He was also a client. I was the entire outsource back office, finance, accounting, hr and admin for that company. He set up a few tables in a terrible, but cheap office space. They had a lot of fun, but only spent money on absolute necessities. He made a whole bunch of money obviously when we helped him sell the company to a large public firm.

So fast forward to my next client. This was a company that was similar (also cybersecurity) to my sucessful first client. Started by 2 Air Force pilots They had to have the best stuff. Had way too many personnel, maybe double what they needed and each employee had the best and most expensive technology. They had a really great product, and fortune 500 companies were buying it but they were hemorrhaging money. I did an employee utilization analysis and showed them that they had some employees that were 20% utilized. They had two fancy offices and employee benefits out the wazoo. We told them they had to cut costs. They wouldn't listen to us so we thought an introduction of the successful marine to these air force pilots would be beneficial.

The Marine graciously agreed to a meeting. We went out to dinner and everything he recommended about cutting costs was shot down. They needed all that stuff. He explained that he made do with 11 engineers for 4 times the revenues that they had. They insisted they needed 25 engineers. They argued about everything and had a reason why they couldn't cut any of the costs.

After we left the meeting the Marine turned to me and said, I hate the Air Force, they get everything! They ended up changing nothing and it got to a point where we fired the client because they wanted us to help them get a bank loan and we did not feel comfortable using our banking contacts to get one for them. Last I heard, those Air Force pilots were still limping along with their company.