The first enterprise deal bought a door, not a customer

A mid-sized firm wins its first genuinely large customer. Somewhere in the six months between verbal agreement and first invoice, a set of costs appears that nobody forecast: an information security certification, a penetration test, higher liability and cyber cover, a data processing agreement reviewed by an actual lawyer, a business continuity plan that exists in writing rather than in the founder’s head, and several hundred hours of senior time answering a supplier assurance questionnaire that asked about things the business had never had cause to name. The deal still…