Spend Matters UK/Europe Turns One — A Big Celebratory Party In Store This Thursday!

I'm headed off to London later today to catch up with my UK counterpart, Peter Smith, and to prepare for our one-year anniversary celebration on Thursday evening. That's right -- Spend Matters UK/Europe is already a year old. Thursday promises to be a good party. We've booked two bands (including one led by the President of CIPS, who moonlights in a most excellent cover band), and a few vendors/providers are underwriting the festivities. A special thanks to Coupa for being Lead Sponsor and to Adomise and Science Warehouse for underwriting the two bands! Peter and I are excited to celebrate a great first year. If you'd like to attend the event, we may have a few spots left, so drop Peter a line (email below) and we'll try and get you in if space permits. There are a few folks coming after the ProcureCon event in Brussels. So if you're at ground zero -- geographically speaking -- of the policy debate surrounding the EU currency meltdown earlier in the week, consider hopping a flight to the safety of the country which smartly sat out the silliness of this common currency thing to begin with.

As to the anniversary and event itself, I'll let Peter's words do the talking:

"Thanks again to everyone who helped make it a very enjoyable and interesting first year -- readers, contributors and our esteemed sponsors, Intenda, Trade Extensions, Emptoris, BravoSolution, Hubwoo, Achilles, American Express, CombineNet and Spikes Cavell ... We are holding our 1st Anniversary Event next Thursday, November 10th, 18:30 - 22:30 hrs, at a venue in Twickenham (West London). Cake! Balloons! Music!"

There will be a bit of serious stuff with Jason talking about his view of where procurement is going, followed by live music from an all-star band put together by Dom O 'Riley of Andomise, and then the excellent Front Covers, who some of you will know from CIPS SM Awards fame, led by Mr. David Smith, our new CIPS President. We've invited lots of people from the procurement world, people who have helped us, our sponsors, and so on. If you haven't received an invite (and think you should), our apologies but we have had problems getting the emails through the some mailboxes! They probably think we've spammers...so please don't be offended, we may well have tried to get through to you. There are 50+ people we haven't heard back from who we have "invited"!

Secondly, we've had a great response but we have a few tickets left* -- so if you would like to come along, meet us and lots of other interesting procurement folk, (free food too...), then please drop me an email to: psmith (at) spendmatters (dot) com. We'll get back to you with full details -- we can't just say "come along on the night" given the venue obviously has limited capacity, and we have to order the food!

(*Obviously if we get too many replies we'll have to do a draw or something..."

I can't wait for the festivities on Thursday and look forward to celebrating with a number of old and new friends. It's been a blast working with Peter and I feel honored and humbled to have met such a great partner in our UK/Europe venture. Even though we're both former bass players -- which is a great metaphor for procurement's role in fact -- we also enjoy our chance to take the stage and solo from time to time. Which is exactly what the US and UK/Europe sites have allowed us to do!

- Jason Busch