The relationship was twenty years old, and everyone assumed that meant it was healthy. It wasn't.
I once inherited a client relationship older than some of my colleagues' careers.
Close to two decades old — practically unheard of in this industry. Held together by a contract structure so favorable to the client that everyone assumed they'd never leave, no matter how the relationship actually felt day to day.
That assumption was the problem.
Underneath the stability, there was real friction — years of it, on both sides. Nobody had picked a fight in a while, but nobody had resolved anything either. The relationship wasn't strong. It was just too expensive to end.
So we stopped coasting on the contract and started actually dealing with what wasn't working.
It took a year of hard conversations — between the people doing the daily work, and separately between leadership on both sides — to get everyone talking honestly instead of just tolerating each other. Eventually that led to sitting down with their full executive team in one room and rebuilding the agreement itself: real concessions, on both sides, not just from us.
What came out of it wasn't just a better contract. It was fewer appeals, fewer claim errors, and a provider network that actually felt supported instead of processed.
A relationship that had been flat for a decade turned into an active growth conversation in about a year — multi-million dollars of new work on the table, being pulled by them, not pushed by us.
The lesson I keep relearning: a relationship that isn't actively getting worse can still be quietly dying. Stability and health aren't the same thing, and the accounts everyone assumes are "safe" are often the ones nobody's actually checked on in years.
“Stability and health aren't the same thing.
Where in your business is "stable" doing the work that "healthy" should be doing instead?