The deal was a milestone. A large customer, a signed agreement, the kind of logo that changes a pitch deck. The commitments in the contract, strict timelines, broad deliverables, high service levels, were exactly what got it signed.
They were also impossible.
Not impossible in the dramatic sense. Impossible in the operational one: the company simply could not deliver what it had promised at the scale it had promised it. What followed was not a breach, and that is the uncomfortable part. The contract performed exactly as written. Every clause did its job. The company entered a cycle of constant exception handling, redirecting people and hours away from strategic priorities just to keep up with contractual ones. Margins on the account eroded. Internal pressure climbed. The customer relationship, the thing the aggressive terms were supposed to secure, strained under the weight of missed expectations.
A contract like this does not explode. It grinds.
I was brought in to renegotiate. The work was restructuring the agreement so that what the company promised matched what the company could actually do: commitments recalibrated to real operational capacity, service levels the team could meet without cannibalising the roadmap, and terms that protected the relationship instead of quietly consuming it. The customer stayed. The deal survived. What changed was that it stopped costing more than it earned.
A signed contract is not a sales document. It is your operating plan, enforceable by someone else. If the promises inside it do not match your actual capacity, you have not closed a deal. You have scheduled a slow-motion failure with a signature on it. Terms that win the deal and terms you can live with are not always the same terms, and the gap between them is where companies bleed.
If you are about to sign, or are already carrying, a contract with commitments you are not certain you can deliver, I'd be glad to hear what's on your desk. Book a 30-minute call