Welcome back to The Procuretech Podcast!

 

We're continuing with our mini series where we ask influencers and industry experts for their thoughts and nuggets of advice on everything that's happening in the digital procurement world.

 
Content and Community for Procurement - Daniel Barnes from Gatekeeper
Today we've got a returning guest who was on the first series of the podcast way back in 2020.

He's a man who needs no introduction. But we're going to give him one anyway.It’s procurement influencer Daniel Barnes, of World of Procurement and lately Gatekeeper.

 
A quick catch up on the last few years
It was the very start of the COVID pandemic when we last spoke. So we kick off the podcast by asking Dan what he's been up to since then.

A lot changed very quickly for Dan when the pandemic hit. He was working as a consultant in the defence space at the time, and COVID really impacted the pipeline of work in that space.

From there, he pivoted to a FinTech firm where he worked for around 18 months. During that time he started looking into procurement tech and contract tech.

In that role, he sourced and implemented a contract management product called Gatekeeper, then decided he wanted to join that company.

Dan's got a legal background, including an undergraduate degree in commercial law. So the contract side of procurement comes naturally to him. He finds it fascinating, being able to hold his own against properly trained legal people like solicitors.

He also felt like he could make a bigger impact at Gatekeeper - by showing off this kind of tech and educating people on the benefits of digital transformation.

He's been in the role of Community Manager over at Gatekeeper since June. His job now involves shooting content on topics like contract and risk management, and also working with Gatekeeper to help better position the business.

So that's lots of change in the last 6 months, let alone the last two years!

 
Dan's experience working in FinTech
When he joined the FinTech, Dan was the very last person to join the team. Everyone else was more focused on the supplier management side of things

They had a CLM but it was basically just a repository that allows you to store metadata, and it didn't really do anything else. It was really painful to work with. It was probably just an Excel worksheet by the CMS, and then a user interface was slapped on top of it.

Going into a FinTech space in a scale up environment was terrifying. Everything happens so fast. Dan realised that with all the admin workload, there was barely any time to any work that adds value.

And the work was boring, too. It was just the most mundane stuff - stuff that you could have a virtual assistant do for pennies, anywhere else in the world.

He felt like a very well paid admin assistant a lot of the time. And that's bizarre, especially for a tech business.

 
Implementing Gatekeeper
Thankfully, the company Dan was working for did get it. He managed to secure some investment to go out and find a solution that could change...