Vent: Lost a $12k client over a comma in an email

I was sitting in my home office in Austin at 2pm on a Thursday when I sent a proposal to a manufacturing company I'd been courting for 6 months. There was a misplaced comma in the contract section about payment terms, and they thought I was trying to charge them an extra $1,200 per month. By the time I realized the error and called them, they had already signed with a competitor. Has anyone else lost business over something that stupid in a document?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_christopher1mo ago

That misplaced comma thing is brutal man, but I bet it wasn't just the comma. If your client was that quick to jump ship over a single punctuation mark, they were probably already looking at the competitor and just needed an excuse. I had a similar thing happen a couple years back with a client who canceled a $5,000 monthly contract because I accidentally put "net 60" instead of "net 30" in the invoice terms. They didn't even call to check, just emailed me saying they were "going in a different direction." I spent a week stressing over a typo before my business partner pointed out they'd been complaining about my prices for months. Sometimes a small mistake just gives them permission to walk away from a deal they already had cold feet about.

the_anthony1mo ago

Yeah, that's the thing. People leave for reasons bigger than typos.

allen.iris1mo ago

Haha well at least now you know what a $12k comma looks like. Maybe frame it as art for your office?