I be in the airport early in the morning on my way to see Dad. Clearly I haven't been posting much lately. I've been super busy with work. I think I may have written about my own personal transition plan. As a self-employed person, there's nothing to retire from. You have to make your own path. About a year and half ago, I laid that path out with a phase one to cease working on growing my business, focusing on the saving rate I needed to maintain, and reducing the amount of time working.
After about nine months I was pretty much on track but they the events of last year's fourth quarter (illness) and this year's first quarter (Dad illness) really put my revenue generation in the hole. As a result starting in around May, I started working extra hard on business development.
I don't know if any of you do sales, but the process of business development (marketing and selling) is all about momentum. If you have process, it takes a certain period of time to get out, generate leads, have leads convert to prospects, make proposals and get closings. We call this the sales pipeline (tracking all of these). Any good business development person is always tracking their pipeline.
I've been able to see that it was filling up...more prospects, more proposals. And until Friday I could feel the momentum building but hadn't got the breakthrough. On Friday afternoon, I had too proposals convert...and there is plenty more in the pipeline so I'm feeling pretty good about going forward.
Unfortunately this brings up the fact that I've had to be putting out more work energy than I really wanted to be doing per my transition plan. However, I couldn't help the early disrupting events, and income generation is key to the transition plan.
On another note, I keep reading all this doom and gloom about the economy. Yet I have had lots of new business opportunities. And most of them are with businesses that are doing well themselves. There seems to be a disconnect between what is being talked about and what is happening.
4 comments:
The name of the department I work in is Business Development, so a lot of the terms you mention sound familiar. Thankfully, I'm not actively involved in the sales portion of our business. I admire those that are though. You have to have perseverance and the ability to see the light at the end of the tunnel. You obviously have these things and it's paid off for you.
It's nice when you write about business, so I can think about the differences and similarities between business and academia. For me, because I'm on "soft money" (grants), I have a similar cycle - it takes about a year to get a grant written , reviewed, and approved. And since a 20% acceptance rate is an excellent average, you have to write a lot of grants.
I think your comment about the economy is interesting. For many of us (like you, and me, and the businesses you work for), things seem to be fine. I imagine the world looks very different if you are unemployed. And now I will go to work and be very, very grateful for my job.
I bet you will be back on track in no time! A little more hard work and then you can hopefully wind things down again.
Hope your trip to see grandpa is a good one.
Glad your work is going well for you! I've never been much interested in sales and finding/building relationships with other companies.
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