This was rough. Up to this point, we had completed 74 projects successfully. Some clients were more difficult than others but nearly everyone was happy with the outcome. In this case, two different clients canceled engagements early, and we lost about $70,000 in committed revenue. Both were crypto startups but the cancellation reasons were different. One of the clients canceled right after the kick-off meeting because he thought that we were just “Notion janitors” and didn’t have the Ops Design capacity that I promised in the sales process, which is flat-out wrong. The other client canceled a month after they failed to adopt some of the systems that we designed. They believed that a full-time hire would be better integrated than a consultant. I understand why they canceled but I think the lack of patience was a common theme here.
The former client paid a $7,500 deposit and requested a refund but the latter paid $30,000 for work to date and did not request a refund, which was quite surprising. Consulting is wild. Anyway, after this incident, I changed our policy for deposits to be non-refundable. I also made sure that the first phases of any project focuses exclusively on discovery, audits, and strategy development which effectively replaced my making estimations and dangerous promises in the sales process.
The former client paid a $7,500 deposit and requested a refund but the latter paid $30,000 for work to date and did not request a refund, which was quite surprising. Consulting is wild. Anyway, after this incident, I changed our policy for deposits to be non-refundable. I also made sure that the first phases of any project focuses exclusively on discovery, audits, and strategy development which effectively replaced my making estimations and dangerous promises in the sales process.