“90% of jobs can be taught. Give people a chance.”

Scrolling LinkedIn, stuff like this comes up all the time. Every time, it gets me. It frustrates me to know. I always think, yeah but not procurement. We’d never allow that.

Some may not agree, and I’m open to being wrong but I wholeheartedly believe Procurement has a gatekeeping problem.

A serious one.

We have built an entire interview infrastructure designed not to find great people, but to eliminate anyone who hasn’t already done the exact job we’re trying to hire for.

Which, if you think about it for more than thirty seconds, is insane.

Here’s the thing about hard skills: I can teach them.

Excel? I can teach that.

Negotiation tactics? Absolutely.

How to run a sourcing event, build a category strategy, read a contract, navigate an RFP process? All teachable.

All of it. Give me someone halfway motivated and I’ll have them fully functional in a couple months.

You know what I cannot teach?

How to be likeable...

Sure, I may sound like a jerk right now but it’s true.

I cannot teach you how to walk into a meeting and not make everyone in the room immediately regret being there.

I cannot teach you how to read a conversation, pick up on what’s not being said, and adjust accordingly on the fly.

I cannot teach emotional intelligence to someone who has spent so many years being completely unbothered by its absence.

I cannot teach… likability.

I cannot teach self-awareness to someone who has never once considered that they might be the problem.

And yet. When we post a job, what are we screening for?

A college degree. Five years of experience. Category management background preferred. Familiarity with Ariba, Coupa, and whatever platform we bought during COVID and never fully implemented. Must have managed suppliers in our industry, at our spend level, in our specific type of organization.

So let me tell you about a hire I made.

This guy had one employer for his entire adult career. Twenty-something years, same company, zero procurement experience. By every standard rubric we use in this profession, he should never have even gotten a callback. This would have been an easy auto screen out by even the most basic ATS tool.

I brought them in anyway.

Now, it’s worth noting that I did take some heat for this. He didn’t have a college degree. He didn’t look like a procurement candidate on paper. I had to put my rear end on the line to make this work.

Within two years, he had grown into the role in a way that made some of my more “experienced” hires look like they were still figuring out which way the building faced. Not because he was some kind of procurement prodigy. He wasn’t. And I’m certainly not some visionary leader who saw what others couldn’t…. or maybe I am - verdict is still out.

What he had was simpler than that. He listened.

Actually listened... not the kind of listening where you’re just waiting for your turn to talk. He learned without ego. He communicated clearly. He gave a genuine damn about the people on the other side of every conversation, whether that was a stakeholder, a supplier, or someone on the team.

That’s it. That was the whole thing. ...This is what should be in job descriptions but never will be…

I don’t think these are exotic qualities. They’re not rare gifts handed out to a lucky few. They’re just... not what we screen for. Because you can’t put them in a job description without sounding like a fortune cookie, you can’t verify them with a resume, and you can set up some ATS or AI tool to weed out “the disqualified” based on keywords.

So, instead we ask for five years of category experience and pat ourselves on the back for being rigorous. Check the box and move on.

The best procurement people I’ve worked with came in sideways and typically by accident. They slide in from Finance or Legal. Some came from the dark side… the vendor side. This guy,… from one employer for twenty years outside of anything that even resembled procurement and contracting. They all figured it out because they were curious, coachable, and, the most critical element, people actually wanted to work with them.

That last part matters more than we admit.

Procurement is a relationship function dressed up in spreadsheets. No matter how pretty you look in your sheets... People need to like you or nobody is going to bother with you and your sheets. You can have perfect process discipline and be completely useless if no one trusts you, no one wants to call you, and every stakeholder you touch is quietly routing around you.

Moral of the story… hire for the thing you can’t fix and teach the rest.

Have a good story about a hire that doesn’t fit the typical mold? Share it with the world. Let’s make Procurement more accessible to quality candidates!

It was never a phase, mom! (Bonus points if you get the reference.)

Then, like many, I got to an age where I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. Hell, I didn’t want to grow up (still don’t!).

I wanted to be all kinds of things over the years. Looking back, I can’t recall a single time I thought to myself... “I want to buy stuff for companies and help them just be better all around”.

Nothing came close to even resembling that.

I didn’t even know procurement was a career. If someone had asked 22 year old me about Procurement, I wouldn’t have even known what it was or where it happened.

There was no Procurement table at the Career fair in High School. It wasn’t something I had ever heard anyone talk about. I wanted to be a police officer. I went to school and earned a degree in criminal justice, fully expecting that to be my path. While in School, I worked for the Commonwealth at the Department of Youth Services in a secure facility for juveniles awaiting trial. It was wild. I learned a lot about how to survive that I still use today at my desk at home.

Anyways, attorneys would come in to represent these children and a lot of them sucked. They treated these kids like absolute garbage which was even worse because the world had already done a fairly good job at that. I decided that law school was my path and I would help kids that nobody else wanted to help.

I became a lawyer and started working in a law firm. Somewhere along the way I took a hard turn from child advocate to focusing on contracts, disputes, and the kinds of legal issues businesses deal with every day.

Procurement was invisible to me.

Until, eventually, I found procurement the same way most people do… by accident.

Procurement sat at the intersection of everything that interested me. It was big picture and detail-oriented… all at the same time. It required understanding contracts and risk, but it also required thinking like a business owner. It was everything I loved about running my own firm and everything I liked about practicing law without that “doing homework for a living” feeling I hated so much.

Every decision had consequences. You had to understand not just what was written on paper, but how it would play out in the real world. You had to understand the business, its priorities, its risks, and its goals.

It wasn’t theoretical. It was practical. It was real.

Procurement forces you to learn how a business actually operates. You see where money goes. You see what the company truly depends on. You see which systems keep things running and which partners are critical to success and how to make them better. You gain visibility into every function… finance, operations, technology, legal, leadership… because every one of them relies on external partners to do their jobs.

Very few roles give you that kind of perspective.

You begin to understand not just what the company does, but how it works. You see how decisions are made, what drives them, and what the downstream impact looks like months or years later. You learn how to evaluate tradeoffs. You learn how to balance cost, quality, speed, and risk. You get to use that law school skill of asking the right questions, because the right question often matters more than the right answer.

Law School taught me to think a certain way. Procurement teaches you how to communicate that thought.

Procurement requires you to work with stakeholders who are experts in their fields but may not be thinking about commercial structure or long-term risk. It requires you to work with suppliers whose job is to present their solution as the only viable option. It requires you to translate business needs into contracts, and contracts into business outcomes. You learn how to build trust. You learn how to influence decisions. You learn how to bring clarity to situations where there isn’t always an obvious answer.

Over time, you develop judgment.

You learn to recognize patterns. You learn which risks matter and which ones don’t. You learn when to push and when to move forward. You learn how to protect the organization without slowing it down unnecessarily. You learn how to think not just about the decision in front of you, but about the long-term health of the business.

Those skills stay with you forever.

One of the things that makes procurement such a great career is that it teaches you how businesses really function. Not the org chart version. Not the polished presentation version. The real version. The version where decisions have tradeoffs and consequences. The version where relationships matter. The version where good judgment creates real value.

It also builds skills that apply everywhere. Every company needs procurement. Every industry relies on people who understand how to evaluate partners, manage risk, and make sound commercial decisions. Once you learn how to do it, you carry that knowledge with you. It compounds over time. You become more effective, more confident, and more valuable with every experience.

Procurement isn’t about buying things.

It’s about helping organizations make better decisions.

It’s about protecting them from risk.

It’s about enabling them to grow.

It’s about understanding how to create value in ways most people never see.

I never planned to build a career in procurement. But once I found it, I realized how much it had to offer. It challenged me. It taught me and it still does. It gave me a perspective on business that I never would have gained anywhere else. That is exactly what I needed!

And the truth is, there are probably thousands of people out there right now who would love this career if they knew it existed.

They just haven’t found it yet because it has done a horrible job of marketing itself.

So, check your local high school for a career fair and get a table ready!

So, how did you end up in Procurement?

And, what keeps you here?

They’re wrong … but it’s ok because we are all wrong sometimes.

That magic, its not in the boardroom strategy decks or in the glossy investor presentations. It wasn’t developed by the Big 4 consultant that your Chief Transformation used to work for and brought in to change the future for the company. It doesn’t happen at the expensive offsite C-level meetings. It’s not the overly fabricated all-hands or the cutesy newsletter you just deleted from your inbox.

That magic happens in a few cubicles in the back where people don’t go unless they have to for some sad reason. The dark space after the pride lands…

That’s where your sourcing and contracts team live and make that magic.

The magic is in the contracts, negotiations, supplier decisions, and quiet moments where someone decides whether the company saves money, manages risk, or creates leverage… or gives it away.

That moment is The Procurement Experience and this is a real-world look inside.

This isn’t theoretical babble. It is battle-tested experience and expertise at work! (You’re going to hear this a lot over our journey together.)

Why is this starting? Well, Procurement blogs and podcasts are so boring. Everyone is so proper and polished. It’s not real. It’s not the life my friends and I live in the trenches. That’s what we should be talking about…

Here, you’ll find insights from the front lines like how deals actually get done, where companies leave money on the table, how suppliers think, and how procurement, when done right, becomes one of the most powerful drivers of profitability and operational control in any organization.

We’ll cover (this list is just the tip of the iceberg):

• The reality of procurement as a career and why it’s one of the most misunderstood and valuable functions in business

• Negotiation tactics, contract strategy, and supplier management that create real leverage

• Commentary on industry trends, vendor behavior, and procurement technology

• Practical breakdowns of deals, mistakes, wins, and lessons learned

• And yes, why you should engage with us… because Procurement Counsel is a business after all

Whether you’re a procurement professional, a business owner or team member responsible for vendor spend, a founder trying to scale efficiently, or just someone curious how businesses actually work behind the scenes, this publication is for you.

Procurement isn’t paperwork. It’s power.

It’s the power of negotiation, reading between the lines, understanding people, priorities, and the evolving landscape of the business… all at the same time. It’s keeping the fires contained and stakeholders happy while keeping the business safe.

I once heard someone say ADHD was the key to being a good procurement professional… and that hit me hard. This is why we stay unmedicated because the key to making this magic is being able to do 12 things at once and balance countless shifting priorities all while dodging grenades.

And once you see how it really works, you’ll never look at business the same way again.

This is Procurement Unmedicated.

Let’s go on a journey together, shall we?