This past weekend my younger son turned 3. From his first team offsite at 5 months through today, it's amazing to reflect on how much has evolved in the past few years (although, with very similar Sudozi team members!) No matter what you do, being a parent is hard. Every parent is a working parent, it's just a matter of who you work for :)

I've been reading this book every night to the boys for about a month now, and I can't stop thinking about how relevant this is to procurement! 😂

Go slow... to go fast. 🏃🏽‍♂️ No, that 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐨 is not going anywhere just because it's the 31st. We can wait :) Tell a business stakeholder they have to work with finance and procurement before signing a contract and you might get some eye rolls. 🙄 It may come as a surprise they can get what they need 𝘧𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 by working 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 finance and procurement.

Excited to kick off 2024 with a three part blog series guest authored by Gary Bernstein. (Gary was most recently the Head of Procurement and Strategic Sourcing at ClickUp. He has also held Procurement leadership roles at GitHub and has over 16 years of Category management and Procurement experience.)

🤔 Was this invoice paid? 🤷🏻‍♀️ Did this vendor go through our annual compliance review? 🤷🏽‍♂️ What price did we pay per seat? ❓How many vendors have access to customer data? 📈How many contract requests are in the queue?

’ll be honest. When I started Sudozi, I had limited business operations experiences outside the tech world. If you asked me how much a city’s budget was or what it bought, I would have no idea. It's easy to live inside the tech bubble. In the past three years, I’ve had the pleasure to work with a variety of entities: government organizations, non-profits, foundations, mental health organizations, “normal businesses” and of course technology companies. Guess what? They all need to buy things and have visibility to their vendors.