[mpf62]

Stop using fake names immediately and start responding with your own name in all cases. Many customers will probably think: “there seems to have taken place a reorganization; cool, now I have a single contact person for all my concerns”. They probably won’t even bother to ask where the other guys are. And if they ask and you really don’t know another way out, end this odyssey with a last single lie: you had to lay them off.

It is far worse if your customers find out by themselves that you lied to them. And I would say this is rather a question of when than if. Some of them will notice that all your employees have the same writing style and/or make the same spelling errors. I’ve once uncovered a “fake” company this way. The quality of their/his service was still as good as in the beginning, but I just couldn’t trust them/him anymore …

Of course, you may lose some projects for beeing “to small”, but it’s even worse beeing known as a liar.

[alexc]

You are right. It is a breath of fresh air for me. I'm going to take this advice.

It is just feels awful to lose business that you can execute perfectly well for a reason such as "being too small".

[mpf62]

Of course it hurts to lose any business just because some of your potential customers think your company is too small.

Serve the customers you can get now well. Not only does “many a mickle makes a muckle” (a Scottish saying that reflects pretty well a saying we have in Swiss-German) but also the concentration of risk is much lower.

And don’t forget: most companies/customers are (too) small by themselves and many of them prefer suppliers that make them feel more like VIPs than like numbers (we don’t care about you - you’re too small for us).

It’s not only a disadvantage to be small. And after you have proven that you have come to stay, bigger companies will notice it one day.