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I've worked at a small company constantly chasing large customers. Let's say a middling customer deal was $50k. Pretty much all profit. A large customer deal wo

I've worked at a small company constantly chasing large customers. Let's say a middling customer deal was $50k. Pretty much all profit. A large customer deal would be $500k, and need $500k of very specific technical-debt inducing bespoke dev work. I didn't know why they didn't grow the number of $50k deals! Actually I know why. It was the "If we can get walmart it'll lead to much more" mentality (but not walmart but similarly big clients). Also the $500k deals took a long time to land. When budgeting, whether the company made a profit or not would depend on a top salesman landing such a deal, or not. What I notice is with larger deals and tenders the world was more cutthroat, the competition was more fierce etc, a lot of the "value" was from negotiating contracts and arguing over deadlines and shit, not actually delivering a product.

doctor_eval 5y ago
Sounds like where I ended up. We had a moderately successful company doing a lot of ~$100K deals and once we became financially sustainable we merged with a supposedly larger company in a complementary field with a view to accelerating our sales and getting access to a larger and more experienced tech team. It turns out that they didn’t care at all about our regular little deals - the sales lead bragged to me once that he didn’t “get out of bed for less than $1M”. Long story short they spent all their time chasing much larger deals, but landing far fewer of them, and like your experience, the bigger deals are more complex and expensive to service. It was all driven by ego instead of logic, and it ended pretty badly.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  I worked for a defense contractor that turned their nose up at $200M NASA contracts. Then after shenanigans from an unrelated division of the parent company all the big contracts started to dry up as punishment.

doctor_eval 5y ago

Sounds like where I ended up. We had a moderately successful company doing a lot of ~$100K deals and once we became financially sustainable we merged with a supposedly larger company in a complementary field with a view to accelerating our sales and getting access to a larger and more experienced tech team. It turns out that they didn’t care at all about our regular little deals - the sales lead bragged to me once that he didn’t “get out of bed for less than $1M”. Long story short they spent all their time chasing much larger deals, but landing far fewer of them, and like your experience, the bigger deals are more complex and expensive to service. It was all driven by ego instead of logic, and it ended pretty badly.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
I worked for a defense contractor that turned their nose up at $200M NASA contracts. Then after shenanigans from an unrelated division of the parent company all the big contracts started to dry up as punishment.