Speaker 0 | 00:02.300
Welcome, everyone, to Telecom Radio 1 today. Another very exciting episode. Today, we have Mari McMinn from Valvoline. And what really sparked this, me wanting to have you on the show, and thank you so much for being on, is you wrote a really, really great article on LinkedIn called Why Supplier Diversity is Good. And why did that surprise me? It surprised me because… A, you work for Valvoline, which everyone knows is a massive company, and you’re talking about supplier diversity. And in my world, and just in IT in general, and anyone that’s in procurement, normally you think of an enterprise company being very kind of dollar and cents, and not thinking too much about diversity as much as just thinking about, get me the cheapest product, make a difference in my bottom line. Am I off there? And thank you again. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Speaker 1 | 01:03.137
No, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. And thanks for the feedback on the article. It’s, you know, I fell into supplier diversity on accident and it’s become really a path in as I’ve seen the value, not just from, you know, from the diverse supplier side of things, but from the enterprise thing as well, enterprise side as well.
Speaker 0 | 01:18.823
So it’s actually a really cool story. Why don’t we just start with that? How did you, cause you say you kind of fell into this and it was a challenging role. And what I’ll do is I’ll put the article link. In the podcast as well at that and kind of like the notes of the podcast so everyone can read it Well, you talk a little bit about you know, you took on the role You know head-on and you kind of jumped into something that you may have been a little bit unfamiliar territory So it’s a really great story. Why don’t you just start with telling us that story?
Speaker 1 | 01:45.996
Yeah, so I did I did fall into it my VP came to me We had a very large customer who is part of the billion-dollar roundtable Which is about 27 customers in the US who spend a billion dollars a year or more with the versatile suppliers and it’s pretty prestigious, it’s pretty exclusive obviously. And they came to us and they said, hey, you know, this is in your contract, you’ve got to get serious about this. And my VP was like, uh, I don’t even know what that means. So I said, you know what, me either, but I’m going to figure it out for you. So it was my background being in data as a perfect match for trying to figure out where we are, where we’re not, and how we kind of accomplish that. So I took it on. I’ve had great mentoring from that customer. We’ve been in their, what they call a catalyst program to help us learn, understand the importance and figure out how to do this, not just check the box, but create a sustainable program around supplier diversity. So we graduated from that program a couple weeks ago. And it was kind of funny, that whole event was like, it was like the Murray and Valvoline show. They were just so proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish over the last couple years just by digging in there and understanding it. And I think that’s where my… What I bring to the table is a little bit different than some of the other diversity managers is that I get the data and I understand it. And then you have to take the business case forward. I’ve been writing business cases for a long time on buying different solutions, specifically in the pricing optimization space. And when you understand that there needs to be a return on investment on anything that you’re doing for a company, that makes the job a little bit easier. You just got to look at the data, understand the data, and figure out how to move that forward with outcome space.
Speaker 0 | 03:28.276
So for some of those out there listening that may misunderstand supplier diversity, because I know I did, I thought, hey, I can bring all kinds of suppliers to the table and that’s diverse. Why not just give a little bit of definition around what really is supplier diversity? You know, why is it important? And then we can maybe talk about, you know, some of the benefits to it.
Speaker 1 | 03:50.648
Yeah, absolutely. So supplier diversity has been around a very long time. I think that’s something that a lot of people have lost sight of. Like 1953, the Small Business Administration was created, which was really to create opportunities for small businesses in the United States to have access to government contracts. If you look at some of the data for the Small Business Administration, like 48% of the workforce in the United States is employed by small business. So it’s crazy when you think about the economic impact of small businesses, what that looks like. from a policy standpoint, right? People are working in this space. This is what they do every day. And that’s actually fueling the economy. So it’s really important that people kind of understand that it’s not just about set-asides or affirmative action or any of those things. In fact, it’s none of those things. At the end of the day, it’s about giving access. So throughout history, minorities were added on. The women component was added on. Service-disabled veteran and veteran-owned businesses have become key recently as well. Some of the first things they focused on were organizations who were based in historically what they call hub zones are historically underutilized business zones where people have high levels of unemployment and those businesses need access to contracts in order for people to work so that’s really kind of where a lot of it started in history um at the very top gotcha
Speaker 0 | 05:20.059
so i don’t know if we have time to go into how you actually vetted finding all of the actual companies that you’re going to choose and or use but at the end of the day what were some of the benefits
Speaker 1 | 05:33.237
working with diverse suppliers yeah so you know it was it was quite the transition for us you know one of the some of the first things we did was we went to some of the national conferences so the minority supplier development council the National Minority Supplier Development Council or we call it NMSDC has a conference every year the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council we bank has a couple of different events all of these guys have regional affiliates so as you’re getting out there and you’re talking to people, people come to you, but you have to be selective, right? One of the things I’m still very protective of inside Valvoline is I want to make sure that my diverse suppliers when they come to table, because we’re still, while we’ve grown our spend 365% over the first two years of the program, we’re still, it’s still a small amount of our spend. So we’re working towards a larger goal, but I have to make sure that those suppliers I’m bringing in knock it out of the park every time. And what you find is a lot of these smaller guys come in and they get so excited to have Valvoline as a potential customer that they just kind of throw up all over everything. So you really have to work with them tightly to make sure that they’re focused on the thing that they’re going to do that makes them different from every other supplier that they’re going to be competing against. And that’s where we’ve really had a lot of success is focusing on that. So we find, you know, I’ll go to a show and I’ll meet 100 new vendors who are possible potential partners. We get that whittled down pretty quickly, and it becomes a handful. It’s a very small handful oftentimes because our program is small. Our resources are limited. So we really are trying to focus on the ones who we know have who can move the needle quickly and who are going to deliver in a way that is going to either create savings for the bottom line and or get us better product in the end. So that’s really how we focus to make sure because there’s a million janitorial supply customers out there or vendors out there. Let’s make sure we get the one. who is going to knock it out of the park. Better service, better delivery, cheaper pricing, certainly. But at the end of the day, they’ve got to be a partner to us and not just a vendor.
Speaker 0 | 07:36.477
You actually brought up a fairly controversial topic in my book, at least. And that is, and I see people post this all the time on LinkedIn, and it is something that I say, why not? And I completely disagree with. And you’ll just see sales guys a lot. They say, you can’t have the best. Priced product, good customer service, and quality all in one. And I question that all the time. I say, why not? Why can’t you have a well-priced product? Why can’t you have good customer service and deliver an excellent product at a great price at the same time? Do you agree that you can’t have all three or do you think it’s possible?
Speaker 1 | 08:17.989
Oh, I totally think it’s possible. I mean, we’ve proven it’s possible. You know, we’ve engaged with a couple of integration partners. who have delivered faster, cheaper, better, and have given us more than the original scope. So sometimes in my mind, I’m like, hey, watch out. You’re getting a little too far on your scope creep there. But at the end of the day, my stakeholders are incredibly happy, and they’re going back to those vendors over and over again. Now, we’re not talking about being dirt cheap. We’re not talking about pricing yourself out of business, right, which is very important for some of these small organizations and expanders. make sure you can live with the price that you’re giving us because we will take it we’ll take everything you give us right but at the end of the day for me having a more value-oriented equation versus strictly bottom line price you know if you can do some kind of analysis to understand what the overall value is that I received for the price paid it doesn’t matter that it’s the cheapest dollar at the end of the day it’s like do I get more value even if I’m paying a little bit more that’s still a win-win for both of us
Speaker 0 | 09:23.805
Give me a, I just curious, I want a little bit, maybe a little before and after, because I, I’ve done, you know, CNSG and my company, we work with a, a lot of vendors, a, a lot of diverse vendors as well. We work with a lot of, you know, eight, a service disabled women owned businesses. And I’ve seen the bureaucratic process, um, through large companies. Um, some do it well, I would say some do it. The majority do it. not as fast and well and as nimble with his great customer service. And I’ve seen, yes, little companies like dance around and do a great job. And then I’ve seen a little company sell as well into a big company. And then everything that you gained disappears as well. I’m just curious. Can you give me like a before and after? Do you remember what the process was like, maybe working with a large bureaucracy and then moving to one of these, you know, smaller, more diverse vendors? And what was like maybe some of the biggest noticeable differences?
Speaker 1 | 10:26.584
Right. So, you know, one of the things that we have a very large digital transformation project underway. And we have a, at the time, a very large integration partner doing a lot of the… planning an analytic work around helping us figure out where we wanted to go next. Well, the contract itself is, you know, I don’t know, 50 pages. The statements of work were incredibly challenging for our business users to understand what it was they were actually getting. I was pushing that integration partner so we could tie deliverables to payments so that we made sure that we were getting what we paid for every time we cut them a check. But because they were so big… We really struggled to get that through. I think a little bit of it was because they were so big, and a little bit of it was because we were trying to move really fast and probably not behaving in our ultimate best interest around this particular relationship. We moved over to a boutique that we’ve been using for some slices of this digital transformation, who’s been a very good partner, very small, cloud-based solutions provider out of Florida, woman-owned. who by the way used to work for the big integration partner, so she has that kind of skillset that she’s brought forward. But what we found was we could manage that contract differently. The contract was shorter. The lifecycle of that contract was easier to manage. The actual statement of work, we were very clear between working with the partner at this very small organization, working with her directly to say, we need to make sure we’re doing this. We’ve gotten started before. We want to make sure that we all are aligned. And that creates the satisfaction. Thank you. from my stakeholders to your organization, as well as making sure that we contract that, that we got what we paid for. And just the simplicity of dealing with a smaller organization has been time-saving on my side as a buyer and a negotiator. But bigger than that, you know, our rates are lower because our overhead is lower. We’re not paying for big, bloated organizations. We’re paying for the work that we’re getting. And quite frankly, we’ve gone back to them. two or three more times now to give them additional business because they have been so easy to work with The teams get the business they’ve spent a lot of time here versus a big integration partner Which is you know, they fly them in they climb out they climb in they climb out and it creates a different level of partnership between that smaller organization that we have been able to um leverage and quite frankly we appreciate it’s awesome,
Speaker 0 | 12:53.517
uh, and just from a business Philosophical standpoint, whatever you want to call it. Yeah the expectations You could set expectations clearly and feel confident that those are going to be met as opposed to a large bureaucratic minutia of people that, like you said, might fly in and even ownership in the company themselves. The person flying in might not have as much ownership just in general, which is interesting because you are that large bureaucratic organization. Do you know what I mean? So it’s like, which is actually really cool. So I think it’s a way it, a, it says a ton about Valvoline, by the way, it really says a ton about your company and your ability to diversify and really take on those values, which is huge. Last question. And I always want to ask you maybe to provide something to the audience. There’s going to be other people that are stuck in your same situation. What, you know, whether it be one piece of advice or two pieces of advice. Maybe it’s a suggestion on how someone can start doing this or a larger enterprise organization can do this. You know, could they reach out to you for advice? What’s your one piece of advice that you would want to give to anyone else out there that might be in a similar situation drowning in the minutia?
Speaker 1 | 14:15.157
Yeah. The first thing for me is really, and I think the success or failure of the part of our team and most of the enterprise organizations is understand why you’re doing it. You know, for us, it really started as a… clients but and you know I don’t want to put my own horn too much but because I understood or saw the value quickly with what these organizations were bringing to us and more nimble than our the more innovative than we are they can turn on a dime for us they hit you they may not have all the tools in the toolbox that a big partner have but they know how to leverage those tools and they get in there and they work so hard for you but you once you kind of understand that you can start to leverage story internally because it does take a lot of evangelical work inside the organization I’m still working on it you know two years in we still have a long long way to go but understanding why we are doing it and for us it’s you know a compliance for sure we got to do it several of our large customers I have to report to them quarterly or monthly B, our customers are diverse. And then when I talk about our customers, I’m talking about primarily our consumer customers. So we run the oil paint stores. People are buying oil off of the shelf at retailers that have our name on it. Those customers are diverse. And knowing that they work in organizations who are supported by small businesses, they are the small business owners themselves or they’re working for small businesses. If you think about, you know, 50% of employees being in that space, why are you not supporting that? as a, not even about goodwill, but about reciprocity, right? So there’s a lot of loyalty there that comes back to you when you are supporting your customer base into their own businesses. And then the last thing, honestly, for us is now we figured out, wait a minute, there’s business we have not historically been able to get to because we weren’t doing this well. Organizations who are in the billion-dollar roundtable, they care about this. Organizations who are in the billion-dollar roundtable could be big customers for us. Why are we not pursuing that? So… The government is another entity that we haven’t been able to address well because we haven’t had these kind of programs. So a lot of our products meet, we have great product, but now we need to take it to the next level to make sure that we are providing value and more than just a product space to our customers, whatever those customers are. But understanding your why to do it and being able to talk through the organization about that is really key.
Speaker 0 | 16:36.462
Let me ask another question, maybe a little bit more personal. just a little bit more personal because a, you’re working in a large, you’ve been very successful in a large enterprise company. And I get, I get all kinds of comments all day long. I, I, I pretty much connect with people that are working in enterprise space all day long. And I get a mixed bag of answers. And a lot of times I get, I mean, I call them whiners and, and I say that with all, all form of wanting to push someone forward. But I get people whining saying they’re stuck in the bureaucracy. They can’t work up that there’s, you know, nepotism, that there’s the old entrenched hierarchy. And I tell them, well, hey, you know, all these people have to die someday. And I’m not trying to be insensitive. But I mean, you know, what do you have to say to someone that’s been working in an environment like that so long and kind of pushed through? and been successful. I mean, any piece of advice there for anyone that feels stuck?
Speaker 1 | 17:39.997
Yeah. Find your advocates and your champions, right? So one of the things that I tell a lot of other women in our organization is their coaches, their mentors, their advocates, and their champions. Understand who is who in your personal board of directors, right? And this is true for whoever. It doesn’t matter, you know, man, woman, you know, doesn’t matter where you come from. You need to understand who values what you’re bringing to the table. And when you find Those are the people who can take you forward. It doesn’t even have to be a senior level person, somebody who can leverage you in another business unit, somebody who can leverage you as a resource that can appear to you. All of those people help build your network and, therefore, help you move along the path. Because most of those opportunities, you know, we talked about being bidirectional earlier. Most of those opportunities are bidirectional. So I’m getting something in return for giving you something. Whether it’s even a peer-to-peer opportunity, if I’m teaching you how to work with Spread Seed a little bit different, helping you understand the data that you’re looking at, I’m understanding more about the business problem you’re trying to solve. So it’s a win-win again for both of us. And once you understand how to leverage those relationships, I think it makes your life a lot easier internally. And I get that I’m a hardcore extrovert, so I get a lot of the introverts in the space are going, oh, you need to go out and talk to people. I’m so exhausted. about all that but at the end of the day find the ones you’re comfortable with you you eat introvert work with introverts all the time and that still is a doable opportunity but you’ve got to find the people who can um help you grow whether that’s through advocacy championships or through just general coaching and learning but
Speaker 0 | 19:22.910
most people don’t would never think this but i’m an absolute crazy introvert i really am and the only reason they’ve ever helped The only thing that has ever helped me overcome that is to look outward and to look at other people and know that your job is to help other people. If you help enough other people get what they want, understand them. If you can connect, discover, and respond with another person and help them, then ultimately you’ll get what you need. I’m not a big fan of whiners, so I’ll just be honest with you. Pete, whiners come with me very well. This has been awesome. I really thank you so much for being on the show. I would actually like to have you come back for another topic, which is the RFP topic, which I have a lot of problems with. I don’t know if you write RFPs. First of all, do you give out RFPs? Do people have a lot? I do.
Speaker 1 | 20:15.380
And so I hate them, honestly. I hate the racism.
Speaker 0 | 20:19.863
We can’t go there. We can’t go there. That’s the other show.
Speaker 1 | 20:22.766
It’s our whole hour, too.
Speaker 0 | 20:24.006
Yeah, that’s the other show. The other show is how I hate RFPs and want to burn in the backyard and fire and how I think that RFPs are very controlling and we should really open it up more. Maybe have more of a, I don’t know. The RFP discussions is a very in-depth one that I’d love to talk about sometime.
Speaker 1 | 20:41.400
Yeah, and we’ve been experimenting on that too, Phil. So I would love to talk about that.
Speaker 0 | 20:45.604
Okay. All right, Mari, thank you so much for being on the show. Have a great day.
Speaker 1 | 20:49.608
You too. Thanks, Phil. Appreciate your time.
