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How to Make Time for Business Development
You don’t need more hours for business development. You need a system that doesn’t depend on you being personally involved at every stage.
In this episode, Michelle breaks down why delivery always wins when it competes with growth, how that creates the feast-or-famine “rescue mission” cycle, and what to build instead.
You’ll learn:
- Why business development is a design problem, not a scheduling problem
- How an Opportunity Engine keeps buyers moving while you’re delivering client work
- Why protecting manager time matters — and why a half-day works better than leftover hours
- How your team can contribute to growth through client service, referrals, and debrief conversations
- Why better positioning and diagnostics lead to shorter, stronger sales conversations
- How one consultant went from near zero to $500K in under 12 months by building the system first
If your next engagement still depends on having enough time to go find it, this episode will show you what needs to change.
Join the upcoming Opportunity Engine Intensive
Or schedule a conversation to see how we can help further.
Transcript
Today I want to talk about a situation that I bet is familiar
Speaker:to almost everyone listening in some way.
Speaker:You land a big engagement, a good one,
Speaker:and you pour everything you've got into delivering it because that's what you do.
Speaker:You're good at the work and the work deserves it.
Speaker:And for a few months, the firm looks great.
Speaker:But while all your attention was inside that project,
Speaker:something happened in the background.
Speaker:The pipeline went cold.
Speaker:So you finish, you look up, and you're back at square one,
Speaker:hustling for the next lead. If that's you,
Speaker:I want to talk about why it keeps happening because it probably isn't what you're
Speaker:assuming. Most consultants and farm owners treat this as a scheduling issue.
Speaker:They go looking for a better planner,
Speaker:a better system, a time-blocking approach,
Speaker:some way to squeeze growth into the cracks between client calls.
Speaker:And the instinct makes sense, but that's not what's actually going on.
Speaker:This isn't a scheduling issue at all.
Speaker:Actually, Chris will tell you,
Speaker:it's a problem of design. And here's what he means by that.
Speaker:When delivery and business development compete for the same hour,
Speaker:delivery wins every single time.
Speaker:And it wins for a good reason.
Speaker:Delivery has what Chris calls revenue gravity.
Speaker:There are deadlines, there are client emergencies,
Speaker:there's money that's already been committed.
Speaker:It pulls harder, and honestly,
Speaker:it probably should.
Speaker:So if your entire approach to business development requires you
Speaker:to be personally present for every piece of it,
Speaker:every call, every coffee, every follow-up you have to remember to send,
Speaker:then you've built something where the thing that matters least urgently loses every
Speaker:single week. It's simple math.
Speaker:And we should talk about what it turns into because this is the part that does
Speaker:the real damage.
Speaker:When business development only happens because the pipeline is empty
Speaker:and revenue is at risk, you're operating in what we call the rescue mission model
Speaker:of growth. You're not building anything,
Speaker:you're reacting. And that costs way more than momentum.
Speaker:Because when you're building from a position of need,
Speaker:you lose the ability to say no.
Speaker:You take the engagement that's slightly wrong,
Speaker:then you take the one that's clearly wrong.
Speaker:And slowly, without ever making a decision about it,
Speaker:you stop being a specialist and you start being a generalist for hire.
Speaker:That's a very hard thing to come back from.
Speaker:So let's reframe the question.
Speaker:The question isn't how do I find more hours?
Speaker:You don't have more hours. That's the entire premise of the problem.
Speaker:The question is how much of this actually needs me.
Speaker:Because here's what Chris finds most firm owners have never really taken a look at.
Speaker:A large share of what brings the right buyers to you can run while you're sitting
Speaker:in a delivery meeting. It doesn't need your presence at all.
Speaker:Let me show you what that means.
Speaker:An opportunity engine is a deliberate,
Speaker:repeatable system that aligns your business development with
Speaker:how clients naturally make buying decisions and it moves the right buyers through
Speaker:five stages. One, they discover your expertise.
Speaker:Two, they understand the specific problem that you solve.
Speaker:Three, they experience how you think before they ever hire you.
Speaker:Four
Speaker:Trust builds before the first meeting happens.
Speaker:And five, they enter a diagnostic conversation because they're actually ready.
Speaker:Now, stages one through four do not require you to be in the room.
Speaker:What they require is assets,
Speaker:a named problem, a visible point of view,
Speaker:a framework somebody can encounter without you being there to explain it.
Speaker:You build those once and then they keep working.
Speaker:They let a buyer make progress on their own timing instead of yours.
Speaker:Stage five requires you,
Speaker:and it should. That's the diagnostic conversation.
Speaker:And that's where your knowledge,
Speaker:expertise, and dare I say wisdom is doing the actual work.
Speaker:That's the part nobody can do for you,
Speaker:and you shouldn't want them to.
Speaker:So think about what that means if you're underwater right now.
Speaker:You've been trying to run all five stages personally in real time,
Speaker:one prospect at a time. Which means stages one through four only happen when you've
Speaker:got a spare hour. And you don't have spare hours.
Speaker:That's why you're listening to this.
Speaker:So what shows up at stage five?
Speaker:A buyer who's cold?
Speaker:Who doesn't understand what you do yet,
Speaker:which makes that conversation longer and harder,
Speaker:and a lot more likely to end with a proposal that just goes out into the ether.
Speaker:Here's the part I think that is genuinely underrated.
Speaker:Build stages one through four once,
Speaker:and stage five gets shorter and more effective at the same time.
Speaker:That's the compounding piece.
Speaker:It's not just that the system runs without you,
Speaker:it's that the conversations you do have get better because the buyer arrives already
Speaker:understanding your point of view.
Speaker:Less explaining, more diagnosing.
Speaker:And I want to be honest here about what relief actually looks like
Speaker:at this point because people expect the wrong thing.
Speaker:The first relief isn't more leads.
Speaker:More leads takes a while. The first relief is shorter conversations that actually
Speaker:go somewhere. Okay, so how do you actually build any
Speaker:of this when you're already at capacity?
Speaker:Two moves and they work together.
Speaker:Most people only ever attempt the first one,
Speaker:which is why it rarely holds. This is something Chris talks about often.
Speaker:It's protecting
Speaker:Manager hours. Maker time is delivery,
Speaker:working in the business. Manager time is working on the business,
Speaker:building the thing that generates demand.
Speaker:That distinction only matters if manager time is genuinely protected.
Speaker:And here's the uncomfortable test of whether it actually is protected.
Speaker:Something visible has to occasionally give.
Speaker:If nothing ever gives, you haven't protected anything.
Speaker:You've just found spare hours,
Speaker:and as Chris says, spare hours don't exist in a busy firm.
Speaker:Start with a half day, not just an hour,
Speaker:because I can easily get eaten up by email.
Speaker:A half day has enough mass to survive contact with a real week.
Speaker:And here's what makes this block actually hold.
Speaker:I want you to name the specific asset you're building.
Speaker:Business development is too vague a label,
Speaker:and it becomes email every time.
Speaker:Back to the inbox. But draft the stage two problem statement,
Speaker:that's a task.
Speaker:When the work is a specific component of something,
Speaker:you're building the block survives.
Speaker:Second move, distribute what doesn't need you.
Speaker:This is the latter framework, and it exists so that growth doesn't rest entirely
Speaker:on the founder's shoulders. And rungs two through four can be run by your team
Speaker:on live engagements starting this week.
Speaker:Rung two is quality client service.
Speaker:And the tool there is the scale question.
Speaker:On a scale of one to ten, how are we doing?
Speaker:And what would it take to get to a ten?
Speaker:Now anyone on your team can ask that.
Speaker:And here's why that's so important.
Speaker:The answer to the second half of that question what would it take to get to a 10,
Speaker:is the diagnostic input for the next project's scope.
Speaker:The client has just told you.
Speaker:what to sell them next. Rung three is asking for referrals proactively.
Speaker:At the moment, credibility is highest,
Speaker:which is usually mid-engagement or right after a solid win,
Speaker:not when you need the work. Rung four is debrief and diagnostic conversations.
Speaker:At the project wrap up, instead of closing the file,
Speaker:you have a conversation about what's next for their team.
Speaker:Almost nobody does this.
Speaker:And it's the moment you have more standing with the client than you will ever have
Speaker:again.
Speaker:Now notice something about all three.
Speaker:None of them require you. All of them are currently waiting for you,
Speaker:though. And if your first thought is that your team isn't senior enough
Speaker:for business development, rungs two through four aren't sales skills,
Speaker:they're service skills. If your team is senior enough to deliver quality work
Speaker:in front of a client, they're senior enough to ask what it would take to
Speaker:get to a 10.
Speaker:I want to close with a story because it makes a point that's very easy
Speaker:to miss and then you can get on with your day.
Speaker:There's a consultant Chris has worked with named Cheryl.
Speaker:She works with women pursuing a very specific role inside tech companies.
Speaker:When she started building her opportunity engine,
Speaker:she was close to zero in this new area.
Speaker:She'd had a handful of conversations and clients over the previous year,
Speaker:and she was in her 60s starting essentially from scratch.
Speaker:What she did first though was not more outreach.
Speaker:It was narrowing. She got precise about exactly who her client was.
Speaker:The problems she solved and the outcomes she guided them toward.
Speaker:Her positioning sharpened and she got very good in one lane.
Speaker:Then she built her diagnostic.
Speaker:So she was walking into conversations,
Speaker:already knowing the precise issues each woman was likely facing.
Speaker:That changed what those conversations were.
Speaker:They became diagnostic conversations.
Speaker:She listened and guided each woman to see what the real problem actually was.
Speaker:And because she was already positioned to solve exactly that problem,
Speaker:there was no pitch.
Speaker:There didn't need to be one.
Speaker:Then she offered a wedge, a smaller initial engagement,
Speaker:helping these women build their dream lists,
Speaker:start conversations, get on the radar of the companies they actually wanted.
Speaker:A wedge, as Chris describes it,
Speaker:is a physical manifestation of trust.
Speaker:It shows a client what's possible before they commit to the full body of work.
Speaker:Once that landed, the larger engagement was an easy yes.
Speaker:Trust was already established.
Speaker:Hesitation just wasn't a fact.
Speaker:Now her pipeline flows. She can predict how many new clients to expect each quarter,
Speaker:and she's starting building a second opportunity engine for
Speaker:an entirely different ideal client,
Speaker:the tech companies themselves,
Speaker:solving the problem from both sides.
Speaker:Under 12 months, from near zero to 500,000 with a million projected.
Speaker:Now, this is the part that I want you to sit with.
Speaker:She could not have taken on that second stream if she were still drowning
Speaker:in delivery with no system behind her.
Speaker:Heck, she couldn't have gotten to 500K in the first stream without
Speaker:the system behind her.
Speaker:And again, this wasn't so much a time issue as it was a system issue.
Speaker:Expansion requires a pipeline you can count on before you commit to the work.
Speaker:That's the real cost of doing business development in leftover hours because there
Speaker:are no leftover hours.
Speaker:A second ideal client, a higher tier of engagement,
Speaker:a service line you've been thinking about for two years,
Speaker:all of it sits behind the same gate.
Speaker:Can you generate demand on purpose?
Speaker:Or only when you happen to have time?
Speaker:Delivery capacity was never the ceiling.
Speaker:The ceiling is whether growth runs without you.
Speaker:So stop trying to find time for business development.
Speaker:You're not going to find it. That was never the problem,
Speaker:as I've said probably five times by now.
Speaker:Build the parts that don't need your time at all.
Speaker:Protect a half day here and there to build them.
Speaker:And hand your team the rungs of the ladder they can own.
Speaker:Essentially, go build the engine.
Speaker:If your next consulting client depends on who happens to refer you this month,
Speaker:the next three weeks can change that for good.
Speaker:Our opportunity engine intensive begins again within just days.
Speaker:Working live with us, you'll build the foundation of your opportunity engine,
Speaker:the positioning, entry, offer,
Speaker:and diagnostic that turn right fit conversations into paid work.
Speaker:That's where the system begins.
Speaker:Question is, what are you waiting on to build it?
Speaker:The link is in the notes. All right,
Speaker:till next time.
