Would you rather… follow up

In response to the email about imperfect suppliers yesterday, Sarah wrote in to ask (shared with permission):

“How often do we need to reassess our suppliers?”

Great question – there’s no standard answer to this as only you’ll know your tolerance for switching suppliers, and the complexities of your organisation. But we can create some guidelines.

One thing you can do is indicate where you’re at on your journey to finding that “perfect” supplier on your website. As an example, this is from our Impact Page (bottom of the page):

Our energy supply is one area where we’re not-quite-there-yet. But rather than waiting for it to be sorted so we can say “it’s perfect”, we’ve just listed where it’s at right now, where we hope to be with it, and (roughly) by when.

I always recommend this approach when you have a certain goal with your suppliers or your processes that hasn’t quite been achieved yet. It shows that you’re consciously working towards it, and also simply that it’s on your radar.

This can be a really helpful signal to a potential customer (or investor, or partner), you might just pre-empt a question they have about working with you.

With that in place, you can monitor and reassess annually, monthly, or at some other frequency, to see what new options become available.

Hope that helps! Thanks for the question 🙂