Let me paint you a picture that'll probably feel familiar if you've ever joined a fast-growing tech company in a commercial role.

You arrive. Smart people everywhere. The product is genuinely impressive. The energy is real. And then you start looking at how the business actually buys things — and you quietly have a small internal crisis.

Contracts that nobody's reviewed in three years. Software renewals handled by whoever happened to pick up the supplier's call. A six-figure professional services engagement signed off because the VP liked the person from the conference. No visibility into what's being spent, with whom, or on what terms.

This is the founding moment. It's messy, slightly terrifying, and — if you get it right — genuinely one of the most rewarding things you can do in this profession.

First, an honest admission

I've been in this position more than once. And I'll tell you straight: the first time, I got some of it wrong. My instinct was to build — quickly and visibly. Category strategies, sourcing frameworks, supplier governance. All the things a mature procurement function should have.

The problem is that the business wasn't ready for any of it. The stakeholders didn't trust me yet. The leadership team didn't really understand what strategic procurement even meant. And I was trying to implement frameworks into an organisation that saw procurement as, at best, a contract admin function.

What I learned is that in a founding role, the first thing you need to build isn't a process. It's credibility.

The 90-day rule

Whatever your instincts are telling you to build in the first few months — slow down. The most valuable thing you can do early is listen. Spend real time with the people who actually run the business: the Finance leads, the Product heads, the CMO, the engineering managers. Not to pitch procurement at them, but to understand what's actually painful.

You're looking for two or three problems you can solve quickly and visibly. Something that makes a senior stakeholder say "huh, I didn't know you could do that." A negotiation outcome that saves a meaningful amount on a contract they'd assumed was fixed. A sourcing process that moves faster than anyone expected.

That's your currency. You spend early wins to earn the right to build the harder, longer-term foundations. Skip this step and you'll spend the next year pushing water uphill.

Foundations before frameworks

Here's the other thing I'd tell my earlier self: resist the urge to build the sophisticated stuff too soon.

The SRM programme. The category strategy decks. The supplier scorecards. These are the visible markers of a mature function, and they're genuinely valuable — eventually. But they don't work without foundations underneath them.

Foundations are boring. They're also non-negotiable. They look like: basic visibility into what you're spending and with whom. A contracting process that's simple enough that people will actually follow it. A sourcing approach for your biggest or riskiest categories. The ability to tell your CFO, with confidence, what the company's top 20 supplier relationships look like commercially.

None of that is glamorous. All of it makes everything else possible.

The cultural challenge nobody talks about enough

In high-growth tech, the people who built the company are often the biggest obstacles to commercial process — and they're not wrong to be cautious. Speed and autonomy are genuinely how these businesses win. The last thing a fast-moving product team needs is a procurement function that adds three weeks to every vendor decision.

So the conversation you need to have, early and often, isn't "here's our new process." It's "here's how I'm going to make your life easier." That means being available. Turning things around faster than expected. Saying yes more than you say no, at least in the early days. Being the person who helps a team get to a good outcome quickly, rather than the person who stands between them and what they need.

The shift happens — and you'll know when it does — when stakeholders start bringing you in earlier. Not because they have to, but because they've worked out that involving procurement leads to better outcomes. That's the real milestone. Not the savings number. Not the framework you launched. The moment when the function becomes something people actively want to engage with.

The best procurement functions I've built didn't feel like procurement to the people using them. They just felt like good commercial sense.

Why it's worth it

Here's what I've come to believe about founding roles: the people who do them well develop a combination of skills that most procurement professionals never need to use at the same time. You're a strategist and an operator simultaneously. A diplomat and a negotiator. An expert who has to earn trust in a room full of people who aren't sure they need your expertise.

It's hard. It takes longer than you think. There will be moments where you wonder whether anyone actually values what you're doing.

And then you'll look back 18 months in, at the function you've built and the influence you've earned, and realise that this kind of work — the from-scratch, figure-it-out-as-you-go, build-something-real kind — is the most satisfying thing in commercial leadership.

Gerard Troy has built procurement functions from the ground up in New Zealand, the US, and the UK — most recently leading strategic sourcing across a global SaaS platform. He advises technology companies on commercial architecture and procurement transformation.

I've delivered a lot of cost savings in my career. More than $40m across a single programme at one point. I'm genuinely proud of that work — it mattered, it was hard, and it required real commercial skill to deliver.

But I want to tell you about a conversation that changed how I think about this stuff.

I was presenting quarterly results to a senior leadership team. Savings number front and centre. Big, impressive figure. I could see the CFO nodding. And then the Chief Product Officer — someone whose team I'd been working closely with — said something I wasn't expecting.

"That's great. But what I actually care about is that my team can get suppliers onboarded in days, not weeks. Are we measuring that?"

We weren't. And that was a problem.

The trap of being measured on savings alone

Here's the honest version: cost savings are seductive because they're easy to count. You negotiated a contract from $2m to $1.6m — that's a $400k saving, clean and reportable. Finance loves it. It looks good on a dashboard.

The problem is that it frames procurement as a price optimisation function. And price optimisation, while genuinely useful, is a narrow way to think about what commercial leadership can do for a business.

Worse, it creates the wrong incentives. Teams measured purely on savings will sometimes slow down decisions to run longer processes. They'll push for cheaper options that create headaches downstream. They'll optimise the number on the dashboard rather than the actual outcome for the business.

And crucially — it doesn't capture the things that actually determine whether procurement is earning real influence or just earning its keep.

What I think actually matters

After that conversation with the CPO, we redesigned how we reported on the function. Here's what we started measuring — and why each one matters.

Speed to value. In a fast-moving technology company, the most expensive thing is often not the price of a contract — it's the time it takes to get a decision made. How long does it take from a team identifying a need to a supplier being engaged and productive? For us, tracking cycle times exposed where the real bottlenecks were, and it gave us a concrete way to show improvement that stakeholders actually felt.

Stakeholder NPS. I know — measuring satisfaction sounds soft. But if your business units are going around procurement because they've learned it's faster to just sign something themselves, you have a serious problem that no savings number will reveal. We ran a proper NPS measure and pushed it above 40. That didn't happen by accident. It required genuinely changing how the function operated — faster turnaround, more pragmatic advice, fewer hoops to jump through. But it also gave us something powerful: proof that procurement was a function people wanted to work with.

Commercial risk coverage. How much of your critical supplier spend is on robust contracts? What's your exposure to single-source dependencies? These things are hard to put a dollar value on — until something goes wrong. A supplier failure during a critical product launch, a contract dispute that ties up Legal for months — the cost of those events can dwarf anything on a savings dashboard. Tracking risk coverage gives leadership visibility into what's being protected, not just what's being saved.

Early involvement rate. This is my favourite one, and the hardest to define neatly. What percentage of significant commercial decisions is procurement involved in before the supplier is already chosen? If teams are coming to you after they've already picked a vendor, you're not doing strategic sourcing — you're doing contract admin. Tracking how often you're in the room at the start, rather than the end, is a leading indicator of whether the function has real influence.

How to change the conversation

None of this means abandoning savings reporting. That would be naive — savings are real and they matter to every finance function I've ever worked with. But they should be one part of a broader picture, not the whole story.

The practical shift is in how you frame your reporting. Lead with the outcomes that connect to what the business actually cares about. Put the savings in context — not just the amount, but what it enabled. "We ran a competitive process on our cloud infrastructure contract and saved $X — and we did it in three weeks, which meant the engineering team could start the migration on schedule."

That's a different conversation to "we saved $X." And it positions procurement as a function that helps the business move, not just one that reduces spend.

The functions with real influence aren't the ones with the biggest savings numbers. They're the ones that get called before a decision is made, not after it.

When you report that way consistently — and when the numbers back it up — something shifts. You stop being the team that saves money. You start being the team that helps the business operate smarter. That's a much more interesting place to be.

Gerard Troy has led commercial and procurement functions across New Zealand, the US, and the UK, most recently managing a $200m+ technology portfolio at a global SaaS company. He works with technology businesses on building procurement functions that create genuine commercial advantage.