Commercial Buying Manager, Pharmaceutical Wholesale

Commercial Buying Manager, Pharmaceutical Wholesale

Wholesale Pharmaceutical Distribution, Margin, Rebate and Availability, Twice a Day, Every Day

Category Management and Commercial Buying Leadership with a Wholesaler and Distributor

Hertfordshire, on site 5 days a week | £85,000 to £100,000 plus a performance-related annual bonus linked to company EBITDA, and a strong benefits package

In wholesale distribution, the numbers that matter are unforgiving and immediate: net cost price, rebate income, and whether the right stock is sitting on the van for the next delivery run, twice a day, every day. If that is the language you already think in, and you have led a category or commercial buying team who move at that pace, this is worth a proper look.

A well-established pharmaceutical wholesaler, built over more than four decades by a family of pharmacists who understood the pressures of retail pharmacy from the inside, and now run by its second generation, is deliberately moving from a family-run business into a genuinely professional, commercially sharp operation. It needs a category and commercial leader to take its procurement function from good to excellent.

A year ago, this business brought in outside expertise for the first time and built a category buying team from the ground up, three groups covering generics, parallel imports and over the counter medicines, each with its own specialist lead, supported by buyers at various stages of development. That work has been done well. What the business needs now is a leader who can pick up that structure, develop the people in it, and turn good foundations into a genuinely commercial, margin-literate function that owns its numbers, cost price, rebate income, inventory availability, as personal measures of success rather than someone else's targets.

You will inherit a live transformation already under way: this business has spent the last year moving from an opportunistic buy to stock instinct to a disciplined buy to sell model, only committing to stock once a customer and a route to market are confirmed, and it needs someone who can finish embedding that thinking properly across the team, including realistic lead time and minimum order quantity planning for stock arriving from across the UK, Europe and the Far East, while keeping availability tight enough to support twice-daily deliveries to independent pharmacies, wholesalers, hospitals and a wide range of other outlets.

You will report directly to the business's commercial and procurement lead, whose own background is in sales, commercial negotiation and wholesale, not classic procurement, and whose time is currently spread thinly across procurement, wholesale and sales. He needs someone he can trust to run this function day to day with real authority. That trust will not be handed over automatically. This is a business built by analytically minded, detail-driven people who expect evidence and a clear business case behind every proposed change, and who move fast, sometimes making decisions the same day, once they believe in the person putting the case forward. The right person will know how to earn that trust quickly: understanding the detail of how the team currently works before changing anything, building credibility through good commercial judgement rather than urgency, and then using the genuine autonomy on offer to make a real difference.

This is a category management and commercial buying leadership role within a wholesaler and distributor, not a generic corporate procurement or purchasing appointment. You will likely have led a commercial, sales, category management or buying team before, ideally somewhere that lives and breathes cost price, rebate and inventory discipline the way pharmaceutical wholesale, healthcare distribution or FMCG grocery wholesale does. Equally, and just as strongly, if your background is commercial finance or FP&A and you have partnered closely with procurement while leading or heavily influencing a team of your own, you should read on, this route in is genuinely valued here, not a fallback. What matters most is commercial astuteness, a real feel for margin and rebate, and the personal credibility to negotiate well yourself, since part of the job is teaching that same instinct to a team still building it, together with the ability to lead people through change without losing them. Recent experience with a modern ERP platform such as Microsoft Dynamics Business Central would be a genuine advantage in a business that has recently implemented it and is still bedding it in.

In return, you join a business that is genuinely investing in getting this right, with a strong, comprehensive package, real autonomy for someone who earns it, and the rare chance to shape a function at exactly the point it is ready to grow up.

To find out more, in complete confidence, contact Martin Veasey Talent Solutions.

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