I knew better. But it was so convenient.
Years ago I ran a different company, and I had a client who made up 75% of my revenue.
The deal was month to month, but there was a bigger prize dangled in front of me. They were setting up a new business, and I was going to run it as CEO. I was the one helping them get it off the ground.
After a year of work, the regulatory approval came through. All that was left was a few odds and ends to reach the full license. A couple of weeks, a month at the very most.
So I did what felt obvious. I switched off the marketing for my existing business, and I started turning away new clients, because I was about to go all in, full time, on this new venture.
Then the couple of weeks became a month. The month became two. I was still being paid, but my messages took longer and longer to come back, and then they stopped coming back at all.
And then the message arrived.
“Thank you, but we are killing this project to fund other priorities. This will be your last payment.”
Contractually, they had done everything right. There was nothing to argue.
Business wise, I was finished. I had emptied the basket of every other egg, and when that one client walked, there was almost nothing left to catch me. I ended up shutting the company down.
It taught me a lesson I have never forgotten.
Never let one customer hold you hostage.
It is not just the stress.
It is the Pandora’s box of problems that one oversized relationship quietly opens behind it.
And my story is not unusual. Plenty of the owners I have worked with have carried the same silent risk, one client, one employee, or one supplier with far too much power over everything they built.
That is one of the reasons I put the Buyer’s Verdict together.
In less than five minutes, it tells you whether you can be held hostage the way I was, and where else the value of everything you have built might be quietly exposed.
You have nothing to lose by checking. It is free, and you can find it here.
Business advisor George Sotiropoulos tells the story of how, in an earlier company, one client made up 75% of his revenue. Lured by the promise of running a new business for that client as CEO, he switched off his own marketing and turned away other clients to go all in. When the client quietly killed the project in a single email, with his last payment attached, George had nothing left to fall back on and had to shut the company down. Contractually the client had done nothing wrong. The lesson is to never let one customer, employee or supplier hold the whole business hostage, because that concentration is a silent risk that can destroy everything an owner has built.