3 Business Growth Activities Consultants Need to Make Time For


You can have a completely packed workday and still do very little to grow your consulting business. These three business growth activities can help you focus your time on creating revenue, staying in front of prospective clients, and developing relationships that lead to future opportunities.

You were busy all day, but did you do anything to grow your business
Why consultants need to make time for business growth activities
1. Make time for money-making activities
2. Create content that keeps your expertise in front of people
3. Invest in relationship-building activities 
The goal is "more often than not," not perfect
Start by looking at yesterday
Make your content creation count

You can have an incredibly productive day and still do almost nothing to grow your consulting business.

I know because I’ve done it.

Client work gets done. Emails get answered. Meetings happen. Administrative stuff gets handled. An unexpected personal problem eats an hour you absolutely did not have.

Then you get to the end of the day, look at everything you accomplished and realize something:

You were busy all day. But did you do anything to grow the business?

I’ve been a one-woman show at Downstage Media since 2017, and I’ve learned that the activities that keep me busy aren’t always the activities that help my business grow.

So I try to come back to three business growth activities more often than not:

  1. Money-making activities

  2. Content creation

  3. Relationship-building activities

Think of them as the three legs of the stool.

Do I hit all three perfectly every day? Nope.

But more often than not, I make time for them. Because when you run a consulting business, serving your current clients can’t take up so much of your time that you stop creating your next clients.

Why consultants need to make time for business growth activities

This problem gets particularly tricky when you sell your expertise.

The better you get at your work, the easier it can become to fill your calendar with delivering that work. Your current clients have questions. They need deliverables. They want meetings. And you want to do great work for them.

Meanwhile, your own business development gets whatever time happens to remain.

That creates a pretty dangerous cycle.

You get busy with client work, so you stop marketing. Eventually some of those engagements end, and you look at your pipeline and realize there isn’t much waiting for you.

Then business development becomes urgent.

You start posting again. You reach out to people. You follow up with old prospects. You scramble to get conversations on the calendar.

And when the client work returns? Business development disappears again.

I don’t think the answer is spending every waking hour working on your business. You have a finite amount of time.

Instead, you need to protect time for the activities that are most likely to create future opportunities.

And for me, those activities fall into three buckets.

1. Make time for money-making activities

I first heard the term “money-making activities” while working with David Newman, and it gave me a helpful way to distinguish between working and working on revenue.

Money-making activities are the things directly connected to creating business.

That could mean following up with a prospect. Having a sales conversation. Writing a proposal. Making an offer. Reaching out to someone who has already expressed a need for your services.

In other words, there should be a relatively short line between the activity you’re doing and someone eventually paying you.

This is different from organizing your CRM.

Could organizing your CRM help you sell? Sure.

But you can also spend an hour reorganizing your CRM and never speak to a potential client.

If you have limited time for business development, prioritize the activity closest to revenue.

  • Send the follow-up

  • Make the ask

  • Have the conversation

  • Write the proposal

And put that time on your calendar. If money-making activities only happen once everything else gets done, there’s a pretty good chance they won’t happen.



2. Create content that keeps your expertise in front of people

Content creation plays a different role.

Someone may already know you because of a sales conversation, a referral, a conference, a networking group or a colleague who introduced you.

But knowing you exist doesn’t mean they’re ready to hire you.

Your content gives them a way to keep hearing from you.

It allows you to repeatedly demonstrate two things:

  1. I know what you’re going through.

  2. And I know how to help you solve it.

That’s why content creation belongs on my business growth list.

You can write an article. Record a video. Send an email. Share an idea on LinkedIn. The format matters less than whether you’re consistently putting useful ideas into the world that demonstrate how you think.

That consistency can become especially valuable for consultants and other professional service providers.

That doesn’t mean publishing three LinkedIn posts next week will quadruple your revenue.

It does reinforce something important: expertise does more for your business when prospective clients can see it.

So don’t wait until you have a completely open afternoon to create content. You probably won’t get one.

Give content creation a place on your calendar.


3. Invest in relationship-building activities

This is the third leg of my stool, and I think it’s particularly important for consultants.

There are plenty of ways to create a pipeline. But referrals and word of mouth still play an enormous role in professional services.

In fact, Hinge’s 2026 research found that referrals and direct human outreach accounted for nearly two-thirds of new business for the professional services firms they studied.

So I make time for relationships.

I stay active in the networks and groups I’m part of. I meet with people individually. I make introductions. I check in. I try to be a useful colleague, friend and peer.

And I refer people.

I friggin’ love giving talented people more work.

If one of my clients needs a web designer and I know five excellent web designers, I’m happy to say, “Here are five people I know, I’ve worked with them, they’re great. Pick the person who seems like the best fit.”

My client gets someone I trust. One of my colleagues gets an opportunity. Everybody wins.

And yes, relationships can lead to business for me, too.

The goal is to create a network of people who understand what you do well enough to talk about you when you aren’t in the room.

The goal is “more often than not,” not perfect

Here’s the part of this framework that makes it sustainable for me:

I don’t expect myself to do all three things perfectly every single day.

  • Some days are packed with client meetings.

  • Sometimes there’s a deadline.

  • Sometimes one of my kids needs something.

  • Sometimes life takes the calendar you carefully planned and laughs at it.

  • So instead of asking whether I checked all three boxes every day, I zoom out.

Did I do these things more often than not?

Look at the day.

Then the week.

Then the month.

Then the quarter.

Then the year.

Over time, I want to see that I consistently made room for money-making activities, content creation and relationship building.

That tells me a lot more about the health of my business than the number of items I crossed off my to-do list.

Start by looking at yesterday

You don’t need a complicated new productivity system to put this into practice.

Pull up yesterday’s calendar.

Look at everything you did and ask yourself:

How much time did I spend making money, creating content or creating relationships?

You might find that you spent seven hours working and almost none of those hours fell into one of these three categories.

That doesn’t mean the other work was unnecessary. Your clients still need you. Your inbox still exists. Somebody still has to send the invoice.

But if those activities consume every available hour, eventually there’s nothing feeding the next stage of your business.

Your calendar should make room for the work you need to do today and the work that creates tomorrow’s opportunities.

Make your content creation time count

If content creation is one of the business growth activities you know deserves more of your time, the answer probably isn’t spending more hours staring at a blank Google Doc wondering what to say.

You need to know which ideas deserve your attention, what you should create next and how that content supports your larger business goals.

That’s what we work on in Spotlight Strategy Consulting

We meet regularly to figure out what deserves your attention and turn your expertise into a content plan you can execute.

So when you sit down to create, you can spend more of that time creating.

Schedule a call to see if Spotlight Strategy Consulting is a fit.

Because your business needs you to do more than stay busy.

More often than not, it needs you making money, creating content and creating relationships.


 


Annie Figenshu

Annie Figenshu is keenly aware that many companies are pressed for time, and every minute counts. She helps brands make the most of their content marketing so that their hard work is shared with the world. Annie is certified in both StoryBrand and Mailchimp, has two kids with Beatles-themed names, and is afraid to think what a day without coffee would look like.

LinkedIn: Annie Figenshu

https://downstage.media/
Next
Next

The StoryBrand Guide Podcast Launches with Annie Figenshu and Tyler Pigott