From the buyer's side of the table.

I began my procurement career as a Strategic Buyer in the oil and gas industry, working across London and Libya — one of the most commercially demanding environments you can work in. That international foundation shaped everything that followed. Over 25 years I have held senior procurement leadership roles across NHS trusts, local authorities, central government, arm's-length bodies, regulated utilities, cultural institutions, and the oil and gas sector — a breadth of experience that very few procurement professionals can match.

My work has spanned the full spectrum of public procurement. At the City of London Corporation I led procurement for the Centre for Music London — a £250M arts and culture construction project involving the Barbican, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the London Symphony Orchestra. At Transport for London I designed and delivered a category management toolkit covering £2.6bn of expenditure across 66 subcategories. At Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals I led a £45M electronic patient records procurement and managed emergency Covid supply chain logistics across multiple sites. My work at the City of London Corporation also connected to the enduring legacy infrastructure of the London 2012 Olympics — procurement at a scale and profile that very few commercial professionals ever get near.

Most recently I served as Interim Commercial and Procurement Lead for the NHS England New Hospital Programme at North West Anglia Foundation Trust — one of the national Wave 1 schemes in the £20bn programme to rebuild hospitals across England. I acted as lead moderator for the Hospital 2.0 Alliance framework and served as ICB Commercial Representative for RAAC hospital schemes across the region. This is the level of procurement complexity I bring to every engagement.

Adrian is currently Commercial Improvement and Contract Management Lead at a London Local Authority, responsible for a £350M portfolio of spend across eight directorates including Resources, Housing Services, Growth and Environment, Integrated Health and Adult Social Care, Children Families and Education, Capital Construction, Housing, and IT and Technology. This live, hands-on commercial leadership role means the insight Adrian brings to Ask the Buyer clients is current, practical and directly grounded in how public sector buyers are operating right now — including full Procurement Act 2023 implementation.

Alongside my interim and advisory roles I was Lead Trainer and Course Creator of Ready 2 Supply — a supplier development programme designed for HSBC, one of the world's largest financial institutions. Running from 2022 to 2024, the programme trained and prepared businesses to supply to corporate organisations at scale, covering commercial readiness, tendering, supply chain compliance and diversity supplier development. Creating Ready 2 Supply sits at the heart of why Ask the Buyer exists — it proved there is a significant gap between how businesses present themselves and what large buyers actually need to see.

Ask the Buyer exists because I saw the same pattern repeated throughout my career — capable businesses losing contracts not because their offer was weak, but because they did not understand how buyers think, evaluate, and decide. I built this platform to bridge that gap. Everything I teach comes directly from the buyer's side of the table.