How do I keep the work coming in?

There is often a dilemma with small and growing businesses - they get busy servicing clients, neglect looking for new clients, then end up panicking and looking around for work. It can be a vicious circle – being needy does not leave you in the best mindset to build your client base with the ‘right’ sort of clients.

Utopia would be to have a controlled pipeline of orders from committed, paying clients who have the potential to allow you to grow with them. Reality might be somewhere in between.

What’s certain is that Utopia won’t happen unless you have targets, a plan to get there and the commitment to follow the plan.

Clearly that means you have to allocate time to working your plan and guard against using that time for a short term ‘opportunity’. Just think of it as being time already allocated to a project for your top customer – yourself.

So how much time should you ring fence for this?

Obviously that will depend on your targets, the number of prospecting activities in your plan, the nature of the activities, and the intended results of the activities. Relying only on passive activities such as direct mail or e-mail for example are likely to be less productive than activities such as direct contact, networking or proactive referral generation, where you have the opportunity of generating a dialogue with a prospect. Aim to have 4 or 5 different prospecting activities, and keep track of where your clients come from so you can identify which are working best for you.

As you client base builds then you can change the balance of your prospecting to bring more referral generation and repeat business.

As businesses grow they can also find themselves over dependent on one sector which can represent a risk to the business. There needs to be some thought given to a strategy to manage this risk – looking for opportunities to become involved in a small project in a new sector to generate experience or partnering up with someone who can help in that respect.

The key message is to have a plan and be proactive and persistent about creating opportunities with the clients you would like to have.

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