Your Biggest Client Stopped Spending – Now What?
Losing your biggest client is one of the few things every founder worries about and almost nobody prepares for. In this episode, Mark and Dominique will walk through what actually happens in the 90 days after it hits, then zoom out to the harder question: how you avoid ending up there again. That means carrying enough pipeline to hit your growth number even without your biggest account, and treating client concentration as something you manage on purpose instead of something a crisis forces on you.
Losing your biggest client strains your bench and cash from day one. Projectworks CEO Mark Orttung, who lived it at Nexient, and CCO Dominique Rennell share the 90-day plan.
How much of your revenue rides on one client?
Revenue concentration is the share of your revenue that comes from your largest clients. (Our guide to client concentration risk covers how to calculate it and why it hits valuation.) Across Projectworks' customer base, concentration falls as firms grow but stays high even at the top end.
Even at 100 or more seats, the top five clients bring in more than half of revenue.
When Mark joined Nexient, one client made up "like, 50 or 60% of the revenue," and as he sees it, "It's just this is kind of a natural part of the evolution of the firm," he said. "But you do want to work your way out of it."
No percentage makes a client safe to depend on, so the useful comparison is with firms your size. If your top client sits well above the figure in your row, you're carrying more risk than your peers, and the job is to bring that number down year by year.
In Dominique's words, "Your firm can look really healthy on all those other metrics. And kind of come down like a house of cards… because one contract is lost."
Why being busy hides the risk
The firms most exposed to a big client loss rarely feel exposed, because they're flat out delivering for a few large accounts and nobody has time to ask where next year's work will come from.
When you have a customer that's feeding you a lot of work, you just relax a little bit on some of your habits… as soon as that customer goes away, you're gonna wish you had been building your pipeline.
Dominique added that struggling to keep up can mask how concentrated the work is. She described a firm of around a dozen people, all serving one large client in the United States. When that client stopped spending for the rest of the year, 12 or 13 people had nothing to do and nobody had been out finding the next client.
The fix sounds unreasonable when you're stretched. "You sound a little crazy saying, let's go do more because we can't keep up with what we got," Mark said. Dominique's rule of thumb is to have something like 20% of your work coming from brand-new clients, though she admits that's easier said than done.
The 90-day plan after losing your biggest client
The first 90 days after a big client loss break into four stages, and the table below sets out what to measure, decide and do in each. Your bench (the consultants with no billable work) sets the pace. Its cost grows every week nobody is placed, so check it daily until it's back under control.
Day 1: find out what happened and whether you can fix it
Start with the uncomfortable questions:
- What happened?
- Could you have seen it coming?
- Is there anything left to save?
Be honest about your firm's part, because the issues that end an engagement have often been visible to your own team for a while, raised internally but never pushed hard enough with the people on the client side who make the call.
Then put a date on it. Knowing the weekly bench cost only helps once you've worked out how many weeks your cash covers, because that date drives every decision you make in week one.
Week 1: decide whether to carry the team, then tell them
Carrying the team means keeping unbilled people on payroll while you find them work. Cutting is cheaper this quarter, but layoffs carry their own cost for a firm that needs to sell its way back, because prospects and future hires both hear about them. As Dominique put it, if "the word on the street is you just let 15 people go, it's probably not a really strong brand story." The smaller your market, the louder that story travels.
Whichever way you go, tell your team within the week. If leadership stays quiet, people fill the gap with their own version of events, and it's rarely kinder than the truth. Brief your board or investors in the same week, with the numbers.
Month 1: turn the whole firm into a sales team
For the first month, selling is everyone's job. Run a weekly all-hands that shares the real numbers on who's on the bench and what's in the pipeline, then ask everyone who they know, because leads turn up in places no sales plan would cover.
Put the bench to work as well. Placing senior people into single roles at clients (staff augmentation) cuts the cost of carrying them straight away, and each placement gives you someone inside a client whose second job is finding the next project and a way to bring a team in. This is also the month to visit every remaining client and check the health of every project, since the warning signs that cost you one client may be sitting in another.
Months 2 and 3: is your selling working?
By month two, the question is whether your selling is producing real pipeline. If it isn't, the fix usually costs money at exactly the moment you have least of it.
We invested in three really senior people that could be both sales and account management. And the theory was you can't cut your way out of this. You have to find a way to grow. You have to get better at selling.
The same bet works on a smaller budget. Back two or three plays hard and give each one a deadline, so that by the end of month three you know which are working.
Start diversifying while your biggest client is still happy
Every step of the 90-day plan is harder with a full bench and shrinking cash, so the better move is to plan for client losses before they happen. Nexient assumed it would lose around five of its 40 or 50 clients each year, one per region, and built its pipeline big enough to absorb them.
In the next episode, Mark and Dominique get into sales compensation for consulting firms, including why some firms pay a higher commission rate on new business.
If the call does come, the Day 1 questions about your bench, what it's costing you and what's in your pipeline should take minutes to answer.
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