Sales director tells me to ignore details, ends up losing the company $8 million.

I work with the federal contractor responsible to buy and bundle hardware, software, etc.

Any government organization needs, and I review the contracts in terms of financial liability and legal clauses.

In other words, I ensure we make money and we are legally covered.

These contracts range from $5,000 to $40 million.

Last year, our company went through a reorganization,

i.e. firing people and giving more work to the people still left with the company while paying us peanuts.

We are a small company with less than 200 employees, and we are trying to retain our government

customers while big companies like Amazon Cloud will eventually replace us in less than 10 years.

The government customers love working with us because this is the only thing we do,

and we treat customers better than big contractors who don't care.

My company laid off 30 people from my 50-person team,

so now 20 people do the work of 50 people at the same salary.

We are paid by the month, not work hours, and we don't get sales bonuses.

This is important to the story.

I have a habit of reviewing everything carefully and spending hours on each contract,

even the ones that just make us a few thousand dollars.

The government vendor selection process is slow, and they are very risk-averse,

so a lot of customers start at a few thousand dollars and end up in the 8 or 9 figure contract range

if everything goes well.

Since people were laid off, I was struggling with the work volume,

and as a result, contracts were piling up.

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