Make business development a habit that scales up and down with your capacity, rather than something you run when work dries up. Pick a small number of activities you can sustain at your busiest, do more of them when you have room, and never drop to zero. The floor you hold is what makes it steady.
Define the smallest version of business development you can keep doing in your busiest week, and hold that floor.
A floor you never drop below removes the months of silence that create the swing three months later.
Write down two activities you could do even in a terrible week, with a number and a frequency.
The only strategy is consistency.
Leah Neaderthal, Smart Gets Paid
A steady habit looks like three settings for the same short list of activities, so that a busy month turns the volume down instead of turning it off. I call them simmer, maintenance, and power, and the point of having three is that you always have one you can do.
| Mode | When you use it | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Simmer | Slammed with client work, traveling, sick, caring for someone, or you just want to let up | Minimum viable showing up. Enough that you don't recede into the distance |
| Maintenance | Your everyday status quo, when you have some room and want to keep planting seeds | Steady, repeatable activity you could hold for a year |
| Power | You have something to promote, you've been quiet a while, or you want to make something happen | Foot on the gas, treated like a campaign |
Most consultants think they have maintenance mode and discover they've been in simmer for months. That's a useful discovery, because moving up a level is a decision you can make on a Monday.
You don't need a reason to be in simmer, either. Not feeling like doing more than the minimum is a legitimate reason on its own.
Pick the two or three you'll keep doing, because the choice of activity counts for far less than whether it survives a hard month. There's no right or wrong set here. The strategy is consistency, and everything else is preference.
Two things worth weighing as you choose:
The channel choices themselves have their own answers: what to post if LinkedIn is your one place covers that one properly, and speaking, newsletters and warm outreach each have their own page. What belongs here is the selection rule, which is that a smaller list you keep is worth more than a bigger list you abandon.
And note what counts. Following up with people already in your world is business development. It doesn't all have to be net new people.
Make your income steadier by changing the shape of your revenue, so that fewer signatures have to carry the year. A steady habit fixes the input. The output has its own levers, and consultants tend to leave all of them alone.
Three that move the most:
The pricing side of this belongs elsewhere, and turning your work into packages instead of hours is where the mechanics live. The point here is that a business made only of one-off projects has to re-sell itself from zero every time.
If consistency hasn't stuck, the plan was almost certainly too big, and the fix is to make it smaller. I learned this training for a triathlon: I only had one speed, and it was fast, and I couldn't hold it for any distance. I had to teach myself to run slowly so I could run longer.
You'll know it's too much because you won't do it. And the trial-and-error phase is normal: you've done these tactics for a while, but the plan is new, so adjusting it down twice is what it looks like when it's working. If the swing itself is what you're trying to break, why the income moved in the first place is worth reading alongside this, and what a whole healthy business looks like sets the target the habit is serving.
The reason I teach modes instead of a plan is that a plan assumes every month is the same, and no consulting month is the same as the one before it.
I'd rather you have something you can do at your worst than something impressive you can do in March. Because the month you skip is the month that costs you, and it costs you a quarter later, when you've forgotten you skipped it.
Here's the thing about small numbers, and I don't think consultants believe this until they see it. One outreach email a week, with two weeks off, is fifty conversations you started that wouldn't have happened. Two posts a week is a hundred posts. Nobody feels like they're doing much when they're doing one of something.
The other benefit is the one people don't expect. When you're consistent, no single day has to carry anything. If you don't feel like showing up on a Tuesday, the seeds you planted in March are still out there working. That's what takes the pressure off, and it's why I'd take the habit over the heroic month every time.
Simmer mode counts as long as you don't hit zero. One warm outreach email a week, or one repurposed post, is a real floor. What breaks the system is a month of nothing, because a month of nothing shows up as a quiet quarter later. If a floor feels like a burden every single week, it's set too high and should come down until it's boring.
Staying fully booked is the argument for continuing. A full calendar today is the product of business development you did months ago, so stopping now schedules the next quiet stretch. Drop to your smallest sustainable level and hold it there. This is the single most common way the swing gets created, and it always looks reasonable at the time.
Long enough that you should not judge it by one month. A consulting sale runs three to eighteen months from first conversation to signature, and awareness takes longer than that to build, so activity started in January is showing up in the second half of the year. Judge the habit on whether you kept it, and judge the income on a twelve-month view.
One thing done consistently wins by a wide margin. Being present in one place regularly is more effective than appearing in five places occasionally, because familiarity is built by repetition and repetition is what a scattered plan can't deliver. Pick the one you'd keep doing on a bad week, get it steady, and add a second only once the first has stopped taking effort.