How Your Gardening Skills Can Help Develop Your Business Development Skills
Business development is often described as a funnel-game:
✔️ More meetings
✔️ More networking events
✔️ More LinkedIn posts
✔️ More proposals
And, hopefully, more prospects fall-out of the bottom of the funnel.
But, as anyone who has built a sustainable client-base (rainmaker) will be able to tell you: Business development isn’t about speed and taking short-cuts, it’s about cultivation.
So, for this BD Tips Wednesday post, I’m looking at why, if you want to become that rainmaker, you need to start in your garden!
1. You Can’t Force Growth
When you’re gardening and plant a seed, you don’t dig the seed up every morning to see if it has grown a little overnight. You:
prepare the soil
water consistently
ensure it gets sufficient sunlight.
And then you wait.
Oddly enough, business development works exactly the same way. You
meet someone (at an event)
follow up thoughtfully
share useful insights
stay visible
But, in the same way as you cannot force a seed to grow, you cannot force trust. You cannot demand that a prospect give you an instruction just because you paid for the coffee that morning.
Lawyers who struggle with business development often try to force an issue that is naturally incremental. Just like gardening, business development requires the ingredient of "patience".
2. Soil Quality Matters More Than Seed Volume
In gardening, poor soil produces weak plants. In business development, poor foundations produce weak relationships.
If you:
Deliver inconsistent service
Fail to communicate clearly
Bill unpredictably
Overpromise and underdeliver
No amount of buying coffees will fix it. The best rainmakers understand that retention and reputation are the soil to successful business development.
3. Weeds Compete for Nutrients
As every garden attracts weeds, every unstructured business development strategy will get bogged down in the weeds.
Weeds in business development tend to look like:
Networking without purpose
Coffee meetings with no strategic alignment
Clients who drain margin and energy
Chasing tenders you should have declined
If you don’t remove what competes for nutrients, your best opportunities will starve.
The most effective rainmakers are ruthless about focus. They know which sectors matter. They know which relationships compound. They say “no” more often than "yes".
4. Seasons Exist
No garden produces all year-round at the same intensity.
There are planting seasons.
There are growth seasons.
There are harvest seasons.
Wait, isn’t that a great summary of business development?
There are periods where you invest heavily in visibility.
There are periods where you nurture active opportunities.
And there are seasons when work flows because of seeds planted [sometimes] years earlier.
Rainmakers know: If you only plant when you are hungry, you will starve.
5. Diversity Strengthens the Ecosystem
A monoculture garden is fragile. One pest will wipe it out.
Similarly, a business development strategy built on one:
key client
referrer
sector
government panel
is exposed.
In the legal services world - particularly if you operate with tender-based clients (like fin services or government) - over-reliance on a single revenue source is a huge structural risk!
Resilient business developers cultivate:
Multiple referral channels
Cross-sector relationships
A mix of recurring retainer and project work
Different pricing models
6. Growth Is Often Invisible
I’ve worked in business development for over 30 years. The one thing I have learnt is this:
‘Roots grow before shoots appear’.
In business development, credibility grows long before instructions arrive!
Need Help With Your Business Development?
Get in touch if you want to talk about any of this. We also offer a very affordable BD Audit and Training package.
