When I was in Nashville last week, I wanted to record every single second of my day.
Every conversation was filled with nuggets: information, insights into our organization, things I didn’t know I needed to know until someone said them out loud over coffee or between sessions. Some of it was about clients. Some of it was about how other offices run their pursuits.
And some of it was so simple I wanted to write it on a sticky note and put it on every conference room wall: no presentation should start with “this is who we are.” Boom. Your presentation is always about the client.
I couldn’t record it. But I could do the next best thing: make sure those conversations don’t stop now that I’m home.
Here’s what usually happens instead. You come back from a conference, a retreat, or a great industry event full of energy. You have a stack of business cards, a notebook full of ideas, and a handful of people you genuinely clicked with. You promise to stay in touch.
Then Monday hits. The inbox wins. A month later, the ideas are buried in a notebook and the people are back to being LinkedIn connections you like once in a while.
The conversations were the most valuable part of the trip, and they’re the first thing to disappear.
Over the last few weeks I’ve written about why peers matter (the relationships you’ll never pitch), how to use the people on the inside, and the three coffees that tell you more than any RFP. This is the piece that holds all of it together: how to build a peer bench. A small, intentional group of people you keep talking to, on purpose, long after the event ends.
Some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten came from my bench. Meet with the losing team came from one of my BD peer mentors. The “this is who we are” gem came from my peer group last week. None of it came from a keynote.
Below, I’ll walk through the five seats every peer bench needs, the simple cadence that keeps it alive without taking over your calendar, a two-minute habit for capturing the nuggets so they don’t disappear, and how to turn a bench into a peer group when you’re ready.
