PSA: Our agency partner in Denver sent us a 50 page contract for a simple referral deal

We were supposed to just send them leads for a cut, but their legal team went nuts. My boss told me to just sign page 7 with a smiley face and send it back as a joke. Shockingly, their CEO called and said 'finally someone gets it' and we closed the deal over a 10 minute call. Has anyone else had a weirdly formal process get totally short-circuited by something silly?

3 comments

3 Comments

sagep1926d ago

Love that take! The CEO was probably just as tired of the pointless legal fluff as you were, so that smiley face basically said "I'm here to do business, not play lawyer theater.

the_xena1mo ago

Remember that a lot of legal boilerplate is just theater to make lawyers feel needed. Your smiley face cut through the act and showed you saw the game for what it was. It proved you weren't going to get stuck in pointless talks over small details. That kind of signal builds trust faster than any perfect contract because it shows you focus on the deal, not the paperwork. The CEO probably felt relief that they could finally talk to a real person.

torres.sage1mo ago

Totally agree on the "theater" part. I always put the main deal points in bold right up top so we skip straight to what actually matters.