Dawn Tiura: Folks, this is Dawn Tiura, President and CEO of Sourcing Industry Group, also known as SIG. I have the amazing Kate Vitasek here today. The reason I’m introducing her that way is every once in a while I find someone who doesn’t know her name, and I feel like you must’ve been under a rock these last 10 years, because Kate is probably the most sought after speaker on the subject of sourcing. She is the most sought after person to learn her methodology and she’s also the author of our sourcing methodology within the certified sourcing professional program. The amazing Kate Vitasek is also University of Tennessee as a professor. Kate, could you just share a little bit about the books you’ve written and who you are today, and then let’s go backward and talk about career path.

Kate Vitasek: Kate Vitasek, as you mentioned. Faculty at the University of Tennessee. I am a Tennessee Volunteer through and through. Dawn, you know every time I show up to a SIG meeting I’m wearing my orange.

Dawn Tiura: Yes, you are.

Kate Vitasek: I graduated from the University of Tennessee, so I go way back. I have a degree in marketing and supply chain from the university. I just absolutely love being a Volunteer, and I think maybe that’s part of our spirit, why we like to share things. Because volunteers like to share and help out. Love to bring that to the professional industry. So, a little bit about my books. Gosh, my first book was in 2010. That’s just amazing. And, as we talk about career advice, that was one of my goals, was to have a book. We’ll talk about that later, but a lot of times people have goals and they don’t do anything to help them. They aren’t taking action towards their goal and you really have to take that action to get your goal. One book led to six books. Super cool. I like to think of myself as almost an artist. Writing books is like art. It’s like you have a piece of clay and you’re just molding it and molding it and molding it until something beautiful comes out. I just love to write. It’s very therapeutic to me. I wasn’t that way always. Used to be it was painful. I think kinda like speaking. A lot of times people think public speaking is painful and now I love to speak.

Dawn Tiura: That’s really neat. I never realized that you didn’t like writing the whole time because I would struggle with writing a book. I think it’s one of those things I really want to do one day, but putting pen to paper is just really hard for me to do. I’m long-winded. You’ve mastered it, because your books, they’re interesting. I just remember the latest one. It read like a novel, which was crazy because it was a business book. But, it was so compelling I didn’t wanna put it down. That was the neatest part about the way you write, is that you draw the person into your books. So, I’ve always enjoyed reading everything you write.

Kate Vitasek: Well, thank you. That’s actually one of the best compliments I get is people say wow, I actually liked your book. A business book can be good. I just think that’s so cool because business books shouldn’t be bad. They’re full of knowledge. They should be exciting to read.

Dawn Tiura: Yeah, I agree. You’ve reached an incredible pinnacle of your career, where you are world renowned and sought after. But, let’s go back and talk about, you obviously didn’t grow up thinking you wanted to go into sourcing, did you?

Kate Vitasek: No, absolutely not. I grew up in a very humble household in the outskirts of Dallas, Texas. Actually, Irving, Texas. They’ve rebranded, it’s Las Colinas now. It’s hip. But, when I grew up there it was not so hip. My goal, literally my goal, I wanted to be the Vice President of a company. I just wanted to work in business. I knew I wanted to work in business. I was sitting in math class, I remember this vividly, I was in eight grade and I was in algebra and I thought I never wanna use algebra again in my lifetime. What job could I have? I said I wanna be a business person that doesn’t have to do math. And, I thought if I made $40,000 that would be a lot of money. That was my goal, and I had that goal, literally, almost until I went to college. I was in college and I was looking at starting salaries. Starting salaries weren’t great back then. I think the best, best, best students made $33,000. That was if you had a killer job, you’re coming out with an undergraduate, $33,000. So, I thought that goal may not be big enough. I better bump that one up. But, it wasn’t until I got some data that supported that, but that goal, eighth grade til probably freshman in college.

Dawn Tiura: Wow. All I wanna be when I grow up is a VP and make $40,000. Compared to where you are today, boy you didn’t take that straight path there, did you?

Kate Vitasek: That’s part of what my learnings are. Life is not a straight path. I use an analogy. Dawn you’ve heard me give my talk about vested, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re not gonna get there. I always talk about Mount Everest because you have to have that picture of where you’re going. But, when you climb Mount Everest, it’s not a straight path. It is so far from a straight path. Just google the path. You can get a map, the hiking path. You go up and sideways, and you actually come back down. Many people don’t realize you have to climb Mount Everest more than once to get there because you go up and then you come down. It’s actually called acclimatization. So, if you’re no failing, you’re not doing something right. I’ve learned that climbing is not one straight path and sometimes you go sideways. Many times you go sideways before you can go up. And, you sometimes go backwards.

Dawn Tiura: You do. As you ascend Mount Everest, you have to climatize yourself. You go up for a little while and you come down, and you go up and you come down. You go a little further and you come down. But, how do you equate that to your career then?

Kate Vitasek: I think of a career as really an accumulation of skills. Sometimes to get to the next level, you don’t have the right skill. You may have some of the right skills, but you might’ve missed one. A great example of that was actually early in my career. My first job out of graduate school was working for, at the time, Anderson Consulting. It’s now Accenture, but they had a really cool little boutique practice within their strategy group called The Logistic Strategy Practice. There was only 80 of us in the world. It was super cool. We did this amazing kind of strategy work. I still can’t believe they hired us to do this. I’d show up and they’d go what are you kids doing here? But, that was the early ’90s and that’s the way it was. It was such a blast. I knew I still at that time wanted to be a VP. I never wanted to be a CEO. I just wasn’t attracted to being a CEO, but I thought I wanna be a C suite, a VP, Senior VP. When you think about going up and not having a straight line, my analogy to business is your goal is really about the accumulation of your skills. Because, you can’t get to the top of Mount Everest if you don’t have all the right skills and equipment.

Kate Vitasek: I really learned that fairly early in my career. Right out of graduate school, I worked for Anderson Consulting. It was actually back then Anderson, but now it’s Accenture. They’re a logistic strategy practice. As a young consultant, we’d go in and we’d do all these cool, great things. This strategy work. But, I knew that if I actually wanted to be in business and didn’t wanna just stay in consulting the whole time I needed to actually implement some of my strategies. No one on earth was gonna hire me to be a Vice President if I couldn’t do what my advice was. So, I actually took a step back and went to work as a practitioner. I went to work for Microsoft and actually took a significant pay cut. But, I knew that was the only way I was going to be able to really acquire skills that I needed. Another time, I looked and to be a general manager, to have those big ticket senior jobs, you need to actually understand finance. I hated math. I’d never really run any type of operations from a finance perspective.

Kate Vitasek: So again, you have to then take roles that you may not think are as sexy or as fun and force yourself into learning some of those skills. I guess there’s some jobs where you just keep getting to be more and more and more of an expert in one little narrow thing, but I think the best people in the world, when you look at the people who I admire, they have lots of skills. They could do so many things. I think I wouldn’t be a speaker or a writer or a professor if I didn’t go through some of the skills that I had learnt, if I had just stayed and been a consultant. To me you have to backwards engineer that goal. So, you’ve got to have the goal. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re never gonna get there. But, sometimes you don’t have the skills and so you always have to be thinking about the skills. My son’s 13 and I love the energy of young kids. It’s like, go try stuff. Just go try, and if you don’t like it you don’t have to do it. But if you never try, you’re never gonna see if that’s a skill that you want and try to understand how that’s gonna fit into your career.

Dawn Tiura: That’s amazing. Do you ever think you have to lose some things that you learned along the way, or shed them? Is there anything like that?

Kate Vitasek: You know that math thing? Now that I have my job, I purposely have shedded all aspects of math. But, that’s really not true. I say that. From an operational perspective, I’m no longer a vice president, general manager running an operation. So, I don’t have that have P&L knowledge and practice those skills that I had to at once. But, I do. Like, with Vested, rule four is a pricing model with incentive. How do you actually develop pricing models for outsourcing deals? So, the math that I use today is just different types of math. So, I don’t think you ever shed skills, but I was never a lover of piling over P&L data, so that’s good. I’m glad I don’t have that role anymore. I just love the role that I have now. People always ask me what’s next? I get that question all the time. What’s next? I was going, 20 more years. I said, we’re changing the world one deal at a time. So, my Mount Everest isn’t 57 companies who’ve done Vested deals. My next one is 157 companies. Then, it’ll be 1,057 companies. I really am trying to double down to get Vested to spread. I think we’ve got the secret sauce for what we’re doing and it’s just climbing higher and higher on that mountain.

Dawn Tiura: We appreciate you doing that and having that as a goal because the more people that get turned on to the Vested methodology, the more strategic they’re going to be seen because they’re delivering such different results than they did from the tactical days. So, I hope you are doing this for the next 20 years and breaking through that ceiling and getting everybody to understand how to be strategic. We appreciate that being part of your goal.

Dawn Tiura: Kate, tell me a little bit about, you had mentioned something once about learning from Jim Carrey and I found that to be hilarious. Can you share that story?

Kate Vitasek: I think it’s a true story. I’ve heard it told and I think I googled it, but you can’t ever trust everything you see on Google, right? There’s a famous story about Jim Carrey that he once wrote a check to himself for a million dollars. He pasted it on the wall and he said I’m gonna be this famous comedian movie star. When he achieved that, he then wrote himself a check. The check was really symbolic of his Mount Everest. I’m gonna be successful. This is what I’m gonna do. I think that visual is something that is really impactful. That’s why I always like to go back to this Mount Everest. What’s your Mount Everest? If you don’t have a Mount Everest. We probably wouldn’t have been able to put a man on the moon if we didn’t physically say I’m putting a man on the moon and you can visualize it.

Dawn Tiura: That’s true.

Kate Vitasek: Because no one knew how to do that.

Dawn Tiura: Right. When I made that first commitment, you’re right. They didn’t know how to do it. They didn’t know if it was possible, but they to do it.

Kate Vitasek: Yeah. The Wright Brothers. Everybody laughed at them. “It’s not possible. You can’t do that.” And, they had a very clear vision of where they wanted. Jim Carrey took this idea, and people laughed at him. They said you’re not gonna do that. And, he was poor. He lived in his car.

Dawn Tiura: Wow.

Kate Vitasek: So, he wrote himself a check and he goes, I’m gonna cash this check one day. I think that’s just very symbolic of the power of having that constant vision right in front of where you’re going. If you like Jim Carrey, I’ll stay on that topic with Jerry Seinfeld. How are these two comedians that are so successful, what are they doing? Jerry Seinfeld actually has a lot, there’s a ton of apps that use a methodology that he created. It’s got different names, but there’s a chain. Every day, you should be doing something that gets you to your goal. If you’re not practicing your climb to your Mount Everest, you’re not gonna get there. He would write down a list and it’d say, “Did I tell a funny joke today? Did I try to get a job as a comedy club today?” It didn’t matter what he did, he trying to develop skills. He said I’m gonna go get the skills I need to be an amazing comedian and he’d check a box. It created a chain. The goal is to see how many days you can keep the chain on, because as you develop a chain, that creates a habit.

Kate Vitasek: That’s really a habit. Creating that chain of positive activities that gets you to where you wanna go. So many times Dawn, it’s amazing, I call it the activity trap, we get stuck doing stuff every day but the stuff we’re doing isn’t climbing our Mount Everest. We have to get out of this activity trap and not just taking action but getting traction. Traction is when you’re taking action on the things towards your goal. Your goal’s often different. Your goal is something you don’t do today. You gotta practice the future.

Dawn Tiura: I hear from so many people that it’s so easy to get caught in your own trap. You just keep doing the same things over and over and of course you’re going to expect a different outcome, even though it’s foolish. But, I love the idea of creating your own chain and not breaking it. I had no idea that that came from Jerry Seinfeld.

Kate Vitasek: Yeah. Actually, just go online. There’s apps called ‘The Way of Life’, ‘The Chain’. There’s all kinds of little, simple to use apps on your cell phone. You can set a goal and say I’m gonna work on this every day. Even if your goal is something like to lose 10 pounds, did you get up and move today? You don’t have to run a marathon, but did you do something positive towards your goal?

Dawn Tiura: Yeah, I love that. Do people only have one Mount Everest?

Kate Vitasek: No. I’ve had multiple Mount Everests, actually. My first Mount Everest was to be a Vice President for $40,000, but then, as I mentioned, in college I had to readjust. Then, I said I still wanted to be a Vice President, but I upped the salary a bit. Then, I wanted to, as I was a Practitioner, I knew I really didn’t want to run an operation anymore. I’d done that. Been there, done that. I liked the consulting aspect, but I didn’t wanna go back into a major, big consulting firm. So, my next Mount Everest was to find a small boutique company, it’s called Supply Chain Visions, and I had that company for 11 years.

Kate Vitasek: Actually, the only reason I don’t have that company anymore is because I’m so passionate about the work that I do at the University of Tennessee. I just really couldn’t do both. I couldn’t sustain a consulting firm with several employees and try to keep them fed and close the next deal and then try to do some of the forward thinking, thought work, the writing and stuff, that I really like to do. So, I had to let go of my consulting firm. Not because it wasn’t successful, but because I think … This is good advice my Dean at the University of Tennessee said. I went to him and I said you know, I’ve got this really successful consulting firm. We were actually ranked one of the top 10 coolest boutique consulting firms… by Gartner and ARC Advisory. We were a kind of small but cool little boutique. I said, “how can I let this go? We’ve created this really cool stuff. But, what I’m doing here at the university is so amazing.” He just looked at me and he says, he owns a ranch, “Kate, you can’t ride two horses.”