You shrink business development instead of pausing it. I teach this as simmer mode: minimum viable showing up, so you never recede from view while client work owns your weeks. One protected block, a few small moves, and the pots stay warm until you have bandwidth again.
Drop to a defined minimum instead of zero: one protected block a week, holding the essentials.
Pausing empties next quarter's pipeline on a delay. A small simmer keeps you in view for it.
Put one 45-minute block on next week's calendar and guard it like a client call.
Simmer mode is minimum viable business development, minimum viable showing up.
Leah Neaderthal, Smart Gets Paid
In a slammed month, business development shrinks to three small moves, done once a week each. This is simmer mode, the low end of how I teach marketing capacity: like pots on a stove, you're keeping things warm so you don't recede into the distance while client work has your attention.
The simmer essentials:
Everything else waits, guilt-free. The fuller strategy I teach has three modes, and the whole point of naming the floor is that you stop measuring a slammed month against a spacious one.
Balance them at the week level, with one protected block for business development, and let the rest of the week belong to client work. Daily balancing loses every time, because client work expands and a ten-minute marketing moment gets eaten whole by the switch: task-switching research by Rubinstein, Meyer, and Evans found that even brief mental blocks from shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% of someone's productive time. Scattered slivers of business development are mostly switching cost.
One block changes the math:
If a client emergency truly takes the hour, move it inside the same week. Postponed to "when things calm down," it dies there, because that week never comes.
The true minimum is smaller than you think: about 45 minutes a week, and in a truly crushing week, replies only.
Answer what comes to you, keep the one conversation in flight warm, and let everything outbound wait seven days. One replies-only week costs you nothing, and nobody notices it but you.
Go dark for a whole engagement and the delay does its quiet work: the people who were warming up cool off, the busy-but-invisible pattern sets in, and the famine lands right as the big project wraps. That swing between slammed and scared is the feast-or-famine cycle, and full-throttle delivery with zero visibility is the first half of the swing, every time.
So hold the floor. Forty-five minutes, or replies-only when it's brutal, and a real return to form the week the pressure breaks. The women who escape the swing are the ones whose minimum never hits zero.
Here's the thing: slammed is a good problem, and it's the most dangerous good problem in consulting. You're delivering, you're billing, everyone's thrilled, and the whole time your future pipeline is quietly starving. Nobody can point at the damage until months later, when the project ends and the phone is silent, and by then it reads like bad luck instead of a predictable delay.
Simmer mode exists because the alternative advice is useless. "Make time for marketing" sounds nice and helps nobody. A defined floor is a plan: three small moves, one protected block, and permission to do exactly that much without guilt. The women I work with don't need more pressure to do everything. They need to know what counts as enough when everything is on fire, and enough is smaller than they think.
And when the season breaks, turn it back up. The stove has more than one setting.
The Academy is where I teach the whole strategy, all three modes of it, with a room of women doing the same work.
In a week with zero minutes, reply to one person and do nothing else. Answer the messages that come to you, keep your one live conversation from going cold, and skip everything outbound. One replies-only week is invisible to everyone but you. What matters is that next week the block comes back, because the floor only works when zero stays rare.
Say it with a door attached: "I'm delivering hard until October, and I'd love to talk now so we can plan for then." Booked signals demand, and demand attracts, as long as the conversation stays open. What you never do is go silent on someone warm because you're busy. The talk costs an hour. Rebuilding their interest later costs a season.
Reconnection first, because it produces conversations fastest, then your posting rhythm, then anything new. The fuller answer lives in [what to do first when work slows down](/getting-consulting-clients/when-referrals-slow-down/node-5.html), and the short version is: start with the people who already know you, and add nothing new until the old rhythm is back.
As a permanent system, yes. A floor that only fits after hours is a sign the block was never protected, and it turns visibility into a resentment engine. Put the 45 minutes inside the work week, on the calendar, where it's a business activity instead of a personal sacrifice. Your business development should run on the same clock your clients do.