let the engineers become the medium through which the two companies conduct a disagreement. The people in the middle have the least power and the most to lose, and they are the entire reason you are doing this.