For about twenty years — sales, inventory, project management — I worked the residential construction trade in Southwest Florida. I started in the boom years, when everything moved fast and nobody asked too many questions about why. I was still there in 2008, when the music stopped and every assumption about suppliers, pricing, and "the way things are done" got tested at once.
That's not a résumé line. That's where I actually learned procurement — long before anyone called it that. I sat on both sides of the table: negotiating with suppliers for materials and trade partners, and being the supplier that builders leaned on when their own numbers got tight. You learn fast what leverage actually means when you've felt it from both directions, in an industry where margins are thin and a bad vendor relationship can sink a project.
Boom-time procurement and bust-time procurement are not the same discipline wearing different clothes. In the boom, the cost of fragmentation is invisible — there's enough margin to hide it. In the bust, it's the difference between staying open and not. I watched both versions play out, more than once.
These days I do procurement work in medical device manufacturing — same questions, much bigger numbers. And the patterns are the ones I'd already met in construction: fragmented spend, duplicate suppliers, quiet drift. The scale changes. The shape doesn't.
The Procurement Guy is what happens when I take that — twenty years on the ground, plus the view from inside a large procurement operation — and point it at small-business problems. I'm offering a focused, affordable second look at your spend: the kind of review that takes one hour and tends to pay for itself many times over.