Welcome to tomwatkin.com, a blog about the basics of business development.
When I was younger, I joined an international engineering consultancy as a senior environmental specialist with a focus on the technical delivery of water projects. Within a few months, I was lucky enough to be promoted to the team leader role. This required me to show a strong business development component, alongside efficient people-leadership and project-delivery skills. In my new role, I had to keep the projects rolling in and the team busy. To be honest, I didn’t know where to begin. Sure, I had a few contacts from previous roles, but I wondered how I could progress from there. Luckily for me, Jim, our team’s experienced principal, was keen to guide me in the right direction. Together, we planned and tackled business development inside and outside the company. Jim showed me the power of networking within the organisation, which was vital because our team often supported the outcomes of large projects won by other departments.
For a few weeks, colleagues in other business units showed surprise that we could offer that capability in-house. Building those internal relationships and undertaking some soft marketing within our own business, made a noticeable impact to our funnel of projects. Jim and I also developed a rudimentary sales plan for communication with our customer base that kept us regularly talking to the right customers.
Jim’s guidance was invaluable. It laid the foundations of an understanding around what business development entailed and started me on a journey of learning and honing the craft.
Not everyone is so lucky to have a mentor on hand to point them towards the right path. At the time of writing this post, I had not been able to find any formal courses that teach the basic fundamentals of business development. Instead, I found a plethora of short video courses available on an array of topics, with nothing tying them together into a system. So, I have started this blog to act as a guide for those thrust into a business development role, be it in a startup, consultant or small business. My aim is to get you thinking about the market you play in, the stakeholders to consult, the customers to pursue and give some tips on how to optimize that pursuit. Each post will explore a different aspect of business development that I hope will help the reader feel comfortable incorporating business development into their professional lives.