Online event
Is your supplier fit for purpose?
Tuesday 20 October at 1:00PM
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You'd never recruit an employee after one conversation, so why do it when choosing the experts your business relies on? Join us to learn how to identify, evaluate and build productive relationships with the right professional partners.
What you’ll learn
- Audit your existing supply chain - map every external supplier and adviser you rely on, identify which relationships are delivering, which have drifted, and where you are carrying risk you cannot currently see.
- Apply a structured due diligence process before you appoint - test sector fit, stage-of-growth fit, working style and evidence of results, and know how to validate reviews, references and claimed experience rather than taking them at face value.
- Build shared accountability for outcomes into the relationship, agree what good looks like at the outset, review it regularly, and know how and when to change supplier if the fit is wrong.
Description
Choosing the right suppliers is just as important as hiring the right people. In this practical session, Sid shares a straightforward framework for assessing suppliers, testing their expertise and building accountability into your relationships. Learn how to identify the right fit, confidently switch providers when needed, and create a stronger, more resilient business. You'll leave with a supplier audit template and practical questions to help you make better buying decisions.
Speakers
Bhupinder "Sid" Sidhu
Growth Advisor, Business Wales
Sid Sidhu has spent thirty years in the room where the commercial decisions get made and has the scars to show for it. He built a customer acquisition operation from zero to 430,000 customers in three years for John Caudwell’s Caudwell Group. He inherited HomeServe’s most at-risk accounts under Richard Harpin, rebuilt the relationships nobody else wanted and secured £90m of contract extensions.
He was Commercial Director and then COO at Nev Wilshire’s Save Britain Money in Swansea, a 500+ person group ranked 3rd in the Fast Growth 50 and 5th in the Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For, before the group went into administration. He will tell you he learned more from that than from either of the successes. He has also built and sold his own: an FCA-regulated advisory firm taken from zero to £75m+ AUM and exited to a Quilter AR, and a national B2B marketplace grown to 2,000+ member businesses. Today he advises founder-led businesses as a Growth Advisor with Business Wales and works as a business consultant to two B2B advisory platforms, Find a Business Expert and HiiGuru. Thirty years of buying from suppliers, selling to clients, and getting both wrong often enough to know what the warning signs look like.