Apr 28, 2026

These Procurement Horror Stories Could Happen to Anyone

By AI Systems Team

6 min read

Tom Mills has made some expensive mistakes. A six-minute negotiation that ended in a supplier walkout. A $300k auto-renewal that slipped through while he was busy pitching alternatives. A deal the finance team had to kill because the numbers didn’t add up. He sat down with us to share what they taught him about procurement.

A digital artwork shows a grounding canyon with green walls and a riverbed filled with scattered sheets of paper under a gradient purple and blue sky.

We’ve all had those embarrassing moments at work. When you’ve spent hours on a contract only to find a typo after you’ve delivered it to the client. Or accidentally messaging your manager when you meant to spill the tea to your work bestie. And the worst of all…replying all to a company-wide email. 😬

“It’s a rite of passage,” laughs Tom Mills from Procure Bites. “We’ve all made mistakes. I’ve got so many horror stories from my early career especially that you’ll probably think I’m the worst procurement professional out there. But it can happen to anyone.”

We sat down with Tom to talk through some of his most memorable mistakes—and how he fixed them—so you can feel a little less alone. From horrible bosses to big “oops” moments, he’s seen it all.

Horror Story #1: The six-minute negotiation that ended in a walkout

Tom explains that at one of his first buyer jobs in his ‘20s, his manager encouraged his team to be tough on suppliers. But Tom took that a little too much to heart during a critical negotiation.

It was very ego driven in this organization. The ethos was, ‘We’re the best and we’re going to beat the supplier up for the best terms. I’m not proud of this one. I promise I’ve grown up since then, but at the time, my ego really got the best of me.
Tom MillsProcurement Protagonist, Procure Bites

He recalls a negotiation with a niche flour supplier. He went in playing hard ball—not knowing that this supplier was the only option in the U.K. for that type of flour. 🤦

“I thought, ‘I want a reduced price, I want better terms, and I’m going to make them come to me in Manchester, where I worked, which was a 200-mile journey for them to get to the negotiating table. The meeting lasted six minutes and the supplier got up and walked out.”

What’s worse? This company had an open floor plan…so this happened not in a conference room but in front of his entire team.

Lesson learned: Letting ego drive your negotiation tactics is a good way to lose a supplier.

The mistake, says Tom, was completely ignoring the power dynamics of the situation. “I made it personal, about me vs. him, and I didn’t have a leg to stand on,” he says. “I hadn’t done my market research to understand that we had no other options. This was such an important lesson to me in terms of collaboration and respect with my partnerships.”

Tom didn’t get fired, luckily, but it did take significant repair work from senior staff to fix his mistake. They eventually got the supplier back. “It was something we definitely needed for our U.K. stores, and I almost ruined it,” says Tom. “The worst part was when they left I actually thought, ‘Yeah, I’ve shown them.’ How naive I was.”

Horror Story #2: The missing detail that cost the company $300k

When you start at a new company, you naturally want to make a big impact right away. When Tom started at Clark’s shoe company as a procurement director in 2013, he was asked to research a new contract management solution for the business. Their current solution went unused and ate $150k a year in their budget.

Months of research and Tom got his manager and the rest of the organization really excited about several alternatives, which offered more features and would result in major cost-savings.

“What I failed to do was realize that while I was doing all of this brilliant research, the contract auto-renewed,” Tom remembers with a grimace. “That meant we had two more years with this current solution we couldn’t use. To make it even worse, I sat on the information for a few weeks spinning around trying to find a way out of it, which of course there was none.”

Lesson learned: When you make a mistake, communicate it right away.

Tom didn’t get in trouble for the auto-renew issue—though he should have done his due diligence before hyping up the new solutions. What did land him in the hot seat was failing to escalate the issue once he figured it out. “The auto-renew clause wasn’t my fault, though I did make a mistake there,” he explains. “But I learned it was much worse that I kept it to myself. That, more than failing to do my due diligence, cost me a lot of credibility with my manager. It took a lot of time to earn back their trust.”

I got so excited about the cost-savings potential, that I forgot the basics. Both in terms of hard skills as procurement professional, but also the honesty and trust that is fundamental to any team’s success.
Tom MillsProcurement Protagonist, Procure Bites

This mistake has also made him paranoid about auto-renewals in his work and personal life. “I have woken up in the middle of the night, logged on to my laptop, and double checked an upcoming renewal date in a panic,” he laughs. “I recognize that this is unhealthy, but I’ll never forget that mistake again.”

The organization did end up switching to one of the solutions Tom recommended two years later, but Tom had already transitioned to another team and thus missed out on the glory and cost-savings credit.

Horror Story #3: The deal that was too good to be true

At Clark’s, Tom moved from direct buying into procurement. One of the first things he wanted to address was the point of sale software that managed the print materials in every store. “It was clunky, it was inefficient, and there were huge costs involved,” he explains. “I was under quite a bit of pressure to meet my savings target for the year, and after speaking with a sales rep at a print management company, I became so invested in purchasing from them that I became a pseudo-salesman internally, and not in a good way.”

Part of the issue was that the sales rep was really good at their job. So when an enticing offer came through, Tom was thrilled. “The math didn’t really add up when I dug into the spreadsheet, but because I trusted their sales rep as a partner, my instinct didn’t kick in. I just wanted to get the deal done so much that I didn’t question it.”

Tom knew that each month he couldn’t convince the marketing team to switch meant a lower chance he’d meet his cost savings goals. It wasn’t until the deal was far along that the finance team finally called him out. “I remember them saying, ‘Tom, these numbers don’t stack up.’ I finally realized that the numbers I’d been selling to the business for weeks or months were too good to be true. They were trusting me as the procurement professional to be all over those numbers, and I wasn’t,” he says.

The team did switch, in the end, but those sneaky sales tactics caught up to them: It required significant negotiation and damaged Tom’s credibility in the process.

Lesson learned: Slow down to speed up

I lost an overview of what procurement should be doing because I was so driven by the wrong incentives,” he says. “It was a stark reminder for me that my role as a procurement professional is not to be focused just on savings, but on value.
Tom MillsProcurement Protagonist, Procure Bites

This was also a good lesson in total cost of ownership (TCO.) There may have been significant cost-savings in the first year, but when the rest of the fees kicked in, it wasn’t such a magical offer that it seemed to be. “I was so caught up in there being one answer, and wanting to get it done, that I didn’t consider all of the factors that go into switching to a new tool.”

Resilience is a key skill for procurement professionals and supply chains alike

Mistakes are going to happen. (Just ask this author, who once managed to send a very profane typo out to an email list of over 100,000 people by accident. 😱)

What matters is how you respond to it. Most mistakes you’ll make are preventable, as in Tom’s story about doing his due diligence on a supplier or double-checking contract details. But sometimes, there are situations outside of your control. Today’s procurement professionals are under more pressure than ever, with macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty that introduce significant supply chain fragility.

“Resilience is something we need to develop as procurement professionals, because there’s so much you just can’t control,” says Tom. “Resilience, and perspective. We’re all doing our best, given the circumstances of our managers, our organizations, our technology, and these broader economic issues. The best procurement professionals are going to make the most of whatever opportunities that come their way.”

Read the whole series with procurement expert Tom Mills here >

Ironclad is not a law firm, and this post does not constitute or contain legal advice. To evaluate the accuracy, sufficiency, or reliability of the ideas and guidance reflected here, or the applicability of these materials to your business, you should consult with a licensed attorney.