Part one is here. Part two is here. Part three is here and covered insurance and accounting. This is the last part and it will cover the most important thing you’ll do for your business: business development.

Business Development

What is business development(BD)? It’s basically doing everything you do to bring business into your company. It could mean anything from internet research, to phone calls, to office visits, to power lunches. Business development is constant, never stops, and is a full time job.

I’d love to get to a point way down the road where I can have PI’s working under me that handle proposals, report writing, and project management, and a business developer that I work with that is in charge of primary BD. That way I could focus on research, publishing, app development, and all the side tech projects that I want to do. That probably won’t happen for a while, and may never happen, but it’s certainly a goal.

So, where did I start and how did I begin to find clients? Well, you probably know more than you think you know already. All I had to do was think about who the projects were for that I’ve worked on in the past. Some of those clients may feel some loyalty to one firm or another but most of them want to save money and will look at other options. This is what I counted on.

I started by making a spreadsheet of all the clients I could think of. A little internet research yielded a few more. I recorded their address, phone number, website, contact name, and the types of projects they typically do.