A group with five brands often has five websites built at different times by different suppliers on different stacks. One has a content system, another does not. A fix written for one has to be written again for the next.
The cost you do not see
The visible cost is five invoices. The invisible one is doing the same work five times: five security updates, five sets of tracking to fix, five conversations about the same feature. That repetition is where the budget actually goes.
The second invisible cost is not knowing anything at group level. Enquiries land in five inboxes, some of which nobody reads. Nobody can say how many arrived, from which market, for which brand.
What matters is not how many sites you have, but how many times you do the same work.
What shared infrastructure means
It does not mean one look. From the outside the brands stay independent: own domain, own colours, own tone. What is shared is underneath, where nobody wants difference for its own sake.
One platform, one panel with permissions split by brand, one component library, and one place where enquiries land tagged with their source. Build a feature for one brand and it can be carried to the others in days rather than months.
Where to start
Not with all of them. Start with the brand where the pain is worst or the next rebuild is due anyway. Build the shared structure while solving that brand real problem, so the investment pays for itself before the group commits further.
Then move the others as their own cycles come up. A group can run half on the new structure and half on the old for a year without anything breaking, as long as the enquiry data is pooled from the start.
Two way links and a gradual move
The connection between centre and brand runs both ways. Demand returns to the centre so the group can see the whole picture; product, price and campaign updates come down from the centre so nobody retypes them five times.
Adding a sixth brand then stops being a project and becomes a setup task. Once identity and content are ready, the site goes live in days.
If you are carrying several brands on separate structures, we can map what you have now and what a shared one would change.