164 The Financial Times Guide to Business Development
portionate that psychologically it seems unachievable. This then triggers
the ‘activity inertia’ mentioned earlier.
With this in mind let me suggest a very simple mechanism, which I have
used successfully on behalf of others and indeed for myself in a variety of
ventures. It is the process of deciding on your goal and then working back-
wards, breaking it down into smaller targets that seem much more realistic.
For example, suppose you operate a business that charges people a £30 per month
subscription scheme for some service or product. Your goal is to generate an addi-
tional £100,000 per year.
Getting to £100,000 may seem huge and almost impossible, but by breaking it down
and working backwards, it looks like this.
Ask yourself: ‘How many new subscribers do I need to generate that £100,000?’
Well, if a subscriber is paying £30 per month, then each subscriber contributes
£360 worth of income. Thus to hit your £100,000 target, you need another 278
subscribers. Divide that by 52 to show how many you need to win on average each
week and the answer is just over ve.
Your challenge and target then becomes, not ‘How do I produce £100,000 of addi-
tional revenue?’ but ‘What do I have to do to simply get an extra ve subscribers
per week?’.
Simply by using the business development priorities concept in the right
order that ve becomes very achievable. Indeed, you may be able to get
what you need just by relying on Priority 1 and converting more enquiries
into business.
Provide strong leadership and involve others
Making the decisions is important but your team needs to see strong lead-
ership, activity, commitment and enthusiasm from the very top of your
operation for any business development efforts. Team members need to see
that you are practising what you preach and that you are giving them the
tools to achieve their targets, which might involve personal skills training.
Stop putting things off
There always seems to be a good reason why, ‘Now is not a good time to take
action.’ Here are a few of the ones I have heard:
We’ve got quality consultants in.
We are reviewing our computer systems.
9
Pulling it all together – making it happen 165
We are thinking about moving ofces.
We are recruiting some new people.
We are having air conditioning installed.
It’s coming up to Christmas.
The summer is a bad time to do things.
It’s hard to motivate people in the cold, dark, winter months.
We are having a new accounts system installed.
There may well be some valid logic behind all of these. However, in my
experience, if you wait for the perfect time, you may wait for ever and do
nothing.
‘You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do
nothing there will be no result.’
Mahatma Gandhi
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