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The Editor’s Letter

HI THERE

Well, it feels good to have my routine back.

There is something about September that resets me. The inbox is full again, the calls are back on the calendar, and after a summer of scheduled posts, I have genuinely missed you all!

But I have some big news, and as honesty happens to be the thread running through this issue, I am going to give it to you straight.

This is, in all likelihood, my last month working for KPMG.

The long term project I came in to deliver has now reached its natural end. Which means that from October I will most likely be a free agent again and am genuinely open to helping other teams with their procurement transformations. If that is sitting on your plate, you now know exactly where to find me. I will share more on what comes next over the coming weeks, because I am still deciding how much of myself I want to hand back to any one organisation.

Now for some rather more exciting news: I am going to DPW Amsterdam!!

If you have been anywhere near LinkedIn lately you will know it is THE event of the season, the biggest procurement tech gathering there is. This year it takes over the RAI in Amsterdam on the 30th of September and 1st of October. Here is my confession: I have never actually been. This is my first time, and I am going purely to see what all the fuss is about. Half the people I know seem to be going, so if you are one of them, please holla at me!

I really love how they have rebuilt it this year. DPW has redesigned the whole thing to feel more intimate instead of about collecting lanyards and leaflets like I used to do at big events. The whole event is built around leaving having met the right people which is a pretty wholesome objective for a tech event. As someone who finds giant expo halls slightly soul-destroying, that pitch worked on me.

And the very best part is... I have a free ticket to give away!

The organisers kindly given me a pass, plus ONE spare to bring someone along with me, and I would love that someone to be one of you.

A ticket like this sells for around £2,000, so this is not a small giveaway at all. There is one condition I’ve been given: it has to go to a procurement practitioner with some responsibility for procuretech, so, sadly, no raw materials buyers this time (sorry!).

If you would like to come with me, simply REPLY to this email and tell me your name, role and company and I will pick a winner and announce it in the next newsletter. 🎟️

One more freebie while I am in a giving mood.

I am running a free training webinar on using AI for strategic and tactical procurement negotiations, alongside my brilliant friend Joël. It is practical, it is hands-on, and it will not cost you a penny. You can grab your spot here: [REGISTER HERE].

Speaking of events, if you came to, or wanted to come to the last intimate AERCE dinner in Madrid, I will be organising another one soon in Barcelona… so watch this space or reply if you want to attend! 🙂 

And finally, today's issue.

My main article is a very honest one about the real trade-offs between working in-house and working in consulting, including the money conversation. And this week's freebie is a proper monster: 100 procurement frameworks, gathered in one place for you. Honesty is the thread through all of it.

Right, that is more than enough from me. Let's get into it…

Procurement by Design

CONSULTING OR IN-HOUSE?

I went back to consulting for the money

I left an in-house life that genuinely suited me, and I walked back into consulting, and I did it (mostly) for the money.

There, I said it.

I know that is not the pretty inspirational version everyone expects.

The neat popular version is that I “followed my passion”, or that I was tired of chasing stakeholders, or that I wanted to build something bigger.

All of that is a little bit true, but the honest, unglamorous engine underneath my decision was a big number on a payslip, and I think as my readers, you deserve to know the real version behind my decision.

My whole career actually started in consulting, and I have now come to believe that is the most useful thing I ever did for my earning power and for my choices later on.

Procurement consulting is where I learned quickly, and it is where I built the sort of CV that in-house employers wanted to hire. The in-house roles I loved most, at TUI, at PZ Cussons and adidas, came to me because a consulting background had already put a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ on my name so consulting opened the senior in-house roles for me.

I am telling my story for anyone early in their career who thinks the two paths are rivals, and they have to choose one over the others. No, that is certainly not the case, I have gone from one into the other and then back again a few times.

But do allow me to be honest about what each one actually can cost you, because as you know well, nothing in this life comes without its sacrifices.

What consulting gives you is variety, and that variety is the fastest teacher I have ever met.

Every few months you work with a new client, a new industry, a new mess to make sense of, a new set of stakeholders who do not yet trust you and have no particular reason to.

You are FORCED to learn, because there is nowhere to coast. In three years of consulting you will see more procurement problems than most people see in ten years sitting in-house in a single function, and you get paid handsomely well for absorbing that intensity.

The price of it is your evenings, your weekends, and on a bad month perhaps also your sense of humour. The hours can be genuinely brutal.

It is also not a secret that the consulting culture is not always kind, and it varies so much from team to team that two people at the same firm, on the same floor, can have completely different experiences of the place.

You are always slightly on show, always being assessed, always the outsider who has to earn trust from a standing start. Some people find that thrilling, some find it exhausting, many of us feel both.

In-house is a different bargain. When it is good, it is really good.

You get to OWN something.

You watch your own decisions play out over years instead of handing a client a beautiful pptx deck and never finding out whether any of it actually worked. You build real relationships with the same people, you know, the relationships where you can pick up the phone and skip the pleasantries.

And in some places, and I am being careful with the word “some”, you can have a working day that actually ends at 5 o’clock, and a flexibility that consulting rarely offers.

The catch is that in-house can quietly stop teaching you.

Stay too long in one function and your learning curve flattens: you already know where all the bodies are buried and the problems start to rhyme with each other.

Progression is harder too… there are only ever so many senior seats, and you often cannot move up without moving out, or moving country. I have written to you before about standing two seats away from a CPO role and realising the only route up was a relocation to Germany that I did not want.

In-house progression runs into a wall for a lot of very good people, and that wall frequently has nothing to do with how good they are. I can think of at least 10 ex-colleagues who are in that position right now.

And then there is the money, which most of us are all FAR too polite to talk about openly. So let me be specific:

A Head of Procurement in the UK earns, on average, somewhere between £70,000 and £100,000. In London the average sits close to £99,000, with the strong end of the range nudging £130,000.

That is a good salary by any sensible measure. It is also, for a great many people, roughly the ceiling of the in-house ladder unless they go all the way to CPO.

Now hold that same £100,000 up against consulting. Inside a Big Four firm, six figures is not the summit, it is roughly a senior manager, with a lot of ladder still above your head.

Directors commonly earn £120,000 to £180,000. And the equity partners average well into the hundreds of thousands: our KPMG's partners came in at around £816,000 last year, and Deloitte's cleared a million. Yes, very few people ever reach that, and I am not pretending otherwise. But it is reachable.

In-house, £100,000ish can be a plateau you settle onto. In consulting, £100,000 is a checkpoint you pass on the way to something much larger.

That gap is why I precisely went back. Because the maths at that particular moment in my life pointed firmly in one direction and I decided to do what felt right for my life at that point.

Let me make something clear first, these are all generalisations, because I have also experienced bad culture and long hours in-house too so it hugely depends on where you work. But the salary ceiling never changed.

My personal plot twist, is that at KPMG I have experienced the best company culture and the most flexibility I have ever had. Yes some of that flexibility I owe to COVID and I personally managed to maintain it but in other businesses a good deal of it has quietly been clawed back since.

So if anyone ever promises you that in-house automatically means balance, keep a little scepticism in your back pocket.

So, which should you choose. I will not pretend there is one clean answer, but here is what I would actually say to a friend across a coffee:

1) If you are early in your career and you do not yet know what kind of procurement person you are, start in consulting. It will teach you faster than anything else, and it quietly buys you options later, including the option to go in-house on far better terms than you would get otherwise.

2) If what you want is to own outcomes and watch your decisions live and breathe over years, go in-house, and go in with your eyes open that your learning will eventually plateau unless you move business often and you will have to fight to keep it fresh.

3) If money is genuinely your priority right now, admit that to yourself first, and then choose accordingly. Consulting and the CPO track are where you can reach serious numbers. There is no shame at all in choosing for money, only in lying to yourself and others afterwards.

4) If it is flexibility and an actual life you are chasing, in-house can absolutely give you that, but interview the culture at least as hard as they interview you, because two teams in the same building can feel like two different planets.

5) And please remember the two paths are not a marriage. I have crossed between them more than once. Consulting funded and enabled my in-house roles, and my in-house roles made me a much sharper consultant.

In this life, you are allowed to change your mind, more than once, without owing anyone an explanation.

I chose consulting again for the money and I do not regret it for a second, but I would never sit here and tell you it was for the challenge.

Now I want your story.

Are you in-house or consulting right now, and be honest with me, did you actually choose it, or did it just sort of happen to you? Hit reply and tell me the real reason. I read every single one.

Freebie(s) of the week

100 Procurement Frameworks.

You know that ONE moment.

The moment someone asks you to "show your thinking" on a category, and there you are all flustered trying to rebuild a Kraljic from memory on a whiteboard and then on the low, quietly hoping you've got the axes the right way round. I know I’ve been there a few times.

It is for moments like this that I have put 100 frameworks (ok, some are models, rather than frameworks!) that I actually usually reach out for into one place.

This freebie had me digging DEEP into my google drive that’s for sure!

Every one is in one single page with a full explanation: what it is, when to use it, how it works as a diagram, a real procurement example, and the traps people fall into when they use it.

Kraljic, should-cost, the chessboard, stakeholder grids, net-zero roadmaps…. the lot.

Now since today seems to be an “honest” issue, let’s give you a little bit more of that.

Someone I really trust, a leader in digital marketing told me recently, in plain terms, that I hand over things I've spent weeks building and price them at next to nothing, and that the maths for the paid stuff stopped making sense a while ago for the hours I put in.

I think he is absolutely right. So the genuinely good ones aren't going to stay free forever anymore. I am pondering whether they would be part of a paid newsletter, or only ever paid by themselves and you still get simpler templates and frameworks from me.

This one took me quite few a days days to do and improve so it's yours free for only 18 hours, then it goes into the store for good.

[Grab it here while you can →]

Did you miss any of the great templates from previous newsletters? Grab them from full store below:

That’s it for this week.

If there is one thread I hope ran through everything today: honesty. The honest reason I went back to consulting. The honest trade-offs nobody prints in the recruitment brochure. The honest truth that almost none of us planned our way into this profession in the first place.

So I will leave you with this quote which shaped more of my decisions than any savings target ever did.

I have spent this whole issue looking backwards, and now I find myself standing at one of those crossroads again, wondering what the next chapter looks like once this KPMG one closes behind me.

What I keep coming back to is that the choices that have aged best for me were never the ones that look impressive to others. They were the honest ones, the ones that fit who I actually am rather than who I thought I was supposed to be.

I hope you give yourself permission to make a few of those too.

Right, I am off to work out what on earth one is supposed to pack for two days of procurement in Amsterdam!

See you next week.

Until next time

Procurement worth reading.