One supplier is 41% of cost of sales. Nobody in the business owns the relationship.

Customer concentration gets a board discussion. The same concentration on the buying side is usually filed as an operational detail, and it costs more.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for One supplier is 41% of cost of sales. Nobody in the business owns the relationship.

Most businesses can tell you, without looking, which three customers matter most. Ask the same question about suppliers and the answer arrives more slowly, often as a name rather than a number, and almost never with a contract renewal date attached. Yet the concentration is frequently sharper on the buy side than the sell side. A manufacturer might have forty customers and one substrate supplier. An agency might have two hundred clients and one platform its entire delivery model assumes. A distributor’s largest account might be 14% of revenue while…

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