'Business went from $200k to zero': Efficiency experts fire the wrong guy and cost the company their biggest account

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

May 10, 2023 12:00 PM EDT

A mistake usually goes unrecognized until well after that mistake is made… and your importance to an organization is often not recognized until well after you're gone. Not so in this case, the decision to identify the least efficient members of their organization backfired spectacularly—all but negating one of their most important clients and making it very clear how important that "inefficient" member had been.

You might think that this decision-making process might have considered that one person was solely responsible for managing their most important clients. But they probably did the foolish thing of simply looking at a singular metric, like the number of contracts managed, rather than the number of clients and the size/value of those clients.

When the company attempted to rectify its mistake by extending an olive branch out to the fired worker, they learned it was already too late—the worker had taken a better job at their biggest competitor.

Read on for this account of events that was told by Redditor u/jeep-olllllo on Reddit's r/antiwork subreddit community. Next, check out this post about a coworker who was fired for "productivity" despite being the most productive but least communicative about their work.