I often get pushback from professionals who tell me they struggle to find the time or motivation for business development and I have empathy with their concerns.
The fact is though, people who employ daily or weekly habits and find a disciplined system, do better than others who do not. So, let’s look how discipline will outperform motivation over time.
I usually start by advising people to avoid Mondays and Fridays as there are too many distractions. Instead, look to put aside a minimum of two hours on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. I recommend a minimum of two hours per week and suggest for example midday until 2:00 PM.
In the first hour you may write an article or record a video and in the second hour you need to be out from behind your desk and building relationships with three groups of people. I often refer to this as the 555 method. Let me explain.
About 10 years ago I wrote a blog entitled “eat your way to success” which suggested that you could have breakfast, lunch and an afternoon catch up of coffee or something stronger with someone every day. You could do this each day of the week resulting in 15 potential meetings every week. Realistically, this is not possible as it would be neither healthy nor practical.
However, imagine how different your professional practice might look if you achieve just two of these external meetings per week with either existing clients, prospects who match your ideal client profile or referrers and joint venture partners.
This would give you an additional 100 external meetings per year that you perhaps did not have last year and due to the fact that good things happen when you go and talk to people, I would be confident in guaranteeing you double digit growth should you do this one thing alone.
However, if you manage to become even better at explaining your value and are able to convert many more of these meetings into profitable new work, the world is your oyster.
To make this process easier, you need to create a dynamic list of the clients, prospects and referrers that you wish to meet and you should have a minimum of five of these any one time. That is why I refer to this as the 555 system and I wholeheartedly recommend it to you.
