Should I Take This Big Customer?

The revenue is intoxicating — big customers know it, which is exactly why everything else about their offer is worse than your ordinary work. This workbook does the arithmetic the excitement skips, then arms the counter-offer.

How it works

• What yes adds — their contribution, minus the fixed costs you must add to serve them, minus the margin on ordinary work they crowd out. The honest annual gain, which is always smaller than the revenue suggested
• What yes risks — concentration after the deal (over 25% they are not a customer, they are an unsecured business partner who can fire you), the cash permanently locked in their payment terms, the break-even margin every future price squeeze moves you toward, and the unwind cost: their 30-day notice against your months of shedding the hire and the truck
• The stat nobody computes: how many years of the deal's gains one bad ending erases
• A four-branch verdict, and The Counter-Offer: six terms with scripts — terms before price, notice matched to your shed time, a ramp not a cliff, a price floor with a re-opener, no exclusivity ever, and the rule about what total refusal tells you

Built for

Service businesses and trades offered an anchor account · suppliers courted by a large chain · agencies offered the whale retainer · anyone whose biggest opportunity and biggest risk just walked in as the same email.

What you get

One .xlsx file, four tabs, instant download. Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice. No macros, no subscription. Every band and rate editable.