You Need Diverse Suppliers; Here’s How To Begin

By Jason Trimiew, Director of Supplier Diversity at Meta

If you’re like me, it feels like diverse-owned businesses are receiving more interest — and corporate support — than ever. It’s great, but interest is just a start. These enterprises need more than to just be admired; it is time for companies to treat supplier diversity work as a fundamental component of a healthy business strategy.

First things first,what exactly is a diverse supplier? It’s a company that is majority-owned, operated, and controlled by racial and ethnic minorities, women, veterans, LGBTQ people, and/or a person with a disability. In far too many instances, maybe even at your company, doing business with diverse suppliers is an add-on, a nice-to-have, or a compliance driver. But supplier diversity is not just a “nice to have” — it is a “need to have.” And making that pivot is a cultural shift.

Wherever you are on the journey — whether you’re considering launching a supplier diversity effort or have had one for years — I hope that you’ll find some learnings in Meta’s story journey that may inspire growth in yours. We’ll start with the “why” and values that guide us. All efforts worth doing start there. We’ll then consider the “how” by looking at a few of the tools and processes we use to scale supplier diversity at our company. And while this is our “how,” we hope you’ll be able to connect with the foundational principles and apply it in your own organization.

Every Employee Can Make an Impact

I’ll be the first to admit that Meta is a unique place to practice supplier diversity. But it’s not because of our annual spend — since 2017, we’ve spent more than $8 billion dollars with diverse suppliers around the world — or because our procurement is almost completely decentralized. It’s because fundamentally, supplier diversity is a robust expression of the company’s most treasured values and completely aligned with our mission: to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. It is baked into our culture.

To be sure, as a Fortune 50 company that connects billions of users around the world, Meta has a great deal of influence. But our influence doesn’t stop at the company level. Meta employees are empowered to make thoughtful decisions on how they spend and engage with thousands of small and large suppliers across industries. From swag to consulting services to market research to construction. And each of those decisions has a multiplying impact. The money we pay to suppliers influences their access to capital, ability to grow and even the economic impact they might have in their communities. When diverse suppliers increase their revenue by working with companies like Meta, they have greater opportunities to expand. They create jobs and hire local workers, they rent buildings in their local communities, they spark generational wealth. With this in mind, our culture supports the idea that how and where we spend our company’s money doesn’t have to be passive. We can take an active role to include diverse suppliers in our decision-making process.

Getting Started With Supplier Diversity

How then do you build and direct the pipeline of potential diverse suppliers that your company could be working with? Ask any diverse supplier what they dread most and 9 out of 10 will reply “being asked to register in your company’s portal.” This is not unfair criticism. Most portals are black-holes or bridges to nowhere.

At Meta, we’re not immune to this either, especially in a completely decentralized procurement environment where everyone is a buyer. So we’ve invested to ensure that there is a reliable through-line from registering as a prospective diverse supplier and the workflow that brings those credible, qualified firms, directly into Single Sign-On tools that are accessible to any employee, so that not only can they be discovered, but engaged directly in our procurement systems without having to leave the tools which would only add to the friction.

We also want to put agency in the hands of the supplier. In our procurement systems, we allow our diverse suppliers to play an active role in maintaining their profile. This feeds our recommendation engine which uses an algorithmic approach to surface diverse suppliers in searches where that supplier will be a likely match for the goods or services being requested.

Finally, we approach supplier diversity with the same rigor for data that we conduct across all of Meta’s businesses. We provide real-time, on-demand reporting, including leaderboards at the cost-center level to ensure there is complete transparency in showing how a team or organization is performing against agreed-upon targets.

We Can All Have a Real Impact

Think of how much impact we could have on businesses and communities if we increase our inclusion of diverse suppliers and use our purchasing power to spend with them. My team’s vision doesn’t end with the impact we can have at Meta. Our hope is you will join us in publicly sharing your learnings and progress (e.g., your impact via diversity statistics) so that we can all aspire to fundamentally transform supplier diversity . After all, what gets measured gets done.

For more information about Meta Global Supplier Diversity, visit us here.

About the Author

As Director of Global Supplier Diversity at Meta, Jason Trimiew launched and leads the company’s supplier diversity efforts to create more opportunities for diverse-owned firms to do business with Meta and the people and communities that Meta connects. Meta has now spent more than $8 billion cumulatively with companies, around the world, certified as minority, women, veteran, LGBTQ, or disabled-owned in categories spanning creative services, network infrastructure, facilities management and more. Prior to joining Meta, Jason designed and delivered the community impact initiatives for Super Bowl 50 resulting in more than $20 million in grants for Bay Area nonprofits and contracts for local, diverse-owned businesses. Jason was formerly a Managing Director at REDF, a venture philanthropy founded by KKR Co-Chairman George R. Roberts, where he led business development and strategic partnerships. Jason earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Covenant College (GA), a master’s degree in international and development economics from the University of San Francisco, where he was awarded the 2018 Professional Achievement Award, and has completed the Executive Program in Nonprofit Leadership from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.