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Sel Bayhack, Partner Modern procurement and contract operations have become increasingly sophisticated and fast-paced across industries. As a result, many businesses are navigating cross-functional changes in management, technology and legal requirements—often without a clear roadmap. To guide them forward with efficiency, compliance and agility, specialized expertise is not just helpful: it’s essential.
As contract terms with global giants are often rigid and non-negotiable, the team delivers tactical solutions to help clients navigate challenging agreements. This sometimes entails guiding organizations toward engaging with smaller or more specialized vendors, where negotiation is possible and contracts can be tailored to fit specific business needs.
Sel Bayhack, PartnerMaxelerate brings that expertise through its skilled workforce and a proven record of excellence in outsourced procurement and contract management services.
What began as an informal collaboration between a few independent procurement professionals 27 years ago has now evolved into a highly specialized, boutique consultancy. The firm was initially formed to serve a single client with outsourced services remotely. But since 2018, it transitioned to a structured organization of W-2 employees in response to shifting tax and labor laws.
Maxelerate’s primary services include contract negotiations, vendor management, IT due diligence and cost analysis, all grounded in the extensive industry experience of its advisors. The firm leads these strategic operations with heavy experience in banking, insurance, and professional services, ensuring every project is matched with the right resources. This breadth ensures that new client engagements start ahead of the curve, not behind it.
“We stand behind our work with a satisfaction guarantee— if a client is not satisfied, the work is on us,” says Sel Bayhack, partner. “This commitment reflects our pride in delivering exceptional service."
Unlike big consultancies where juniors do the heavy lifting, Maxelerate leverages senior professionals with decades of experience, often gained in the procurement departments of major corporations like BP Amoco, McDonald’s, Panasonic and Toyota.
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We stand behind our work with a satisfaction guarantee—if a client is not satisfied, the work is on us
As contract terms with global giants are often rigid and non-negotiable, the team delivers tactical solutions to help clients navigate challenging agreements. This sometimes entails guiding organizations toward engaging with smaller or more specialized vendors, where negotiation is possible and contracts can be tailored to fit specific business needs.
For instance, ERPs and CRMs drive critical business operations, yet they’re rarely a perfect fit. Most companies bridge these gaps by bringing in specialized developers to build middleware and system integrations. Here, Maxelerate safeguards clients’ investments by overseeing complex vendor agreements, ensuring performance, and protecting budgets through well-negotiated terms. Apart from procurement and contract management, Maxelerate’s approach to legal services is intentionally distinct. The firm never acts as an “attorney of record” on client contracts. Instead, its advisors offer recommendations and strategic input, leaving the client’s legal team to review, approve, and finalize agreements with confidence and clarity.
This philosophy of empowerment and transparency runs through every aspect of Maxelerate’s vendor management strategy, ensuring enterprises maximize benefits from their technology investments while retaining control.
A couple of illustrative success stories involved a physical service and a software product. A major cleaning services contract was negotiated in which Maxelerate introduced a clause requiring the firm to perform quarterly customer satisfaction surveys to monitor vendor performance. When surveys revealed subpar service, the agreement required a fee reduction that drove tangible improvements in service quality, demonstrating their negotiating skills and leading to measurable results.
Another example involved an application development product purchased by the client to connect another application to the existing ERP system. Maxelerate negotiated a service level clause that held the application to the “5 9’s” uptime requirement, meaning that the application had to be fully functioning 99.999 percent of the time for the vendor to be paid their support fee or face a financial clawback penalty for downtime.
At its core, Maxelerate’s value proposition is about trust and long-term partnership. The firm eschews unnecessary overhead and invests in relationships, passing cost savings directly to clients. With a track record spanning nearly three decades and a team of true veterans, the firm maintains an alternative to the impersonal, high-turnover model of the industry's most prominent players. It consistently delivers ‘small firm, big results’ to organizations that expect nothing less than uncompromising procurement expertise.
www.maxelerate.com
Partners: Sel Bayhack & George Pratscher
Evaluating Outsourced Procurement Services for Complex Vendor Environments
Procurement teams rarely bring in outside support because sourcing volume suddenly increases. The pressure usually starts elsewhere. A software renewal arrives with nonnegotiable licensing language. A facilities vendor misses service targets for months before anyone documents it. A procurement department loses experienced staff yet still carries contract exposure across finance systems, application development agreements and regional service providers. Internal teams end up buried in revisions, escalation calls and approval bottlenecks rather than commercial leverage.
That tension has shifted expectations around outsourced procurement support. Large consulting firms still dominate enterprise procurement transformations, though many buyers have become skeptical of delivery models that rely heavily on junior staffing layered beneath senior relationship managers. The issue is not headcount. It is contract judgment. Enterprise agreements tied to ERP systems, cloud software or specialized applications often leave little room for renegotiation, which means value comes from knowing where terms can still move and where service accountability can still be enforced.
Experienced procurement practitioners tend to focus less on headline savings and more on contractual mechanics that materially affect cost exposure later. Service-level enforcement remains one of the clearest examples. Vendors routinely promise response times, uptime thresholds or support commitments that become difficult to validate once implementation is complete. Procurement partners that can structure measurable performance language, customer feedback loops or penalty frameworks tend to produce stronger long-term contract behavior than firms centered mainly on sourcing events or benchmarking exercises.
Buyers also face a practical staffing problem that rarely appears in procurement presentations. Many internal procurement departments no longer maintain deep category coverage across technology, facilities management, relocation services and application development agreements at the same time. Outsourced support becomes far more useful when the assigned personnel already understand the commercial realities of those environments instead of learning the business during the engagement. That distinction matters most in negotiations involving enterprise software providers where standard terms heavily favor the vendor and leverage exists only in narrow contractual areas such as renewals, service obligations or cancellation language.
Institutional continuity has become another quiet differentiator. Procurement outsourcing relationships often fail after leadership transitions because the external team lacks historical context around vendor behavior, renewal patterns or prior negotiation positions. Firms that maintain long-standing practitioner networks with enterprise procurement backgrounds tend to adapt more quickly during contract cycles that involve multiple business units or inherited supplier agreements.
Within that context, Maxelerate presents a measured fit for companies that need experienced procurement support rather than broad consulting-led transformation programs. Its model centers on senior procurement professionals drawn from large enterprise environments including manufacturing, financial services and corporate operations. The firm’s emphasis on experienced practitioners appears particularly relevant for organizations managing software agreements, outsourced services and contract governance issues where service-level enforcement or renewal leverage can materially affect spend. Its approach to procurement support also stays disciplined around legal accountability, working alongside client legal teams rather than attempting to replace them. For buyers that need commercially experienced procurement coverage without building another internal layer of training and oversight, Maxelerate merits serious consideration.
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