A customer becomes 40% of your revenue. You call it a great relationship. A potential buyer calls it a risk. An experienced operator can help you build the sales engine that makes the business less dependent on that one account.
I was talking to one of our operators recently about a company that was trying to sell.
The buyers kept raising the same objection. One customer accounted for roughly 40% of total revenue. Within one service line, the dependence was even greater.
The operator told me that concentration was getting in the way of a sale. It was a live opportunity we were discussing, not a completed turnaround.
And the interesting part was how the company had won that customer in the first place.
A great relationship can hide a missing sales engine
The founder already knew someone at the customer. An opportunity came up. The company stepped in, did the work, and earned more business.
That is a good way to win an account. You should take those opportunities.
But winning through a founder's relationship does not establish that your team can consistently win comparable accounts without that relationship.
According to our operator, the company had not yet built that repeatable sales motion for the service line. It had a valuable customer and a capability it could sell. It still needed a way to put that capability in front of other buyers.
Those are separate assets.
What happens if that account changes?
You do not have to be selling your company for this to matter.
Suppose your largest customer changes leadership, brings the work in-house, negotiates harder, or delays a major project. What happens to your staffing, cash flow, and ability to pay yourself?
A good relationship does not remove those questions. Neither does a long history together.
There is no single concentration percentage that makes every business safe or unsafe. Contract terms, margins, customer stability, and the ability to replace the work all matter. But if losing one account would force you to rebuild the business, that deserves an operating plan.
The assignment needs to be more specific than “grow revenue”
In this conversation, the operator was being asked to think through a short initial assignment and a longer engagement.
He was clear about one thing: you are not going to materially dilute that level of customer concentration in four weeks.
I liked that. An experienced person should be able to tell you what the first month can establish, and what will take longer.
A useful first assignment would examine which services can win elsewhere, who buys them, how those decisions get made, and whether the company has the capacity and margins to serve the new work.
Then someone needs to own execution: target accounts, outreach, qualified conversations, proposals, and the handoff into delivery. The founder cannot remain the only route into every important customer.
Measure the dependence, not just the activity
Track your largest customers' share of revenue and gross profit. Look at the pipeline outside those accounts. Ask how much of it comes from a process your team can repeat.
More activity is useful only if it produces suitable business. Adding low-margin customers to make the percentage look better can create a different problem.
The goal is a company with more ways to win and enough profitable work to withstand a change in any one relationship.
Your biggest customer may be excellent. Keep serving them well. Build the rest of the business while you still have the freedom to do it.
Get matched with an operator who can help build a sales engine beyond the founder's relationships.