I once worked at a FinTech company that spent a lot of time and money worrying about a potential deal with a marquee client. An FP&A report showed that we might

I once worked at a FinTech company that spent a lot of time and money worrying about a potential deal with a marquee client. An FP&A report showed that we might lose money at first. We ended up making money from the get-go, but more importantly, no one ever asked;, wait, aren't the main benefits here reputational and don't they exceed the short-term costs and benefits by at least an order of magnitude? From the outside, it looks like Intel had the same problem. But I don't think we really know what happened here.