The Big Rock Problem  ## Metadata - Author: [[Alex]] - Full Title: The Big Rock Problem - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #consulting - #freelancing - #business-model Author: Alex Source: Personal website Reference: https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/essays/the-big-rock-problem/ date created: {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}} {{time:HH:mm}} --- # Title: The Big Rock Problem ## Table of Contents: - [🧱 Definition: What is the Big Rock Problem?](#-definition-what-is-the-big-rock-problem) - [🕳️ Gaps and Hidden Costs](#️-gaps-and-hidden-costs) - [💥 How It Hurts Your Business](#-how-it-hurts-your-business) - [🎢 Feast-or-Famine Cycle](#-feast-or-famine-cycle) - [🛠️ Solutions Overview](#️-solutions-overview) - [🪨 The Case for Small Rocks](#-the-case-for-small-rocks) - [🏗️ Building Around Small Rocks](#️-building-around-small-rocks) - [🧭 Choose Your Path](#-choose-your-path) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📖 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items (Advocacy & OSPO Alignment Prompt)](#-action-items-advocacy--ospo-alignment-prompt) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical validity](#-logical-validity) - [🔍 DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### References: - Alex Standiford, “The Big Rock Problem,” published 2025-08-27, https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/essays/the-big-rock-problem/ ## 📝 Summary: The article argues that relying on a few large clients (“big rocks”) creates fragility, hidden operational gaps, and a feast-or-famine cycle. Using a jar-and-rocks metaphor, Alex recommends designing offers around many smaller customers (“small rocks”) or, alternatively, deliberately “building a bigger jar.” Favoring small rocks reduces idle capacity, context switching, bespoke workflows, and power imbalances. The piece concludes by urging readers to protect selling time and build systems to consistently acquire right-sized work. ## 📖 Main Content: The “big rock problem” frames client concentration risk as an operational design flaw. Big clients demand bespoke processes, absorb capacity, and push founders to pause sales during delivery, leading to pipeline droughts. The fix is strategic: either expand capacity (systems, staff, processes) to truly support big rocks or productize/standardize smaller offers to fill the jar with tightly nested, low-demand customers. Small-rock models enable automation, faster sales velocity, lower switching costs, and resilience when any one customer churns. The power dynamic shifts from negotiated, custom engagements to repeatable, self-serve purchases, stabilizing revenue and enabling vacations, selective offboarding, and scalable fulfillment. ### 🗒️ Notes - Core claim - “Big clients kill small businesses” by creating hidden costs and dependencies. - Opportunity cost isn’t obvious at first; friction to raise price compounds. - Metaphor: Jar and rocks - Jar = total capacity; rocks = clients. - Big rocks (demand-heavy) leave gaps (idle capacity, context switching, bespoke workflows). - Harm mechanics - You can’t “split” big rocks; visible gaps can’t be efficiently filled. - Focus shifts to client emergencies over business growth. - Feast-or-famine loop - 1) Land big deal → 2) Stop selling during delivery → 3) Project ends, pipeline empty → 4) Panic sell → repeat. - Creates brittleness and burnout risk. - Benefits of solving - Consistent income; fewer emergencies; reduced dependency; ability to fire bad-fit clients; vacations; easier outsourcing. - Two paths - Build a bigger jar (capacity, processes, team, ops maturity). - Or find many smaller rocks (standardized offers). - Case for small rocks - Tighter nesting reduces gaps and overhead. - Shift from “clients to negotiate with” to “customers to serve” using standardized offers. - Lower impact of churn; easier automation; referral-friendly; lower-touch sales. - Price point example: $50/mo self-serve vs $10k requiring calls. - Building around small rocks - Identify a repeatable process at a lower price point. - Acquire “scoops” of small rocks via scalable channels. - Baseline revenue from customers; calendar less dictated by a few clients. - Final guidance - Choose path intentionally; protect selling time; create foundations and leverage multipliers. ## 📖 References: - Alex Standiford, The Big Rock Problem: https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/essays/the-big-rock-problem/ ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: - Original idea: Big clients look lucrative but hide oversized demands and friction to adjust scope or price; the opportunity cost surfaces late and crowds out core business-building. - Paraphrase: Large accounts dangle steady pay but bring heavy, often hidden operational load. You remain responsible for solving expanding problems while facing resistance to renegotiation. The true cost emerges over time as these engagements consume capacity needed for growth. - Original idea: Small rocks compress better, enabling standardized offers, automation, and reduced risk from churn. - Paraphrase: Numerous modest customers fit closely together, minimizing waste. This moves you from bespoke negotiations to packaged services that can be automated, making the loss of any one buyer manageable and improving overall stability. ## 📰 Newsletter: This week in WordPress and open source: - Learn: New guides on building sustainable service models—turn your bespoke projects into productized offerings that scale. We’re sharing step-by-step workflows for PHP/JS tooling, GitHub project templates, and CI recipes to standardize delivery. - Updates: Core performance wins landed; check the latest Trac summaries and Gutenberg changelog highlights. Don’t miss improvements to Patterns and Interactivity API. - Community: Contributor Onboarding sessions are back next month—perfect for first-timers. Shout-out to meetup organizers who piloted “Docs Sprints” standardizing readmes across popular plugins. - New plugins: A handful of lightweight utilities for block-specific CSS, script deferral, and site health dashboards. We’ll feature a teardown of how maintainers use Issues + Discussions to triage effectively. - Sustainability: If one client can cut your revenue in half, it’s time to rethink your jar. We’ll cover productized care plans, tiered support, and referral systems that keep your pipeline warm—no more feast-or-famine. Links: - Patterns and Interactivity API recap: https://make.wordpress.org/core/ - Contributor events calendar: https://make.wordpress.org/meetings/ - GitHub project templates example: https://github.com/features/projects ## ✅ Action Items (Advocacy & OSPO Alignment Prompt): Prompt to use for future articles: “Analyze how this article informs open-source advocacy, contributor engagement, and education within the WordPress ecosystem. Map its ideas to: - Advocacy: Policies and practices that reduce single-sponsor/client dependency and encourage diversified funding for contributors and maintainers. - Contributor Engagement: Systems for onboarding, mentorship, and repeatable contribution workflows (issue templates, labels, playbooks) that ‘shrink rocks’ by lowering per-contribution overhead. - Education: Curriculum or workshops to productize services (maintenance plans, documentation standards, CI/CD) and improve teachability of PHP, JS, HTML/CSS, Git/GitHub. - OSPO Objectives: Governance, compliance, budgeting, and vendor-neutral processes that build a ‘bigger jar’ responsibly (tools, automation, SLAs, roadmaps) while maintaining transparency and inclusivity. - Sustainability & DEIB: Practices that distribute opportunity across diverse contributors, publish transparent roadmaps, and protect time for outreach without risking delivery. Conclude with concrete steps I can take on stage, in workshops, and online to merge education with advocacy, and how these steps support my path toward OSPO leadership.” Alignm - Summary: If one client can cut your income in half, you don’t have a business. You have a dependency with nice invoices. This post exposes and frames this problem and how to work your way out of it. - URL: https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/essays/the-big-rock-problem/  I believe that big clients kill small businesses. Big clients promise financial stability and big paychecks. They also come with big problems. Those problems are hard to see in the beginning. You’re still on the hook to solve those problems, and asking for more money comes with friction. The *opportunity cost* of signing a big client is *never* obvious at first, and inevitably it becomes more expensive than you expected. These clients generally end up taking up more space in your business than you intended, and pull you away from doing the other important aspects needed to keep your business healthy. **I call this the big rock problem.** #### What Is The Big Rock Problem? A clear mason jar with 4 large rocks stacked inside. Imagine you have a jar full of rocks. In this metaphor, the “rocks” represent your various clients, and the “jar” represents the absolute limit of how much the business can handle at once. Big rocks usually bring in more money, but demand extra resources to fulfill them. To be clear: **rock size is about *demand*, *not dollars***. If you’re employed full-time, your jar is literally filled with one giant rock – your job. Lose that rock, and you lose the overwhelming majority of your income. *Yikes*! A service company whose entire business is running off of a few big rocks isn’t much better. Losing just one of those clients *blows a hole in your finances*. You basically have four full-time jobs, and none of your bosses are talking to each other. *Big yikes*! A clear mason jar with 4 large rocks stacked inside. The gaps around the rocks are highlighted to illustrate how much wasted space is in the jar. Big rocks have their own specific needs, and because of that, they tend to take up more room than they seem on the surface. When you look at a jar with a few big rocks in it, there are large gaps between the rocks. Reducing the size of the gaps is difficult. Those gaps show up as idle capacity, context switching, and bespoke workflows you can’t reuse. #### How The Big Rock Problem Hurts Your Business If your jar is full of big rocks, there’s no more room for other big rocks, even though *you can see plenty of space between them.* The problem is you can’t break your rocks into smaller pieces. These gaps *cost you money*. They make it difficult to focus on growing your own business because you’re too busy solving your clients’ problems. ##### How The Big Rock Problem Creates a Feast-Or-Famine Cycle A common symptom of the big rock problem is a nasty feast-or-famine cycle. 1. Find a large opportunity and take it. 2. Work fills the jar; you stop selling. 3. Project ends. Cash dries up. Pipeline is empty. 4. Panic sell. Repeat step 1. You’re always a step behind, under the gun, and just one bad month away from your business falling apart. In this condition, your business is *extremely* brittle, and every new customer feels a bit like rolling the dice. That’s why many freelancers burn out. They can’t afford to take a break, because if that loop doesn’t hold *every single time*, they’re cooked. Stress is a problem without a plan, and this cycle creates plenty of that. The cycle breaks **during delivery in step 2.** That’s where it perpetuates. And that’s where the crux of the big rock problem lies. **Signing large, demanding clients makes it harder to keep yourself committed to growing your own business.** If you can successfully solve the big rock problem, you: 1. Have a more consistent monthly income 2. Have fewer client emergencies that are your problem 3. Stop panicking about losing a rock 4. Feel confident to remove a rock who isn’t a good fit 5. Take vacations 6. Outsource fulfillment readily #### How To Solve The Big Rock Problem There are two solutions to the big rock problem. Either you **build a bigger jar**, or **build a system to find smaller rocks**. Either way, your jar should be able to support *many rocks* instead of just a few. I think the best solution to the big rock problem is to **focus on finding many smaller rocks**. ##### The Case For Small Rocks A clear mason jar mostly full of dozens of medium-sized pebbles neatly placed inside of it. Small rocks can settle together, nesting much tighter than the big rocks ever could. Those smaller gaps represent less idle capacity, context switching, and bespoke workflows you can’t reuse. As the jar fills with smaller rocks, the relationship shifts. Instead of **clients** you negotiate with, you **serve customers** who choose a standardized offer. This drastically changes the power dynamic between your work, and your business. If a smaller rock leaves your jar, the impact is less. Losing a small customer might sting, but it doesn’t threaten the entire business like losing a major client would. Small rocks are *light* and therefore easier to put in your jar. This makes adding them easier to automate. Instead of hiring a dedicated full-time sales team, [you will likely be able to create a referral program.](https://www.sirenaffiliates.com/guides/how-to-build-a-referral-program-for-your-web-agency/) Customers will comfortably pay a low price without requiring any of your time. For $50/month and a 30-day free trial, I don’t feel like I need a call, but a $10,000 website job *definitely* requires a call before we start. ##### How To Build Your Business Around Small Rocks The key is to identify a specific repeatable process, usually at a much lower price point. These customers become your *small rocks*. A clear mason jar mostly full of very tiny pebbles neatly placed inside of it. The average size of the rocks in your jar shrinks. You’ll gain the means to turn the smaller rocks into bigger rocks if you need it. Plus, out of necessity, you find a repeatable way to get scoops of small rocks all at once. The result is a stable, healthy business with options that don’t perpetuate the feast-or-famine cycle. Over time, fewer **clients** set your calendar, and more **customers** set your baseline. The work moves from negotiated projects to purchased services. The dollar amount might be similar. The **operational demand** isn’t. #### Choose Your Path To overcome the big rock problem, you must either **take on smaller rocks** or **grow your jar**. Those two paths are distinctly different, and require different strategies to implement. Do you want a business with big rock **clients?** You’re going to need to make your *jar bigger*. You could even say your problem is a *small jar problem* instead of a *big rock problem*. Do you want a small, profitable business with **customers?** You’re going to need to make your *rocks smaller*. Either way, you need to protect your time, so you can prospect and sell without losing existing clients in the process. *Start there*. Create those foundations, [find the right multipliers for your business](https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/essays/stop-chasing-customers-chase-multipliers/), and leverage them to help you shape your business into what works best for you., The Big Rock Problem, Alex, 01k5scckag431ax3a0x2aetb6k.