How did I end up in Procurement when I really wanted to play for the Bruins?
We all have a story that got us here. I bet nobody did it on purpose...
Like every little boy back in the late 1900’s… I wanted to be a cop to catch bad guys, or a hockey player and lead the Bruins to a Stanley Cup. Then, as I got older, I wanted to be a bass player in a pop punk band like Blink 182 or Taking Back Sunday.
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?