Back in June I promised to post ideas on finding the time for business development, and haven’t done so. Things slowed down for us this summer, so I wasn’t pressed for time, myself. The time subject just didn’t seem interesting.

Summer is over, and, for now at least, the economy chugs along at a good clip. Once again my clients are struggling to get their client work done, and, once again, putting business development calls and meetings at the rear of the train. Many professionals are afraid to do any marketing for fear that the client called might want to hire them, when they have too little time to do it.

They forget that calls made today are unlikely to turn up business today, and will preserve relationships that you will need when the economy turns (see The Lead Glut and It’s Consequences). So, now both you and I are ready to talk, once again, about making time for business development.

Logically, there are a limited number of ways to find time in an overloaded schedule. You can: 1) replace some other activity (sleep, comes to mind, though some of you readers might not find that suggestion funny), 2) increase your efficiency somewhere, and so, free up time for business development, or 3) you alter something else you are doing so that you derive business development value from it, too. We call this Two-for-One marketing. I will address Two-for-Ones today.

In the first group of professionals that I ever coached, Jim had the most difficulty finding time for business development calls and meetings. He had taken on a workload that would have broken someone else’s back. During one coaching session he said he would be unable to make any calls the following week. He would be meeting with clients in Boston all day on Monday, in Detroit on Tuesday, in Milwaukee on Wednesday and in Memphis on Thursday and Friday. He would be in meetings or at airports most of the day.

I have a rule that I shared with him of not letting a day pass without doing something, no matter how small, to further my efforts to develop business. Jim agreed to try this approach. On his return, he told of how at each client site, he had dropped by the office of a person he knew but was not scheduled to meet. He would stick his head into the contact’s office and say, “I’m here to meet with x and just wanted to say hello.” This led to a brief conversation without taking much extra time. In most cases he arrive a little early at the client’s offices and took ten minutes before the meeting started to look up the additional person.

By Wednesday Jim already had a pay-off. The extra person he visited in Milwaukee gave him a modest lead, which had the potential to convert into something big.

James McKinsey, the founder of McKinsey & Company, believed in Two-for-Ones. According to his biography, he encouraged all of the firm’s consultants to have lunches with prospective clients. The consultants would be having lunch anyway, so why not get some additional value from it?

Other Two-for-Ones that I have seen people use are:

• Talking with seatmates on airplanes
• Making calls on cell phones while commuting
• Going to a sporting or cultural outing that you would go to anyway and taking a client with you

I have an image in my mind of a dinner plate heaped revoltingly full of all kinds of food.  There’s pickled herring and taco chips, a combination my mother actually served to guests once.  There’s spaghetti in marinara sauce with anchovies, an egg roll, cherry pie, creamed spinach, oysters and chocolate sauce.  There’s blue berry yogurt, cheese whiz, acorn squash, pork loin and peanut brittle.  Avocado, crab cake, pigs-in-blankets and plum pudding.  I am seated, staring at this mess, and a waiter is standing beside me with a serving dish filled with bananas, steak tartar, juju bees, liver pâté and a green substance that they used to serve in school, and which I still can’t identify, all smothered in redeye gravy. The waiter is saying, “Would you like some more, sir?”
 

This image comes to me, whenever someone says that he can’t do any business development, because his plate is too full, already.  How I loath the full-plate metaphor!
 

So, I will make you a deal.  From time to time I will provide you with ideas for addressing the time problem.  Of course, none of them will solve it; it’s the kind of thing you can only chip away at.   But, if you use them, they will help.  In return, you will eliminate the full-plate metaphor from your repertoire or, at least not use it in my presence.  Deal? 
 

My first suggestion came from a consultant whose career streaked upwards to a partnership in his firm.  “At the beginning of every year,” he told me, “I look at what I am spending my time on.  I try to identify things that I won’t be doing by the end of the year and that will free up about ten per cent of my time, which I can then apply to a higher and better use.  I then work at unloading those things.  Some of them take a few months and some of them the better part of the year.  But I get rid of them.” That’s how he made time for business development.
 

Think for a few minutes on this simple idea. This is the kind of thing that successful careers are built on.  It is such good advice that it’s worth unloading two or three full plates from your vocabulary.