The Pro Club is a peer-led learning community for business owners, directors and senior commercial leaders who recognise that stronger procurement thinking drives stronger commercial outcomes. Founded in Lancashire and built on the principle that shared knowledge and collective learning move businesses forward, The Pro Club brings together founders, MDs and commercial decision-makers to tackle the real growth challenges every business faces.
Through interactive half-day sessions held monthly in Lancaster and Chorley, members explore the commercial issues that drive growth — or stall it. Topics range from cost modelling and supplier strategy to negotiation, contract risk, crisis management and the alignment between procurement decisions and board-level performance. Each session combines a member-led case study with peer-to-peer problem solving. The format is deliberately interactive: no lectures, no theory dumps, no sales pitches. The Pro Club operates a strict “no hunters” rule — members are there to contribute and to learn, never to sell to the room.
The Pro Club’s guiding principle is that procurement is not a back-office function; it is a commercial discipline that touches every aspect of business performance. Whether the topic is supplier dependency, working capital, innovation through supplier partnerships, or risk in the supply base, the conversation always returns to the same question: does the procurement strategy match the commercial ambition? In most businesses, the answer is no — and that is the gap The Pro Club exists to close.
The Pro Club is delivered through a joint venture between Essential Sourcing – the procurement consultancy led by Mick Ramsden MCIPS – and Scale-Ability, the leadership and business growth consultancy led by Paul Aisthorpe. The partnership brings together deep procurement expertise from regulated, technical and complex sectors with proven coaching, facilitation and commercial growth capability. Members benefit from both disciplines in every session: the procurement rigour to make better commercial decisions, and the leadership thinking to embed those decisions across their organisations.
Members include manufacturers, distributors, professional services firms and SMEs across the North West, each carrying real commercial responsibility for their business’s growth. The community is scaled around the quality of contribution, not headline numbers. Members commit because the conversations are honest, the problem-solving is practical, and the relationships extend well beyond the events themselves.
Through The Procureneur Programme™ – a structured four-session programme combining procurement skills, leadership coaching and one-to-one mentoring – The Pro Club also offers a more intensive route into procurement thinking for commercial leaders who want to build that capability inside their own organisations. The Pro Club is now expanding its reach through partnerships with organisations that share its commitment to making procurement thinking accessible to under-represented commercial leaders – SheChain Live among them.
Mick Ramsden MCIPS is the founder of The Pro Club and Managing Director of Essential Sourcing. A Chartered Member of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply, Mick has spent his career building, leading and turning around procurement functions in complex, regulated and technically demanding supply chains – environments in which the wrong supplier decision carries operational, financial and reputational risk in equal measure.
Mick founded Essential Sourcing to bring senior-level procurement thinking to SMEs and mid-market businesses that lack the scale to employ it in-house, and co-founded The Pro Club to create a peer-learning environment where commercial leaders could share, challenge and refine that thinking together. His guiding philosophy – that a business’s back-of-house supply chain is its strongest front-of-house advocate – shapes everything The Pro Club teaches.
A vocal advocate for opening up procurement to a wider supplier base, Mick sees homogeneous supply chains not as a diversity issue but as a commercial risk – one that concentrates exposure, suppresses innovation, and quietly erodes long-term competitiveness. Through The Pro Club’s partnership with SheChain Live, Mick is helping bring buyer thinking into the rooms where capable women-led businesses too often hit invisible barriers.
SheChain Live Partner
The Pro Club helps women-led businesses understand how procurement decisions are actually made — and how to position themselves to win them.
Together with SheChain Live, The Pro Club is bringing procurement decision-makers and women-led suppliers into the same room: not for networking theatre, but for honest commercial feedback and peer-to-peer learning that turns capability into contracts.
This is procurement thinking as a route to commercial growth – for the women-led businesses who need access, and for the buyers building more resilient supply bases.