Signature talk & workshop
Find the Friction
Every procurement team knows something is slow. Very few can name the specific place, in order, with a number attached. That is the whole job — whether I have your stage for forty minutes or your team for a day.
What it is
A facilitated working session with the people who actually do the work — not a strategy offsite, and not a software demo.
Most procurement improvement programs start with a tool and then look for a problem. This starts the other way round. We map where the team’s hours genuinely go, separate the friction that is worth removing from the friction that is load-bearing, and leave with a ranked list the team believes in — because they wrote it.
It is deliberately unglamorous. The output is a short document, not a transformation roadmap. But it is the document that makes every later automation, AI, or headcount decision defensible.
Structure
Three parts.
Find it
Where the time actually goes. We walk the real process as the team performs it, not as the process document describes it, and record every handoff, wait, and re-key.
Rank it
Not all friction is worth removing. We sort by cost, frequency, and whether the pain is a symptom or the cause — then argue about the order until the team agrees.
Route it
Each item gets a destination: fix the process, fix the data, automate it, or leave it alone. Most organisations are surprised by how much lands in the last two.
The keynote
The three places friction hides.
Procurement functions do not fail loudly. They lose hours in three specific places, and every one of them is invisible on an org chart.
Retrieval
Senior people spending their day finding numbers rather than deciding with them — pulling reports, reconciling exports, chasing a status someone already knows. It looks like diligence. It is the most expensive clerical work in the building, and it is almost always the largest of the three.
The wait
Work that is finished but not yet allowed to move, because the approval lives in an inbox or a spreadsheet only one person updates. Nobody is idle and nothing is progressing. Every day lost here is a day of buying from the supplier you were trying to leave.
The re-argument
The same decision made from scratch every time it comes up, because nobody wrote down the rule. Who buys the raw material. When an exception goes upstairs. What threshold changes the answer. Teams mistake this for judgment; it is usually an undocumented policy costing a meeting a month.
Every engagement below starts from these three. The workshop ranks them against your own process; the keynote argues them from the stage.
Who it’s for
- Procurement and supply chain leadership teams that agree something is broken and disagree on what.
- Manufacturers about to buy procurement software, who want to know what they are actually buying it for.
- PE operating partners assessing a portfolio company’s procurement function before committing to a plan.
- Teams that have tried automation once and watched it stall on the data.
No prior work required, and no preparation from participants. Bring the people who do the job.
Four ways to bring me in
Same material. Different room.
The argument scales from a conference stage down to a working session with eleven people and a whiteboard. Pick the one that fits the room you have.
Keynote or conference talk
The thesis, the current numbers, and the three places friction hides in every procurement function I have worked in. Built for supply chain and manufacturing conferences, industry associations, and internal leadership summits. It ends with a question the audience can take back to their own process on Monday morning — not a framework they have to buy.
Podcast & panel appearances
A working practitioner, not a consultant describing practitioners. I still carry a category, so the examples are current and the constraints are real. I come with this quarter’s numbers, I will disagree with a host on air if the data says so, and I would rather be specific and wrong than vague and safe.
In-house workshop
The full three-part session with the people who do the work. We map where the hours actually go, rank the friction by cost and frequency, and route each item: fix the process, fix the data, automate it, or leave it alone. You leave with a ranked list your team wrote and therefore believes.
Course
A longer-form version for teams that want to run the method themselves rather than have me run it once. Same structure, taught across several sessions, so the next friction audit does not need me in the room.
What people said
Testimonials
Testimonial slot — awaiting a real quote and attribution.
Testimonial slot — awaiting a real quote and attribution.
Testimonial slot — awaiting a real quote and attribution.
Nothing is quoted here until a real participant has said it and agreed to be named.
I take a small number of these each quarter, so the follow-up work stays real.
Bring Find the Friction to your room.
Tell me the format, the audience, and the date. If it’s a stage, a studio, or a conference room, the material travels.