Last week, I wrote about what it takes to build a business development culture inside a company. My argument was simple: you do not create that culture by telling everyone to sell. You create it by helping people understand how they contribute to growth.
Afterward, I sent a note to my subscribers with another question:
What if the business development that needs a jump-start is your own?
One reader wrote back with an answer I wanted to share.
They had recently moved to a new company and were rethinking their personal professional business development strategy. Their new firm was further along in its BD journey than the one they had left, but they were still wrestling with questions many people face after a transition:
What do I do next? Where should I invest my time? How do I integrate more effectively with the rest of my team?
Then they said something that gets to the heart of personal business development: we are rarely successful as a team of one.
They saw their network as a collection of personal professional relationships, but they also understood that those relationships become more valuable when combined with the knowledge, relationships, and goals of the larger team.
That is the tension inside every personal BD plan.
The relationships may be yours. The reputation may be yours. The choices about where you show up and how you contribute may be yours. But if you work inside an organization, your plan cannot exist entirely on its own. It should help you grow while also helping your team see the market more clearly, build stronger relationships, and make better strategic decisions.
I am seeing that same tension in conversations with colleagues as we refine their personal BD plans. The first thing I asked was, “What do you want to achieve?”
One answered, “I want to learn how to advertise myself.”
I understood what they meant. They wanted to become better known inside and outside the company. They wanted to leverage their market experience and relationships to support their career growth and position themselves for a future promotion. They were looking for the fastest path to get there.
But “advertising yourself” is not quite the same as building a professional reputation. Advertising asks, “How do I get people to notice me?” A thoughtful BD plan asks, “What do I want people to trust me for, and how do I demonstrate that value over time?”
Almost every conversation eventually reached the same practical concern:
How am I supposed to do all of this while still doing my job?
It is a fair question. Architects, engineers, builders, project managers, consultants, and technical professionals already have full-time responsibilities. Their performance is measured by the quality of their work, their project results, their responsiveness, and often their utilization. Business development can sound like a second job they are expected to complete before breakfast, after work, or somewhere between deadlines.
A personal BD reset is not about doing more.
It is about becoming more intentional about what you do, why you are doing it, and how it connects to something larger than yourself.
Transitions expose what your old rhythm was carrying
Moving to a new company is one of the clearest times to rethink your business development strategy.
Some relationships will follow you because they trust you personally. Others may have been more connected to your former company, role, or projects than you realized. Your new organization may serve different markets, have different strengths, or expect you to contribute in different ways. Even familiar contacts may need help understanding what your move means and how you can now help them.
You may also lose the internal partner who once helped you make sense of business development. It may have been a formal BD leader, a mentor, a principal, or a colleague who naturally connected relationships to strategy. They helped you decide which opportunities mattered, where to invest your time, and how the pieces fit together. Many people do not recognize how important that person was until they are no longer there.
Without that support, business development can begin to feel like a collection of lunches, events, LinkedIn activity, and good intentions with no clear direction.
I experienced my own version of this when I started Ivi Gabales Consulting in the first quarter of 2025. I had spent years building relationships on behalf of firms. Suddenly, I had to build for myself.
The shift sounded simple, but it required me to rethink how I talked about my value. I could no longer lead with, “Here is what our firm can do for you.” I had to be able to say, “Here is what I can do for you.”
It was uncomfortable at first. Many of us have been taught that promoting ourselves is self-serving, especially when we work as part of a larger organization. But becoming known for your expertise is not an act of disloyalty. If you are a trusted advisor, clients want to work with you because of how you listen, think, solve problems, and make them feel supported. Whether you bring work into your own business or into a larger firm, trust still moves through people.
I had a clear idea of who my ideal client was and i targeted all my content, collateral, and outreach to that niche. In less than a year I had 4 fractional clients providing me with full time work.
The goal is not to make yourself bigger than the team. It is to understand and articulate what you bring to it.
A transition does not mean you have failed at business development. It means the system around you changed, and your plan needs to change with it. You do not have to wait for a new job to experience this. A promotion, new market focus, leadership change, major project win or loss, or simply a season of feeling stuck can all signal that it is time for a reset.
Your BD plan is also a career plan
For many professionals, business development enters the conversation only when they begin moving toward senior leadership. They have spent years becoming excellent at delivering the work, and then the expectations change. They are asked not only to lead projects, but also to understand the market, strengthen client relationships, create opportunities, mentor others, and help shape the future of the business.
That does not mean everyone seeking a promotion needs to become a traditional salesperson. It means leadership increasingly requires the ability to look beyond the work directly in front of you.
A personal BD plan makes that transition intentional. It asks you to consider what kind of leader you want to become, which markets or clients you want to understand, where you can create value beyond your current assignment, and which relationships will matter as your responsibilities grow.
Your career goals should also connect to the company’s needs. Does the organization need a stronger presence in a geographic market? Deeper relationships in a client sector? Someone who can connect technical expertise to emerging opportunities? A leader who can bring different parts of the company together around a shared strategy?
The goal is not to perform business development so leadership notices you. The goal is to begin practicing the broader thinking, relationship-building, and strategic contribution the next role will require.
Done well, business development becomes part of how you do your current job and how you prepare for the next one.
Before you add more, take an honest look at what you have
Most people respond to a stalled business development plan by adding activity. They attend another event, join another organization, schedule more coffees, or promise themselves they will post more often.
Activity can create momentum, but it cannot replace direction.
Before adding anything to your calendar, ask yourself:
What do I want business development to help me accomplish over the next twelve to eighteen months? Am I trying to enter a new market, deepen my position in an existing one, build a network in a geographic area, become more valuable inside my company, prepare for a future leadership role, or create opportunities for my own business?
Which relationships have I meaningfully strengthened during the past ninety days? Who already trusts me but may not understand what I do now? Which relationships have gone quiet because I did not have a reason or a rhythm for staying connected?
Where am I investing my time today, and is that investment aligned with where I want to go? Am I participating deeply in one or two communities, or appearing occasionally in too many places?
What do I want to become known for? If someone referred an opportunity to me tomorrow, would they know what kind of opportunity to send?
How well does my team understand my relationships, interests, and market knowledge? How well do I understand theirs?
And finally, am I actually stuck, or am I expecting results from relationships and activities I have not consistently invested in yet?
These questions are not meant to make you feel behind. They help identify the real gap. Your BD may not need more effort in every direction. It may need more clarity in one.
Start with direction, not networking
“I need to network more” is not a business development strategy. Neither is “I need to get out there.”
One colleague came into our conversation with several potential markets, a limited geographic area, and multiple local organizations they were trying to support. They wondered whether they should expand into a location with less competition.
None of those ideas was necessarily wrong. Together, however, they could easily become a plan that consumed every available hour without creating meaningful traction.
We began narrowing by asking where they already had credibility, where the market activity was, and what work they genuinely wanted to be doing. The questions shifted the conversation from “Where might there be less competition?” to “Where do my experience, relationships, interests, and the company’s needs create the strongest reason for me to invest?”
A useful personal BD plan begins with that kind of direction. You may choose a client type, market sector, geographic area, technical expertise, or business problem around which you want to build.
Try completing this sentence:
Over the next year, I want to become better known among ________ for my ability to help with ________.
For one person, that might mean becoming better known among school district leaders in a particular region for helping them deliver complex capital programs. For another, it may mean building relationships with healthcare executives around pediatric behavioral health design. A business owner may want to become the first person growing companies call when their business development efforts feel scattered.
The answer does not have to be perfect, but it needs to be specific enough to guide your choices.
Once you have a direction, you can evaluate everything else against it. Does this organization put you near the community you want to understand? Does this event help you deepen the right relationships? Does this content reinforce the expertise you want to be known for? Does this opportunity move you toward the work you want next?
Direction gives you permission to say no to activity that looks productive but does not support the plan.
Choose the relationships that deserve your attention
Most people do not have a networking problem. They have a staying-connected problem.
They know plenty of people. What they lack is a deliberate way to decide which relationships need attention and what the next step should be.
Start with a small group rather than trying to maintain everyone at once. Your priorities might include clients you want to understand more deeply, former colleagues you want to reconnect with, new contacts in your target market, internal partners who could help you learn or grow, and peers who may become future clients, collaborators, or decision-makers.
Do not only look upward. Early in my career, many of the people I met were not yet signing contracts or leading organizations. Over time, we grew into new roles together. A strong network includes the leaders who can open doors today and the peers who may shape the market tomorrow.
For each priority relationship, identify one natural next step. It might be a conversation, an introduction, a useful article, a project debrief, an invitation to an event, or simply checking in because it has been too long.
The point is not to attach an immediate ask to every relationship. It is to remain present enough to understand what matters to the other person and to be useful when the opportunity arises.
Choose where people can experience you
Joining an organization is not the same as investing in one. Membership may put your name on a list, but contribution helps people understand who you are, what you care about, and how you work.
Choose a professional organization, committee, community, or cause connected to the market you want to serve. Attend often enough to recognize people and be recognized. Volunteer for work that lets you contribute something useful. Ask thoughtful questions. Help someone else succeed. Follow up outside the scheduled events.
This is not about finding the room with the highest concentration of potential clients. It is about finding a community where your interests and the needs of the market genuinely overlap.
The same principle applies to visibility. Visibility without a point of view is just exposure. You do not have to become a full-time content creator, but you do need to make it easier for people to understand what you know, what you notice, and what you care about.
Choose one or two subjects connected to your direction. Share what you are learning from client conversations, projects, conferences, market changes, or your own experience. You can do that through LinkedIn, an article, a presentation, an internal training session, a panel, a client roundtable, or a thoughtful question in the right meeting.
Your visibility should not feel like a performance separate from your work. It should help others see the value already present in how you think.
If someone read your last five posts, heard you speak at an event, or sat beside you in a client meeting, would they leave with a clear sense of what they could trust you to help them with?
If not, you may need more focus, not more visibility.
Bring your personal relationships into the team strategy
This is the piece the subscriber’s response made impossible to ignore.
A personal BD plan should not become a private spreadsheet of names that only one person understands. Relationships are personal, and trust cannot simply be transferred from one colleague to another. But the insight surrounding those relationships can and should strengthen the team.
Share what you are hearing. Compare your relationship map with your teammates’ maps. Look for gaps, overlaps, and opportunities to make thoughtful introductions. Talk about which clients know only one person in the company and which relationships would benefit from a broader team.
Do not confuse relationship ownership with relationship protection.
If a client trusts you, introducing them to the right teammate should deepen the relationship, not threaten it. It shows that you understand their needs well enough to bring more value to the table. It also reduces the risk that the entire client relationship disappears when one person changes roles or leaves the company.
The best teams do not dump their contacts into a system and call it collaboration. They add context. They explain the history, trust, sensitivities, commitments already made, and where another person might genuinely help.
Internal visibility matters too. Your coworkers need to understand the market knowledge, relationships, and interests you bring. You also need to understand the expertise and relationships around you well enough to connect them to the right external need.
Rarely are we successful as a team of one. Personal business development creates more value when it becomes part of a shared strategy.
Do not build a second job
When I looked at my colleagues’ calendars, the answer was clearly not to add five breakfasts, two evening events, a board position, and weekly LinkedIn posts. That might look like a robust BD plan on paper. In practice, it would be abandoned the moment a project demanded their full attention.
The answer is not to wait until you are less busy. For most high-performing professionals, that season never arrives. Instead, look for ways to make business development part of work you are already doing.
A client meeting becomes a relationship-building opportunity when you arrive with one thoughtful question about what is ahead, not only what is due today. A project debrief can uncover future needs as well as lessons learned. A conference you already attend becomes more strategic when you identify three people to contact before you arrive. A technical presentation can increase your visibility while helping your team and clients understand an emerging issue. A follow-up email can strengthen a relationship when it includes something genuinely useful.
Your project work is not separate from business development. Delivering well, understanding the client, communicating honestly, and creating confidence are some of the most powerful business development activities you can do.
But integration does not mean business development requires no additional time. Some relationships need conversations outside a project agenda. Organizations require real participation. Visibility requires thought and preparation. If your company expects you to contribute to growth, there should be an honest conversation about priorities, workload, and what you have permission to stop doing or delegate.
You cannot keep adding responsibilities and call it development.
Once the scope is realistic, put it on your calendar. A plan that lives only in a document will eventually become something you intended to do.
Create a rhythm small enough to sustain. Each week, strengthen one priority relationship. Start or renew one conversation. Share one useful resource, insight, or introduction. Take one visibility action. Spend fifteen minutes documenting what you learned and deciding what comes next.
Once a month, look across the larger plan. Are you investing in the right relationships? Are you showing up consistently in the community you chose? Is your team learning from what you are hearing? Is your visibility reinforcing the expertise you want to build?
Every quarter, revisit your direction. Markets change. Roles evolve. Relationships deepen or fade. Your plan should be steady enough to create momentum and flexible enough to respond to what you learn.
Measure movement before revenue
Revenue matters. But in relationship-driven industries, it is often the last visible result of work that began months or years earlier.
Measure the leading indicators too: meaningful conversations, relationships strengthened, introductions made or received, invitations to participate, client intelligence uncovered, follow-ups completed, and opportunities influenced.
Also pay attention to a quieter indicator. Are people beginning to seek your perspective?
When someone asks what you are seeing in the market, invites you into a strategic conversation, introduces you to someone important, or thinks of you when an opportunity emerges, your positioning is changing.
Relationships build trust. Trust builds opportunity. Opportunity drives ROI.
Your reset does not have to be dramatic
You do not need a new CRM, a packed event calendar, or a hundred-name target list to restart your business development.
You need a direction you can explain, a small group of relationships you will intentionally strengthen, a community where you will contribute, a point of view you are willing to share, and a rhythm that keeps the plan moving.
Then you need to connect your effort to the people around you.
Your personal BD plan should help you grow, but it should also make your team stronger. It should turn what you know and who you know into shared insight, thoughtful action, and better opportunities for everyone.
If your business development feels stalled, do not begin by asking how to do more.
Ask where you are going, who matters, where you will invest, what you want to be known for, and how your team can move forward with you.
That may be the reset you need.
I am curious: which part of your personal BD plan needs the most attention right now? Direction, relationships, community, visibility, consistency, or team alignment? Reply or leave a comment. Your question may be exactly what someone else in this community is trying to solve too.
