Two conversations from a tradeshow keep coming back to me. Both were with CEOs or founders, both were completely confident in their current procurement strategy, and neither was afraid to tell me why. What sticks with me is that I don’t think either of them was wrong. They each made a true assertion about the current state of their business and then used it as an assumption about the future state, and those are not the same thing.
Two industries, the same conclusion
One was the CEO of a beverage company, one the founder of a fish oil company. Very different businesses, very similar view: their procurement situation needs no help.
The first reason was admirable, and I say that as someone who has sat in that procurement seat. He has high expectations for his entire team, and the procurement hire continues to deliver on them. That is not a bad thing. It is the opposite of a bad thing.
What he likely doesn’t see is the effort that hire is putting in to keep things running at that standard. And he is completely missing the risk of relying on one person with the entire system of record in their inbox. When that person leaves, half the supply chain leaves with them.
The second founder wasn’t worried because he is connected to every fishery that supplies the oil in his product. He also runs the trade organization. If anything is happening in that market, he’ll be the first to know.
He probably does know his supply base better than almost anyone. He’s not guessing. He has decades of relationships and a seat at the head of the table. That is the strongest version of “we already know our suppliers” I have heard. But it still carries an assumption: that because he is close to the market, he always knows what the market is.
Neither of these is a story about a bad operator.
They’re both stories about what someone in the thick of it, with no problems right now, can’t see.
Past performance is not indicative of future results
In the years I spent in procurement, I think I would have said things were going fine too, if someone had caught me at a tradeshow. That held right up until a crop failed, a shipment sat at port, a supplier overcommitted, and on and on, and the chaotic scramble that inevitably came next. Not because I was bad at my job, but because I was focused on the here and now instead of strategically planning for the future.
Going back to my finance roots here: past performance is not indicative of future results. In the last twelve months alone we’ve seen climate-related crop challenges, disruptive geopolitical events, and tariffs implemented, removed, and then reimplemented, just to name a few. Nothing can be taken as a certainty.
The status quo isn’t a strategy anymore. It’s a risk.
What the status quo looks like from the inside
I’m not talking about this in theory. Every one of these came up in conversations we’ve had at Waystation in the last several months.
One manufacturer’s suppliers moved to reprice every 30 days to hedge against market volatility. That manufacturer can only push changes through to its own customers every three to five months.
Then there’s the manufacturer whose whey protein price doubled. He had no way to know whether that was the actual market or a supplier taking advantage. When the number came in, he had to decide whether to believe it, and no tool was available to him to check. That’s the same problem as knowing you’re overpaying and not being able to prove it.
Another team had sales raising the forecast on a juice that was already supply-constrained. The part that stuck with me is that they weren’t sure every possible supplier had even been contacted yet. You’re taking the forecast increase in one meeting and trying to remember who you emailed three weeks ago in the next, which makes supplier discovery a memory exercise instead of a process.
One brand told us tariffs were the biggest problem they had last year. They also run formal RFPs on essentially none of their spend, and sourcing only gets triggered by a price increase or a tariff. So when the tariff landed on an ingredient they buy from China, the trigger fired and the scramble to find a backup began. Tariffs hit margin twice, and the scramble is the second hit.
That’s what the status quo actually looks like from the inside. Not complacency. Just a system where the only thing that ever triggers a look at the market is the market hitting you first.
The record is already there
The quote from three weeks ago, the supplier someone meant to call back, the price increase nobody can sanity-check: all of it is already sitting in your team’s email. That is the whole coordination tax in one sentence, and it’s the gap a tool like Waystation closes without changing how your team already works.
Making that record findable doesn’t stop the disruptions. It just means your people spend their time building strategy instead of reconstructing history.
