Hi, this is Mo Bunnell, your business development expert and author of “The Snowball System”. Our last video was the first of a little two part series. We talked about the right mindset for business development. The idea that you actually don’t want to consistently focus on your longer term goals. How many dollars you want to bring in, how many projects you wanna sell, advancements at the client, you manage things like that, but you’re actually much more effective if you focus on really short term bursts of activity that you can control. And what I’ll talk about in this video, the second in the two part series, is exactly how I do that and how I see other clients do it successfully.

Here’s the deal. Our minds are focused, channeled, and used to looking at the world in time periods in very specific ways. Meaning there is a feeling of a week that I’m convinced is stronger than any other feeling we have. If you think of the major ways we break up time. Annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily. There’s a pretty strong feeling of annually. You really know the feeling of the new year and what it feels like, but it’s too far of a time period to do most business development things. That’s a great time period for setting your longer term goals and evaluating your skills and things like that.

If you take a step back from that quarterly, you can easily pass over a quarter, unless you have a calendar item or there’s a few things that are done quarterly, you can sort of tell it’s a new quarter. But you almost have to think about it monthly. Little stronger than quarterly, but it’s the same thing. You know, if it’s a new month, especially if it happens on a weekend, it’s sort of easy to pass into a new month and go, “Oh man, I can’t believe it’s May or whatever.” The brain is trained to think in weekly chunks. There is a feeling of a Monday. There’s a feeling of a Wednesday. There’s a feeling of a Friday, a Saturday, Sunday.

There’s an old Seinfeld skit that said Tuesday has no feeling. I think that’s really funny. It’s sort of true. Tuesday, eh, not as much, but man, Monday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, these are feelings you get. When you wake up the morning, it’s a Friday. It feels a certain way. Same with Saturday. So I am convinced that when it comes to your BD planning, to be the most effective, you have to do it on a weekly basis. There is no feeling of biweekly or every other Tuesday. You would have to have a calendar entry to remind yourself. So you can’t do your business development planning in biweekly chunks. It can work, but it’s not strong.

What’s strong is to say, “Every Friday at 4:00 PM”. And this is, by the way, how I do it. Every Friday at 4:00 PM, I’m gonna take 15 minutes, and I’m gonna pick three proactive business development activities that I can 100% control. I’m gonna write it, so I can 100% them. I’m gonna pick three things that I’m going to promise myself I will get done by the next Friday at 4:00 PM. If I do that every Friday – I’m close to 200 weeks in a row. I haven’t missed without fail – And when I do that, I have a feeling of accomplishment in the next week because I know what Friday feels like. And I know what Friday afternoon feels like as I reflect on the prior week. I either have a feeling of accomplishment. “Hey, I got all three outta three done; it’s time for happy hour. Let’s celebrate the week and feel great about it.” Or I have a feeling of ‘I let myself down’. If I get one outta three, even sort of two outta three, I have a feeling like, “Man, I didn’t manage my time like I should, didn’t get my three things done. Not good.” But I get a little fired up on those weeks about doubling down the next week and catching up and doing the next week’s three things.

That’s a feeling that you want. And what’s beautiful about the weekly mechanism is there’s that feeling of Friday at 4:00 PM that I’ve trained myself to feel. And if I do get off track, I’m only off track a week, as opposed to, if I would do this monthly, for instance, a whole month could go by and you’d be off track.

So, when you think about your incremental progress, when you think about the bursts of activities that you can control, pick a time once a week. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s Saturday, Monday, Sunday night, Saturday morning,  Monday morning, Friday night, Wednesday at 2:00 PM, whatever. But pick a time that without fail you’ll take 15 minutes to figure out what’s the next burst of activity that’s aligned with your long term goal, but is really short term, super practical, 100% in your control, and just pick three things you’re gonna hold yourself on the hook to do before the next time interval. Reevaluate. Measure your accomplishments.

Do you get 1, 2, 3 outta three? Somehow document it however you want. I use a little journaling app called Day One to do that. And then, if you get all three, find a way to celebrate. Does that mean you end the week, you have a nice cup of coffee, you do a little journal entry, do some little thing to just reflect and say, “I did what I needed to do this week.”

And if you do that week over week over week, that’s 150 things roughly that you’ll do in the next year you wouldn’t have done otherwise. And you’ll see that snowball rolling downhill and the momentum that just becomes unstoppable once you do that several weeks in a row.

I hope this helps you succeed. We’re trying to add value with these videos, so if you loved it, send it to somebody else. It’s how people find out about us. And as always, we hope these videos help you help your clients succeed. Well, that’s it for today. Thank you so much for watching. For more content like this, check out my most recent video and be sure to like them so other people can find out about us, but make sure you subscribe.

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