Big Clients, Small Margins: How Enterprise Growth Reshapes the Business You Thought You Knew

With annual revenue between $5 million and $50 million, steady operations, a dependable team, and energy in the business, smaller mid-market companies are a vital engine of the American economy. As of mid-2024, they sustained year-over-year revenue growth of 12.9% and employment growth of 10.3%, with larger firms in the $100 million-$1 billion range posting even more substantial gains of 15.1% and 13.3%, respectively. Most leaders projected 8–9% growth heading into 2025. 

At National Business Capital, we’ve seen this growth firsthand. Working capital, expansion, and equipment accounted for over 70% of the total capital deployed by our clients in the first half of 2025. These aren’t defensive loans; they fund targeted growth initiatives made with precise actions, a clear forecast ROI window, and contingency plans. 

Key Takeaways

• Enterprise deals test your fundamentals. Operationally, financially, culturally, you need to be stronger before you scale.
• The early excitement is real—but so is the asymmetry. Keep your head clear and analyze the contract before signing.
• The margins may thin, at least at first. Growth often comes with cash strain, execution risk, and strategic exposure. These should be temporary as the business fundamentally transforms.
• Preparation matters more than projection. Setting the business up for delivery success is more important than forecasting the upside.
• Mastery is knowing what not to change. The goal isn’t just landing the deal, it’s staying whole on the other side.

The Enterprise Leap

One area where strategic funding helps fast-growing companies is taking the crucial jump to serving enterprise-level customers. The enterprise playing field introduces a new scale for mid-market companies, particularly those dealing with their first mega-partner, and they often underestimate the effort required.

You may already feel an internal strain just from considering the possibility. You want to deliver on an enterprise engagement, but you may not have what it takes. Nearly half of all U.S. mid-market firms face gaps in talent, finance, and digital skills that limit scalability under enterprise demands. 

The enterprise leap is a moment of real tension: validation and strain, possibility and pressure. What follows is a field manual for fast-growing companies on how to work smart, stay whole, and keep to the fundamentals as they progress from mid-market ambition to sustainable enterprise-level execution.

Why September? A financial and operational inflection point
September puts several deep, often unspoken dynamics into play.

• The Enterprise Pipeline Lock-In
  Enterprise customers—especially in retail, manufacturing, and B2B services—are finalizing next year’s budgets in September–October. If you’re courting a “giant,” your ability to meet their approval process timelines this month often decides whether you land in their next fiscal year’s spend. Miss this year’s window, and the next serious shot might be 9–12 months away.
• Fiscal Year Compression
  Even if the fiscal year ends in December, September marks the point from which every major decision serves two timeframes: closing the current year strong and positioning for next year’s growth. There’s no room for experiments. Every dollar spent or deferred from here to December is a signal about your priorities and your confidence level.
• The Capital Visibility Shift
  By September, your trailing twelve-month performance (TTM) is primarily set. If you’re raising capital, renegotiating credit, or setting the stage for M&A, this is the P&L picture that potential partners will see. A perception of strength or weakness in September can be as important as actual performance.
• The Operational & Cultural Crossroads
  September is late enough in the year that system cracks are visible (capacity limits, bottlenecks, vendor fragility), and you can see how your team has absorbed the stress of the year (burnout patterns, leadership bandwidth, panic or complacency). Now’s a good time to examine how fatigue in output, in decision-making, and in culture may be showing up.

Phase 1: The Conversations

The conversations with that potential “big” partner may start informally, but they will eventually shift gears. At that point, their questions get sharper, new stakeholders join the calls, and soon, interest morphs into intention. When the shift happens, your offering or product is no longer being evaluated; your entire business is being assessed for fit. The “fit” with their systems, supply chain, procurement constraints, and risk profile. They want to know if the business is up to the task of serving them.

Internally, with the conversations taking place inside your company, you may begin to feel some tensions between the current operations of the business: fulfilling current orders, managing cash, etc., and the thinking, planning, and modeling around a new future with the enterprise customer. 

What will need to change? Answering this question should uncover the actions you need to take when/if the deal closes. Pathways to get there should include:  

• Operations outlining fulfillment scenarios.
• Finance building early versions of new working capital models.
• Leadership analyzing current financial performance, capital relationships, and teams. 
• Production knowing if current vendors could meet an “X-fold” change in demand? 

Financial Limits

Financial readiness won’t announce itself. But if your business isn’t ready, the cracks will show under pressure. You will need to gauge how close you might be to your limits. Asking:

• Are you currently stretching AR to preserve cash?
• Are current vendor terms propping up working capital?
• If volume tripled, would your cash position hold?
• Where is your revenue per employee? How will the deal add to the strain?
• Do you know what it costs to serve the customer at this next level?

Maintain Focus

At this juncture, you might risk executional drift. Once the idea of this “megadeal” takes root, your team may begin projecting into the future and make decisions based on an unsecured future event. This is a test, not of specific capabilities, but whether your teams can stay focused on today while leadership prepares for tomorrow.

Take the time needed to learn whether your current structure can hold under the new weight and what changes should be made. Patience is required. This shows itself through the discipline to prepare deliberately, without treating the deal as inevitable. Because until the contract is signed, every forward action is speculative overhead. And mid-market companies can’t afford to mistake optimism for momentum.

 The CEO’s Quiet Conversations – ecosystem to speak with 

Before a contract is in sight, even before a formal proposal, the connected CEO starts talking to key people in a strategic way. Their goal is to quietly test the system and gather truths you can’t see from inside the business.

Who to Call First

• Trusted Advisors – Your outside financial advisor, fractional CFO, or CPA firm. Keep it exploratory: “If we needed to float [X weeks] of additional production on net-90 terms, where’s the break point?” Long-time mentors or your CEO coach are other targets.
• Your Industry Network – Look for leaders who’ve seen enterprise buyers in your category before. Ask them where the pressure points will be—and where the traps are buried. Think broadly of your networks, which may include professional organizations like YPO, local Chambers of Commerce, and other industry-specific groups.
• Selective Board Members and other Influencers – Look to those who can add strategic clarity without creating noise or expectation.

Vendors and Partners
Your critical suppliers of materials, logistics, and technology are the quiet gatekeepers of your ability to deliver. But don’t announce a possible deal. Instead, frame the conversation as contingency planning: “We’re exploring scenarios that could increase our weekly volume by [X%] sometime next year. If that happened, what would it do to lead times, pricing, or capacity on your end?”

This framing lets you surface capacity limits, price shifts, and service gaps without tipping your hand or triggering price creep.

What You’re Really Doing

• Mapping where the system will hold and where it will bend.
• Identifying “first call” partners if the deal becomes real.
• Spotting silent bottlenecks before they can break delivery.
• Building the external bench strength that you’ll need later without committing prematurely.
  

These conversations aren’t only about preparing for this deal. They’re about building the awareness of your larger ambitions and solidifying the connections that will let you execute smoothly, whether or not the potential new relationship with the “giant” turns real.

Phase 2: Where Negotiation Reveals Structure

When you step into formal negotiation with an enterprise buyer, you’ve entered the most revealing part of the journey. Each negotiating point becomes a little mirror. You aren’t just crafting the deal—you are demonstrating your readiness by the things you push back on and what you concede. 

Every clause, every assumption, every “standard” request is a marker—showing you what the enterprise values, how they manage risk, and where they expect you to bend. The enterprise will read your responses for discipline, leverage, and adaptability. They’ll also sense over-eagerness, fragility, and whether you can be pushed off your boundaries.

The negotiation is more than securing an agreement—it is the early proof of whether your company can operate at enterprise scale without losing its structural integrity.

What to Watch For

• Pace Pressure: Are they driving timelines to match internal priorities, or to test how you respond under urgency?
• Term Asymmetry: Which clauses are skewed to their favor by default, and how often do they concede without pushback? Be aware, some terms, even if common, may have different impacts at this new scale. For example, an early payment discount could further erode much narrower margins.
• Cost Visibility: Are you prepared to name and defend the full cost-to-serve—including compliance, customization, and onboarding—without flinching?
• Boundary Tests: Are the “small” asks (labeling tweaks, report formats, service guarantees) hinting at bigger operational strain later?

No matter how seasoned your internal team, enterprise negotiations carry clauses, compliance requirements, and capital impacts that experienced outsiders may have seen hundreds of times before. Having those eyes on your draft agreements is additional insurance.

Elsewhere Inside the Business 

Every department will feel the pull of the contract. Legal reviews term sheets and indemnity clauses. Finance revisits the pricing assumptions. Manufacturing weighs supply chain impacts. And the sales team wants the deal done so they can receive their reward. 

Additionally, your investment partners and other important stakeholders will also have their perspective, which cannot be ignored. 

This is a time of focused tension. The forward motion is real, but it can’t run over your internal clarity. Now is the time for honesty about capacity, unit economics, and financial limits.

Financial Clarity Sets the Pace

What may have begun as “just-to-see” modeling now becomes required:

• Working capital projections need to be defensible.
• Margin compression calculations must factor in realistic assumptions about co-op marketing, returns, and compliance costs.
• Models need to include receivable delays and payment terms to see when liquidity gets tight, and how tight.
• Forecasting impacts of one-time onboarding costs: legal, process, packaging, tooling, training.

The finance team’s job is to be a readiness warning light, not by creating objections that stop the deal, but to clarify the costs of chasing it. Your team’s desire to “make it work” may override warning signals that were there all along, and leadership should distinguish between ambition and capacity.

 The Pressure Triangle 

For some businesses, the “stop” signs are already present. Here are three that can surface:

• Accounts Receivable aged over 90 days at 50%+
• Accounts Payable consistently beyond 60 days
• Revenue growing, but cash declining

This is sometimes called the Pressure Triangle, three early indicators that your current financial structure may be too tight to sustain a leap in growth. If you’re “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” it may be a sign your cash conversion cycle is already stretched, and enterprise volume will only stretch it further.

In the negotiation, you earn the right to scale, not by being agreeable, but by knowing your “no” and standing firm.

As the signing comes closer, your biggest concern may transition away from ambition – not being able to close the deal – to capacity, as you recognize that if the deal does close, your business is about to be accountable to a partner that it may not be ready to support.

Phase 3: Welcome to the Big Leagues

The deal is live, and your cash clock starts ticking in a new way. You’ve spent substantial resources on inventory, payroll, and logistics before a single enterprise payment has hit the bank. On paper, your business might look better than it has ever seemed, but your bank account doesn’t reflect this. The fact is your business is sitting in one of the most predictable stretches of the enterprise curve: the lag between investment and return.

This period can be disorienting. Margins will likely tighten. Cash flow may appear to decline. The P&L may not align with your expectations. It doesn’t mean something is wrong. You may already be seeing:

• Big swings in monthly P&L – margin dips of 5-15% in a single month are common.
• Inventory and payroll spikes ahead of invoicing – every new headcount can add 10-20% to your temporary cash burn.
• Front-loaded marketing costs can add 15-25% to customer acquisition costs
• New roles being added before cash arrives, which can add $8-12K per month in FTE expense per role. 
• With a shift to pre-pay logistics and transportation often found in manufacturing and construction, if fuel cost surges or tariffs happen costs can jump 10–20%, or more. You will have to absorb these increases before you can pass them on if that is even possible in your contract.

In an enterprise deal, the scoreboard says you’re ahead long before the cash crosses the goal line. You’ll see the revenue on paper, but if payment terms run 90 days and costs hit on day one, your account balance can shrink while your P&L looks strong. This cash lag is where profitable companies run out of oxygen.

If you panic, you may rush to cut costs, become hesitant on delivery, and strain the relationship. This risks even further cash flow delays. If you plan for this as part of the process, you can sail through it without taking in the sails.

In this phase, watching the numbers is only part of the story; you’ll want to read them correctly. One of two things is happening. You’re either not delivering efficiently or you’re scaling exactly as planned.

The difference is subtle. The questions circling inside your head are probably something like, which one are we experiencing? And, can the systems we built carry this new weight, every day without fail?

The Hidden Costs of Growth

What can destabilize businesses during this phase isn’t waste. The fact is that the cost of growth arrives before the proof of it does. Most of these are one-time investments, not recurring overhead, such as:

• Equipment or process upgrades
• Hiring ahead of confirmed demand
• Added warehousing or logistics infrastructure
• Product approvals, certifications, or third-party audits

There’s a second category of hidden cost you may feel more acutely once you’re tied to enterprise clients: market-driven impacts you can’t control but must absorb.

Enterprise customers run at a scale where sector shifts hit fast and hard. When they pivot, they expect their partners to pivot, too.

• If transportation, gas, or shipping costs spike, your logistics budget changes overnight.
• If tariffs shift in construction or manufacturing, your materials costs may jump mid-contract.
• If your enterprise client is responding to a sudden change in regulation, you may need to retool compliance processes on the fly.

You might never have felt these dynamics directly before, but now your business is part of an operating environment where they’re part of the ongoing reality. And they can land in your inbox as a “priority change” email from your customer on a Friday afternoon.

You can’t avoid these costs, but you can anticipate them in both your capital planning and your communication cadence with the client. The sooner you can spot a market ripple, the better chance you have to adapt before it becomes a margin hit.

All these costs are indicators of a system being stretched, possibly for the first time. The leadership question isn’t “Can we afford this?” But instead, in “what time frame must the return materialize for this to be sustainable?”

Capital at Work

These expenses are needed in the leap to enterprise relationships. They can be managed, afforded, or carried, if your capital model was shaped intentionally, not optimistically. Executives often have three levers:

1. Internal Cushion
   Retained earnings or deferred spending. Cleanest choice, but not always available
2. Short-Term Credit
   New or existing credit lines and trade finance. This requires cash discipline and repayment clarity.
3. Outside Capital or Bridge Financing
   Equity or structured debt. Viable if the strategic upside justifies the dilution or borrowing costs. 

More than the choice of lever you pull, the intention of the choice, and the clarity of modeling earlier in the process will matter to your success.

Once your customers are onboarded, success should look like consistency. Deliveries arrive on time. Exceptions logged and addressed. Communication with the partner is clear and regular. The entire team working as a system—not in a series of heroic recoveries from the edge.

 Execution Pitfalls & What to Watch

Once the deal goes live, new patterns may appear. Some productive, some not. 

“Hero Culture”

• What you may see: The same few team members “pulling it off” every week.
• What that indicates: Burnout, failure to scale, silent process breakdowns.
• How to correct: Transition to system reliance, not individual effort.

Internal Spotlight

• What you may feel: Company-wide attention shifts to “the big deal.”
• What it risks: Focus drifts from other core customers and long-term priorities.
• What you can do: Reinforce internal roles, normalize the new work.

Lack of Real-Time Metrics

• What’s missing: No structured way to track delivery performance.
• What it means: Issues emerge too late to course correct.
• What may help: Instrument ops the same way you instrumented sales.

How You Know it's Holding

There is no specific scorecard, but these measures may confirm you’re delivering under pressure:

• On-Time Delivery Rate
• Fulfillment Accuracy / Error Rate
• Cycle Time (Order to Cash)
• First-Time Quality Score
• Internal Escalation Frequency

Phase 4: The Capital Reckoning

Your company likely feels different now. Maybe not in the headlines, but in its weight, how it runs. Cash takes longer to cycle through the system. Margins feel thinner than the effort suggests. The team is performing, but the edges are tighter. And the capital you needed to land the deal isn’t the same capital you’ll need to grow beyond it.

This is the start of a new normal, a redefinition of how the business functions under sustained enterprise load.

Signs You’re in the New Normal

These aren’t certainties, but they’re common patterns in the months after enterprise onboarding:

• Revenue is up, but profitability feels off.
• Burn rate runs higher than expected, even with steady delivery.
• The team is stretched from sustained pace, not from firefighting.
• Finance is reconciling forecasts with actuals and finding small but persistent gaps.
• Strategic questions surface quietly: What’s next? What does growth look like from here?
• Much of this was likely modeled in advance, but modeling doesn’t erase real-world friction. The point of preparation was never to make this transition effortless; it was to make you ready to respond without losing form.

The New Fundamentals

Your core fundamentals still matter here—they just carry more weight:

• Strategic Fluency – Growth options expand: organic, partnerships, maybe acquisitions. Without clarity, expansion becomes drift.
• Capital Agility – Single-source funding is rarely enough now. Managing a capital stack including credit, retained earnings, and equity requires foresight, not reaction.
• Operational Rhythm Under Load – The question transforms from “Can we do it?” to “Can we deliver repeatedly without eroding the system?”
• Cultural Integration – Teams are evolving with new pressures. Mastery is keeping them cohesive while the business shifts shape.
• Measurement Precision – Lagging indicators are too slow. You need real-time visibility into bottlenecks, cycle time, and cash to protect momentum.

You may already be operating at this level, just without naming it. These aren’t upgrades. They’re the ground you now stand on.

Levering Up: What’s the Game Now?

The deal has changed your financials. Now it might alter your trajectory. Three common paths become clear:

1. M&A Readiness

• Upside: Strategic growth, new markets

• Risk: Integration fatigue, loss of control

• Indicator: Acquirers watch how you stabilize

2. IPO or PE Recap

• Upside: Capital infusion, valuation boost

• Risk: Intense pressure, fragile narrative

• Marker: Revenue multiple becomes your new scorecard

3. Sustainable Independence

• Upside: Control, long-term value

• Risk: Capital constraints, slower growth

• Key to success: Internal capital discipline must be relentless

You don’t need to decide at once. But you can’t ignore that these options now exist. Eventually, not choosing becomes a risk.

Phase 5:  After the Leap, Building Mastery

You no longer run a business with zero enterprise-level experience. The scale is different. The capital base is different. Expectations both internally and externally are different. What was once a stretch has become the baseline.

The challenge shifts from building up to holding shape. Obvious crises no longer test you, you’re tested by slow drift. Perhaps the customer’s requests evolve; minor changes to fulfillment, tweaks to reporting, adjusted delivery timelines. None of them seems large enough to threaten your business, but together they create scope creep that can pull you off center.

This is also the phase where culture is most at risk. As you add enterprise customers, the pressure is operational and about identity. Without deliberate care, the systems you built that help you win new deals will start to bend toward outside demands instead of your own priorities.

Holding form now means re-anchoring to clarity before drift sets in. Review whether your delivery model can sustain real-time pressure without hidden costs. Reassess whether payment terms that worked during ramp-up still work now. Check if the boundaries you set in negotiation remain intact or have been worn down by incremental concessions.

The reset here isn’t about reinvention. It’s about coherence. Budget cycles shift to reflect actual volume, not projections. Hiring becomes more deliberate and less reactive. Capital decisions focus on long-term configuration instead of bridging the next gap. And leadership evolves from pure ambition to disciplined discernment choosing growth that reinforces, not erodes, the core of the business.

Master the Next Landing

An enterprise deal doesn’t redefine your business. It reveals what is already present, sometimes stretched, sometimes quiet, sometimes ready before you realize it. Scale isn’t mastery. It’s not volume. It’s not speed. Mastery is what stays consistent under pressure.

Scale without mastery is fleeting. When the focus shifts to execution under sustained load, and to knowing what to protect no matter how high the stakes, the fundamentals of your business become sharper. These fundamentals, which you fought to keep, are now your infrastructure.

What was once preparation is now your daily practice. The discipline that keeps the business whole at this altitude. You’re not rehearsing for the future. You’re playing in the big leagues now, and every rep shapes the company you will become.

Curious how enterprise growth changes your capital strategy? Talk with an advisor who’s seen companies your size through this exact stage.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phil Fernandes

Chief Operating Officer

Phil Fernandes serves as Chief Operating Officer for National Business Capital. He boasts 15 years of experience in sales and 10+ years of management experience as National’s VP of Financing/Analytics. Phil is also an excellent writer who's completed the Applied Business Analytics executive program at MIT and regularly contributes articles to National Business Capital’s blog.