Quick wins
You do not need a procurement qualification to buy well. You need five habits. This guide gives you one page per habit: what it is, why it matters, and how to do it before your next significant purchase. These are the five things D1 Advisory sees missing in almost every small and medium business we work with. They cost nothing to implement and they start paying for themselves immediately.
If you want the full picture, including the mistakes that taught Sylvia Luchian these lessons, join the Five Lessons Learnt in Procurement webinar. It is free, it takes 45 minutes, and it covers everything this guide hints at in the kind of detail that only comes from having been in the room when things went sideways.
Every procurement problem D1 Advisory has ever fixed started with the same root cause: the business did not define what it needed before it started talking to suppliers. The supplier defined the scope. The business bought the supplier's solution, not its own.
Before your next significant purchase, spend 30 minutes writing down what the purchase needs to achieve for your business. Not the product you want to buy. The outcome you need. This one habit will change the dynamic of every supplier conversation that follows.
Do this now: Pick the next purchase on your list. Open a blank document. Write three sentences: what you need, why you need it, and what success looks like. That is your brief.
One quote is a price. Two quotes are a market. Three quotes are a negotiation position. If you are buying anything above $5,000 without at least two comparable quotes, you are trusting the supplier to give you a fair price without any incentive to do so.
This is not about distrusting suppliers. It is about giving yourself the information you need to make a confident decision. If the first supplier is the best option, the comparison will confirm it. If they are not, you have just saved your business money.
Do this now: Look at your last three significant purchases. How many had a second quote? If the answer is zero, make a rule: nothing above $5,000 without two comparable options.
Contract terms exist to protect the supplier. That is not cynicism. It is how contracts work. The auto-renewal clause, the limitation of liability, the intellectual property assignment, the termination notice period: each one is there because the supplier's legal team put it there to protect the supplier's interests. Your interests are protected only if you read the terms and negotiate the ones that do not work for you.
You do not need a lawyer for every contract. You need to read the document and understand what you are agreeing to. If a clause does not make sense, ask what it means before you sign. That question alone changes the power dynamic.
Do this now: Pull the contract for your largest active supplier. Read the termination clause, the auto-renewal clause, and the limitation of liability. If any of them surprise you, that is your signal.
You cannot manage supplier spend if you do not know what it is. Most small businesses track revenue obsessively and manage costs at the invoice level. Very few pull together a simple view of total supplier spend by category. Without that view, you cannot spot the slow creep: the subscription that increased 8% without notice, the category where three suppliers overlap, or the service that nobody has used since last year.
This is a one-hour exercise that will tell you more about your business's purchasing health than any consultancy report.
Do this now: Export your last twelve months of supplier payments from your accounting software. Sort by supplier. Add a simple category column (IT, facilities, professional services, etc.). Total each category. You now have spend visibility. Look at what surprises you.
A procurement threshold is a dollar amount above which every purchase follows a basic process. Below the threshold, people buy what they need without red tape. Above it, the purchase goes through a defined set of steps: requirements documented, options compared, decision recorded. The threshold protects your money on the purchases that matter without slowing down the ones that do not.
Most small businesses do not have a threshold. Every purchase is treated the same, which means the $200 stationery order gets the same level of scrutiny as the $50,000 technology contract: none.
Do this now: Set a threshold that makes sense for your business. For most SMBs, $5,000 to $10,000 is a sensible starting point. Tell your team. Write it down. Apply it from today.
These five wins will make an immediate difference. They are the starting point, not the finish line. If you want to understand the full picture, including the five lessons that shaped how D1 Advisory approaches procurement, join Sylvia Luchian for the Five Lessons Learnt in Procurement webinar.
It is free, it takes 45 minutes, and Sylvia walks through the five things she wishes every business owner knew before they signed that contract. No sales pitch. Just the lessons, the stories behind them, and practical guidance you can use straight away.
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