Advisory Boards as Business Development Engines
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Why does business development never seem to fully live up to its name? Why is it so difficult to get business development working effectively for your company? Why does your BD team look like a series of revolving doors – with one person after another being hired amid great fanfare only to be let go within a year for ‘non-performance’? All these consultants are peddling the same tired old solutions to a problem that never seems to go away. Why can’t somebody come up with something that works? There has to be a better way!
I’ve never met a CEO who was really happy with the way business development was working. They all end up saying about the same thing. “Traditional solutions fail to produce expected results while regularly generating unexpected costs. There needs to be a better way.” “Why can’t we get this right? It’s not rocket science and we’re supposed to be good at what we do. Why can’t we get this damn thing right?”
I remember the look of utter frustration. I had started three companies by then and knew exactly what this CEO was talking about. Business development is the major challenge of every CEO and senior team. Being in business begins with getting business. Get it right and you can win big. Get it wrong and nothing else much matters. For all my experience, I had little to suggest to my frustrated companion – it was very humbling.
After we parted, my walk up First Avenue towards my home on 59th Street in Manhattan became the first steps on a decade’s long quest for a solution. During my six tours as CEO I have encountered the same challenges over and over. My frustration grew until there was no way out but to find an alternative approach that really worked. Finding a way to make business development work became a crusade.
I got very lucky. My fourth company showed me the way. Six months after my dismal performance in the bar I had the beginnings of a solution. Those first insights formed the core of an innovative, potent and cost-effective approach to business development. Much of the next two decades were been spent developing then refining a solution to what I see as the principal point of pain for most CEOs.
During that time I was guided by three goals. • First, the solution had to be head-and-shoulders better than competing strategies. • Second, it had to be highly cost effective – minimizing the drain on critical resources while generating maximum benefits in the form of turbo-charged business development. • And third, it had to work! So, here is the good news – there is a better way and this book is going to show you how to turn all those nagging questions into fading memories.
