I can see it now... my existing clients reading this and saying, “WTF?!?” and reaching for the pitchforks. Breathe. I’m still taking care of you. This isn’t a license to neglect delivery; it’s a reminder that growth only happens when you make space for the work that creates tomorrow’s revenue. When there’s a client deadline or firedrill, you’ll pull an allnighter if you have to. When it’s a choice between an hour of business development at 8pm and a new Netflix season of Stranger Things, most founders pick the couch. I’m not saying do BD instead of delivery; I’m saying schedule BD in the part of your day you actually control, or it won’t happen.

The Holiday Trap

Right now is the perfect stress test. As the holidays approach, delivery often slows because clients travel or go dark. At the same time, annual planning for next year is in full swing. It's great if you’re in those conversations, but dangerous if you aren’t. The lazy narrative kicks in: “No one decides during the holidays.” So founders coast, conversations stall, and Q1 arrives with a pipeline that looks like a barren farm field.

The point of business development is optionality. A full pipeline lets you say no, hold your price, and sequence work that fits your capacity. An empty pipeline forces you to say yes to misfit clients with concessions on scope and terms that ripple through your organization's utilization, morale, and margins. I'm not here to give you a pep talk. I'm here to tell you that you need a plan and a system you’ll actually commit to and stay consistent with with you have every excuse not to.

The Math of Neglect

Delivery expands to fill all available time because it’s externally enforced. There’s a paying client on the other end of that email. Business development has no external force. Skip it today and nothing explodes. At least not until next quarter, when cash lags and you make decisions under pressure, to stay busy, that actually compound the problem.

I watched a firm live and die by the conference calendar for years. During peak conference season, their pipeline was relatively full, but as conferences became spradic or non-existent during the holiday months of November and December, they had very little activity, and would go into the following year with a bit of angst. When COVID killed their primary channel completely, we built a broader BD muscle: research, point-of-view content, partner motions, and direct outreach. When conferences returned, they kept the system and stopped ricocheting between feast and famine. Conferences became the place to deepen relationships, not the only source of them. That’s the payoff of respecting the pipline. Today’s BD becomes next quarter’s payroll and your ability to choose. If you don't plant the seeds, all you'll be left with is a bag of seeds and a barren field with no crops.

Managing Capacity and Client Expectations

If you don't protect your BD time, it will get eaten up by delivery and operations time. Founders should rarely run above sixty percent delivery utilization, and ideally no more than fifty. Even as an independent consultant, this is something you should be shooting for. And if you feel like you can't, because you don't make enough revenue from that 50 - 60%, then you likely aren't charging enough, but that's the topic of my next article.

The rest of your time, the other fifty percent, funds the future—BD, business strategy, IP creation. Build your service offering in a way that ensures founders and partners aren't required in every meeting and involved in every deliverable. Set the tone with clients during the sales process, on what founder and partner involvement looks like. Bring in your account managers and senior consultants early during the sales process, to help set that precedent, to instill confidence in your team, and to avoid the feeling of the bait and switch.  Publish response-time windows and office hours, and set escalation rules in your SLA so clients feel cared for and know what to expect, while your BD block stays protected. When you enforce the boundary, you’re not being unavailable; you’re ensuring the firm they hired will still be strong six months from now. A farmer with no crops to sell at the end of the season, is probably going out of business.

What Business Development Actually Is

Now that you have your BD block protected and non-negotiable, let's make sure you are doing the right things during that sacred time. BD isn’t just late-stage sales calls. It’s four interconnected activities, and skipping any of them sabotages the others.

1. Admin is the infrastructure—lists, CRM hygiene, prepping agendas, getting contracts out and signed.
2. Research keeps your finger on the pulse—markets shift, technology changes, and different clients have different pain points and different lived experiences they come into the conversation with. Being informed and prepared for conversations is critical.
3. Prospecting starts new conversations—direct messages, warm intros, content-led invitations, and partner-led introductions.
4. Sales advances real opportunities—clear next steps and mutual action plans.

When founders and partners say they “do BD,” they often mean they haphazardly reached out to some contacts and had some general conversations. If you don't have consistency in what you are doing to start or advance a meaningful conversation, it's just lip service. Respect the unglamorous pieces: good research and clean thoughtfully curated lists are what make every prospecting touch and sales conversation more effective.

Eat The Frog, But Matched To Your Energy

Yes, do the hard, high-leverage thing early, but make “early” mean your best energy window. If you aren't a morning person, and it takes you a few hours to get the creative juices flowing, you probably shouldn't be doing outreach and sales conversations first thing after waking up. Use your sharpest hour for live conversations, personalized outreach, or proposal strategy. That's the work that requires fast thinking and emotional connection.

Save the low-creativity tasks for your low-energy window. If you crash after lunch, that’s when you update CRM, refine lists, and prep notes. You don't get any extra BD points for doing something at 6am. Pairing the right kind of BD activity with the energy that makes it easy to do every day, is the winning formula.

Think of BD like a workout routine. You don’t need a heroic workout where you are so sore after that you can't do another workout for the next week. You need repeatable programming that moves the needle. A simple rhythm works: identify a handful of people you’ll contact, a handful you’ll follow up with, and one live opportunity you’ll move forward before the day gets away. Prep the names and do the research the day before so you aren’t negotiating with yourself tomorrow, when a client email pops into your inbox, because inevitably you will choose the well defined activity of answering a client email over an undefined general BD calendar block. 

You already spend your willpower on delivery and running the business. Not to mention all the other personal things that come up throughout the day... defiant preteen at home anyone? Design the environment so BD happens by default. Put a recurring block on your calendar and treat it like a standing client meeting. No Slack. No inbox. Phone out of reach (I am a fan of using The Brick device). If a real fire forces you to miss it, reschedule the full block within twenty-four hours. 

Build accountability that stings just enough to keep you honest: a weekly partner check-in, a leadership report where you share BD activity and next steps, or even a low-tech ritual like moving a sticky note from the left side of your monitor to the right only when the block is actually done. The system doesn’t need to be fancy. It needs to be non-negotiable.

Cadence That Compounds and Metrics That Matter

Daily, you run your block. Weekly, you review the pipeline with brutal honesty—what moved, what stuck, what next step is missing. Quarterly, you tune your ICP, offers, pricing, and ecosystem map based on what the conversations are actually telling you. When you show up this way, your message sharpens, your deals shorten. This is how you make your own luck, instead of relying on referrals to fall into your lap.

Don’t stare at revenue like a bathroom scale every day. Track the inputs you control and the outcomes that matter on a sensible cadence. Each week, count the connections and outreaches you sent, the number of meaningful conversations you had (two-way dialogue about a problem plus a clear next step), and how many deals moved to the next stage. Each month or quarter, look at the new qualified opportunities, cycle time, win rate, and average deal size. These tell you a lot about whether your positioning is carrying its weight, and whether your message is resonating. Inputs create the outcomes. Measuring both keeps you emotionally steady while you wait for the contracts to sign and the revenue to hit your books.

Motivation and momentum

A bad day, week, or month, will inevitably bring up negative emotions—feelings of helplessness and thoughts of "f this, what am I doing wrong?" The reality is that you will lose more deals than you win. That's just how the math works. I don't care for baseball, but I know that batting .300 is really good. And even then, not every hit is a homerun.

Realizing this, is especially important when your sales cycles are long, as they typically are with professional services. It might be a while before that next big contract actually signs. It might be a while before that big sale of crops happens, and in the meantime you need to keep putting in the work to till, plow, fertilize, and seed, and that can be grueling work.

Keep morale up by noticing and celebrating small wins: the meeting booked, the above average engagement on a LinkedIn post, the affirmative head nod during a presentation. Of course you will celebrate the contracts being signed, but don't forget to recognize the work put in and the micro results along the way. Take screenshots, write them down, take a mental note, share them with your accountability partner—whatever works for you. We are all different, with some being more resilient and internally motivated than others, but we all have a fixed amount of willpower and motivation. Celebrating the little wins along the way replenishes that stockpile of willpower and motivation a little bit, and allows you to get to the next big celebration with some reserves left over. And when that bigger milestone hits—a renewal, a new "largest client", a new partner referral—celebrate it deliberately so your brain associates the grind with reward.

Some of the same practices that work for accontability are also good for keeping that motivation up. I am personally a fan of sharing the good and the bad with either my leadership team and/or my partner/accountability partner. Right now that I am an independent consultant, I share my wins, big and small, with my wife. Just the other day, I sent her three screenshots from LinkedIn comments and chats. The first was a troll, that tried to tare me down. The second, was a newsletter subscriber who sent a message of appreciation about my content. The third, was someone who saw one of my LinkedIn ads, and after a short back and forth, scheduled a meeting. She gave me a high-five after the last one, and replenished that little big of motivation for me.

Here's What My BD Schedule Looks Like

I have a daily BD block from 9:30 - 10:30am. This is after I've had my breakfast and walked my dog, so my brain is ramping up to peak alertness and motivation. This block is used primarily for prospecting, though roughly once per quarter I'll take one or two of them and focus on list building and optimization and industry research. I don't schedule sales calls during this time, because I have learned that if I don't keep a non-negotiable time for prospecting, I simply won't do it.

I generally try to keep sales calls to the mid-day, because that's when I am generally craving some human connection. For the most part I also try to avoid Friday's because who really wants to make major decisions on a Friday? This isn't a hard and fast rule because sometimes there is a need for speed, and a Friday meeting is the only way to keep a deal moving.

Monday's are for content development. This is when I write my newsletter, write and schedule my LinkedIn posts for the week, edit any Consulting Growth Insights Live video, work on website updates, create images or infographics, etc. I currently do all of this myself, with the help of AI, because I enjoy it. Thought at some point in the future I will go back to outsourcing the video production and website updates.

Here are my activity targets:

• 1 newsletter per week
• 5 LinkedIn posts per week
• 10 LinkedIn connection requests per day. My system allows for only warm connection requests because I only send them to people that have engaged with my content (ads, posts, newsletters, profile). Depending on what they engaged with and how, the CTA is either to sign up for my newsletter, take my Positioning Risk Assessment, or start a conversation.
• 1 direct outreach to someone I haven't connected with for a while per day. These don't have any particular agenda, other than to say hi, and see how they are doing.
• 1 direct outreach to someone with an offer to help. I am a big believe in business karma, and I enjoy helping people.
• 2 direct out reaches to people I can co-create content with per week. this is generally an invite to Consulting Growth Insights Live.
• Attend 1 local networking event per week. Because you really can't beat in-person connection.

Here are my metrics:

• 2 business conversations per week. These can be prospective clients or partners or collaborators. If I am hitting this number, I will have an average of 10 per month, of which roughly two will turn to actual opportunities, and with my 40% close rate, I can expect to win 2 - 3 deals per quarter.
• 20+ Newsletter subscribers per week across email and LinkedIn.
• LinkedIn profile views. I try to shoot for 30+ per week, though that number scales as my follower/connection count grows.
• Positioning Risk Assessment completions. This is a fairly new asset, so I don't yet have a target.
• LinkedIn post engagement. This is more of a qualitative metric, but I look for likes and quality comments from my ICP.

One thing I haven't yet consistently worked into my BD workflow is Reddit engagement. I have done it in spurts, and there is definitely some good potential there, but I haven't yet dedicated the consistent time to it as I have to my other focus channels.

I only share this with you because I want you to see an example. What works for me, may not work for you. The timing, the activity targets, the channels may all be wrong for you and your firm, but the idea that you need to create dedicated time and headspace for BD is absolutelt right for you.

A 30-day BD Sprint You Can Start Today

Week one is installation: put that hourly BD block on your calendar, and mark it as busy. Don't half-ass it and leave it as free, because inevitably someone will book over that time. Pick your daily activity targets, and create your tracking/measurement structure. Identify the pain point or problem you want to go after from a use case and messaging perspective.

Week two is repetition: run the block every workday, and log the outcomes. Create a piece of POV content related to it that will make your ideal clients think differently about the problem.

Week three is leverage: activate two partners with a co-created asset (e.g. webinar, podcast episode, white paper, etc.), related to that same problem you picked in week one, and identify a list of deals you can go after together, or referrals you can provide to each-other.

Week four is tuning: review the data, sharpen your ICP message, adjust your lists if needed, and decide what you’ll stop doing next sprint because it didn’t move the needle.