Every department head in our company negotiates their own vendor contracts, software subscriptions, and contractor pricing, which has caused massive duplicate spend and zero price leverage. We created a centralized Procurement and Vendor Management seat, but none of our existing leaders want it and we cannot afford a dedicated hire. How do we assign a seat that nobody wants to own without it getting ignored?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When nobody wants to own a seat, the temptation is to turn it into a committee or leave it unassigned. Both options guarantee failure. In the EOS framework, every seat must have one name, five major roles, and clear accountabilities. If everyone owns vendor management, no one owns it.

Start by defining the seat strictly on the Accountability Chart before attaching any human names. Identify the five core roles. For procurement, these typically include negotiating master service agreements, eliminating duplicate SaaS licenses, managing vendor performance reviews, maintaining pricing benchmarks, and standardizing purchase approval thresholds.

Once the seat exists, look across your leadership team. This seat belongs naturally under Operations or Finance. If you cannot afford a dedicated full-time procurement director, the leader of that parent department must temporarily take the seat. Place their name in the seat box.

Do not sugarcoat this responsibility. If your Finance Director takes the seat, acknowledge during your Level 10 Meeting that they are holding two seats. They must allocate specific hours each week to it, establish one or two company Rocks around contract consolidation, and report on procurement scorecards.

If the leader lacks the capacity to run day-to-day vendor negotiations, pair them with an administrative coordinator or an automated contract management platform to handle repetitive data extraction. But the executive whose name is in the box remains solely accountable for total vendor spend and contract discipline until business revenue justifies hiring a dedicated seat owner.