Should You Hire a Procurement Team, or Rent One?
The build versus buy question that most SMBs answer by accident, and how to answer it on purpose.
At some point every growing business hits the same wall. Software spend has crept past a number that makes the CFO uncomfortable, renewals keep arriving unmanaged, and someone in finance or IT is quietly negotiating vendor contracts on top of a day job they were actually hired to do.
The instinct is to fix this by hiring. Bring on a procurement manager, give them a title, and let them own it. Sometimes that is the right move. Often it is not, and the reason has nothing to do with the quality of the hire.
The hidden cost of building
A single procurement hire is rarely a single cost. To do the job well, that person needs market pricing data, contract templates, vendor benchmarks, and the kind of negotiating reps that only come from doing thousands of deals. An SMB doing a few dozen renewals a year cannot generate that experience internally, no matter how capable the hire.
So the new manager does their best with the tools at hand, which usually means negotiating against vendors who do this every single day, with no benchmark for what a fair price even looks like. The salary is visible. The capability gap is not, and it is the expensive part.
A procurement function is not a person. It is data, leverage, and experience working together. Hiring one person rarely buys all three.
What renting actually means
Procurement as a Service, or PRaaS™, exists for the wide band of companies whose spend is too large to ignore but too small to justify a full internal team. Instead of a single salaried hire, you get a function on demand: seasoned negotiators, current market data, proven contract frameworks, and the benchmarks to know exactly where a deal should land.
The economics tend to favor renting until a fairly high spend threshold. A fractional model costs a fraction of a loaded salary, carries no ramp up time, and brings leverage that no single internal hire could replicate. You pay for the function when you need it, which for most SMBs means concentrated around renewals and major purchases rather than spread across a full time role.
How to actually decide
Three questions cut through it. First, how much do you spend on technology and vendors annually? Below a few million, a full internal team is hard to justify on savings alone. Second, how predictable is that spend? Lumpy, renewal driven spend suits an on demand model, while constant high volume purchasing may warrant building. Third, do you need a person or a capability? If the honest answer is that you need expert negotiation a dozen times a year, you need a capability, and that is exactly what renting provides.
The worst outcome is the accidental one: spend grows, nobody owns it, and the business absorbs inflated pricing year after year because the build decision felt premature and the rent option was never considered. Answer the question on purpose, and either path can work. Leave it unanswered, and the vendors decide for you.
Merci Technologies helps small and mid sized businesses buy technology with confidence through PRaaS™, the Contract Health Check™, and advisory grounded in the peer reviewed CASES Framework™. Talk to Onyx, our AI procurement advisor, to start the conversation.
