Do you waste time winning unprofitable work?

Professionals spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to win new work.

Conferences. Networking events. One-to-one meetings. Introductions. Follow-ups. Travel. Proposals. Presentations.

But how much of that activity actually results in profitable work?

That is a rather different question from asking how much new business are you winning to keep you busy?

Not all work is equally valuable.

Some clients require disproportionate amounts of senior time. Some projects are won at fees which make them barely worthwhile. Some work leads nowhere. And enormous amounts of time can be spent pursuing opportunities which were never particularly attractive in the first place.

So perhaps we should ask two questions:

Why is so much professional work unprofitable?

And:

How much time are we wasting trying to win more of it?

Are we starting in the wrong place?

Most business development starts with the professional.

What services do we provide? What expertise do we have? Who should we tell about it? Which conference should we attend? Who should we arrange to meet?

But perhaps the starting point should be somewhere else.

Who are the clients we most want to work with?

What concerns them?

What problems are we particularly well placed to resolve for them?

And, crucially, who already has relationships with those clients?

Because the clients you would most like to work with are almost certainly already clients of other professionals.

Are your contacts creating profitable opportunities?

Most professionals already know plenty of people.

The question is whether those relationships are producing the quality of work they actually want.

If they aren't, is the answer really to attend more events, make more contacts and arrange more meetings?

Or could the opportunity already be sitting somewhere within the relationships you have?

The challenge is knowing how to unlock it.

From activity to strategy

This changes the question.

Instead of asking:

“How can I do more business development?”

ask:

“How can I spend less time winning the wrong work and more time creating opportunities for the right work?”

That is fundamentally a question about profitability.

It is also why simply telling professionals to network more, attend more events or arrange more meetings rarely solves the underlying problem.

More activity is not necessarily the answer.

Moving the profitability dial

More business development activity does not necessarily mean more profitable work.

Sometimes the opportunity is already there. It just needs to be approached differently.

I work with professionals to move the profitability dial upwards — starting with what they want to achieve and what is frustrating them about getting there.

What happens next depends on what we discover. Are opportunites being missed from colleagues, contacts or clients or all three?

If you're curious, let's start with a half-hour conversation.

It won't be right for everyone.

But what have you got to lose — other than half an hour?

And if you're not ready for a conversation yet, sign up to my newsletter for more insights in this series on winning better-quality, more profitable work. https://carolines.club.