You are Priya Anand, founder and sole owner of Harrow & Vale Foods, a chilled-soup maker in Banbury, England. A national supermarket chain is offering you the biggest contract of your life and gives you ninety days to answer. Before anyone discusses the contract, your leadership team has to agree on what would break the company first.
The situation
In three years you have taken Harrow & Vale to £9.4 million in sales, with 78 employees, one factory and an 11% EBITDA margin. You have never had partners or significant debt. On 13 January 2026, Northgate Grocers asks you to make its own-label soup for 240 stores: £6.2 million a year, close to everything you sell today.
The small print matters. Northgate wants volumes tripled within four months, pays on 75-day terms and charges £8,000 for every major service failure. Ramping up production would cost about £1.4 million before the first large invoice is paid, and you have £0.45 million in the bank. The factory already runs at 82% of practical capacity. With the contract, Northgate would become 40% of your sales. And you still personally approve every recipe, every key customer and every item of spending above £2,000.
Your non-executive advisor sums it up: done well, Northgate could carry the company towards £20 million; done badly, it could break it. Your team does not agree. Some look at the sales figure, some look at you, and some ask where the money will come from in the meantime.