Welcome to my blog.  It is designed for professionals who must both deliver their firm’s service and also sell those services, i.e. for seller/doers, for aspiring and actual rainmakers.  These include many attorneys, architects, actuaries, engineers, executive recruiters, interior designers, management consultants, publicists and those who work with such professionals on marketing and selling. I hope it will:

• Provide a regular reminder of the need to stay focused on business development, even though you are faced with pressing client work. Many of the professionals we have worked with have commented on the value of regular reinforcement.  This blog will provide it to those who want it in what we hope is a lively, short format.
• Provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and information about rain making.  I hope that the blog helps you exchange ideas with other professionals who also must develop new business.
• Help me stay in touch with people Harding & Company has worked with as clients and friends over the years.  All of us at Harding & Company would like to hear from you.

For those who don’t know me, here is an overvew of my background:

• My undergraduate degree is in social anthropology and I consider myself an applied anthropologist.  After a brief stint as a community organizer in Chicago, I went to business school and spent an unhappy year working for a public/private partnership (Undergraduate: Harvard ‘69, Business school: Kellogg ‘75).
• I spent the next fourteen years as a consultant at The Fantus Company (later PHH Fantus) as a location consultant, helping companies select locations for plants, offices, research labs and warehouses.  I loved this work: Getting paid to travel to and explore new places was a perfect fit for me. I thrived and ended up running one of the firm’s offices and then a national practice.  I also served on the executive committee.  During these years I first got involved with selling professional services and helping others learn to do so.
• Having difficulties with the management of our new parent company, I resigned with perfect ill-timing, just before the First Gulf War and related recession.  I spent a frustrating nine months looking for work, but also learned about many professional firms under the legitimate guise of a job seeker.
• I spent two years as the director of marketing at The Hillier Group, a large architecture firm.  This exposed me to the design professions.  I learned that these professions also had difficulty converting doers and managers into sellers.  The ubiquitous nature of this problem in the professions gave me the idea for my current practice.  I started writing my first book, Rain Making, at nights and on weekends.
• In 1993 I set up Harding & Company to help professionals make the transition from doing to selling.  I had one client at that time, IBM Consulting.  I imagined developing a small regional practice.  Imagine my surprise to find myself working in ten different countries on five continents in 1994.
• To do a better job of creating rainmakers, I began to interview the best rainmakers at many firms and also people who observed them in action.  This database, which now covers in excess of 300 rainmakers, has provided most of what we now teach.
• Fourteen years and three books later I am still at it and having a blast.  The client firms we work for do interesting things and the people we work with are smart.  It is tremendously rewarding to see professionals catch the business development fire and have their careers take off.

I have a wife and one son and am inordinately lucky in both of them.

I can be reached at fharding@hardingco.com.