Three forces working against your next engagement
Being brilliant at your work is one of the most reliable ways to destroy your pipeline.
In the opening chapters of The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber introduces a character named Sarah. Sarah is an exceptional baker. She loves the craft, she is brilliant at it, and one day she decides to open her own bakery. The logic seems sound: if you are good at the work, you should be able to build a business around it.
Within a year, Sarah is exhausted. She works longer hours than she ever did as an employee. The quality of her baking is as good as ever. Her customers are happy. But the business is barely surviving, and she has no idea how to fix it. The problem, Gerber argues, is that Sarah assumed that understanding the technical work meant understanding the business of doing it. It doesn’t. The skills that make you exceptional at delivery are not the skills that build a practice. They are, in fact, often the skills that consume it.
Most consultants who read that passage recognise something in Sarah. They also quietly assume it applies to someone else.
Being good at your work is not enough to sustain a consulting practice. If you want a business that lasts beyond your current engagement, you need to understand the three forces that turn full utilisation into a slow decline.
Force #1: The Absorption Force
Delivery expands to fill all available time.
This is not a time-management problem. It is a structural one.
When you are in an active engagement, every available hour has a natural claimant. There are client emails that require a considered response. There are deliverables that need one more review before they go out. There are scope items that weren’t in the original brief but feel too small to push back on. There are stakeholder conversations that weren’t planned but need to happen before the week ends.
None of these feels like a problem in isolation. Collectively, they occupy the entirety of your working week, and then some.
David Maister observed this pattern across dozens of professional service firms over two decades of research. The consultants with the highest utilisation rates consistently allocated the least time to business development, not because they were unaware of the need, but because billable work exerted a gravitational pull that no non-billable activity could match. In a practice built on one person’s expertise, that pull is even stronger. There is no colleague to pick up the slack. There is no business development function to keep the pipeline moving. There is only you, and you are in a client meeting.1
The result is not a schedule that is too full for pipeline work. It is a schedule that never made room for it in the first place.
The fix is structural, not motivational. Time for business development needs to be allocated before the engagement fills the week, not after. A protected, recurring block, treated with the same seriousness as a client deadline, is the only mechanism that consistently survives contact with a demanding workload.
Force #2: The Avoidance Force
Business development feels wrong when you’re already busy.
This is a psychological force that operates below the level of conscious decision-making.
When you are fully engaged with a client, the income feels certain. The work is in front of you. The relationship is active. The value you are delivering is visible and immediate. Reaching out to a prospective client, by contrast, involves none of those certainties. The outcome is unclear. The response is unpredictable. And the return, even in the best case, is weeks or months away.
Daniel Kahneman’s research on loss aversion established that people weigh the psychological pain of a potential loss roughly twice as heavily as the pleasure of an equivalent gain. Applied to consulting, this means the discomfort of uncertain, unrewarded business development activity is felt more acutely than the anticipated value of future work, even when the rational case for doing the outreach is obvious.2
There is also a social dimension that reinforces the avoidance. Reaching out to a prospect when you have nothing new to offer, no news, no completed project to reference, no specific reason to be in contact, feels transactional in a way that many technically-oriented consultants find genuinely uncomfortable. So they wait. They tell themselves they will reach out when the current engagement has produced something worth sharing. That moment either never arrives or arrives too late.
Recognising the avoidance force for what it is, a predictable psychological response, not a reasonable business decision, is the beginning of working around it. The goal is not to feel motivated to prospect when you are fully occupied. The goal is to have a contact rhythm and a system that runs regardless of how you feel.
Force #3: The Attrition Force
The pipeline erodes quietly while the work looks healthy.
This is the most dangerous of the three forces, because it is the least visible until it is expensive to fix.
A consulting pipeline is not a real-time indicator of business health. It is a lagging one. The engagement you’re working on today was sold three to six months ago. The relationships that produced it were being maintained before that. If you stopped doing pipeline work at the start of your current engagement, the effect does not appear in your revenue until the engagement ends, at which point the gap is already open, and you are filling it from a standing start.
Research on professional services sales cycles shows that the average time from initial contact to signed engagement ranges from eight to sixteen weeks, depending on scope and organisational complexity. For a solo consultant working without a sales function, the timeline is often longer.3 This means the work you need in six months requires pipeline activity that begins now, not when the current project wraps.
The consultant who waits until they are available to look for work will always be behind. By the time the urgency is felt, the lag has already accumulated. What follows is the feast-and-famine pattern that most experienced consultants recognise, but few have structurally resolved: a period of high utilisation, followed by an unplanned gap, then a reactive scramble to secure the next engagement, which in turn produces the next gap.
The discipline required here is counterintuitive. When you are busiest, that is precisely when pipeline activity matters most. Not because you need work now, but because you will need it in the window that follows.
Putting It Together
The three forces operate in sequence, and they reinforce each other.
The Absorption Force fills your time with delivery. The Avoidance Force provides the psychological justification for failing to protect any of it. The Attrition Force ensures that by the time the damage is visible, it is already expensive to repair.
None of this is inevitable. But reversing it requires first understanding the mechanism, then deliberately building against it.
The practical response requires three things, held simultaneously: a protected weekly block for business development that runs regardless of your current workload; a contact rhythm with past clients and prospects that does not depend on having something to sell; and an honest accounting of the pipeline lag, knowing that the work you need in the next quarter requires investment in relationships that begins this week.
Sarah, the baker, was not failing because she was bad at baking. She was failing because she had no system for anything other than baking. The same trap, with different terminology, is available to every consultant who mistakes a full schedule for a healthy practice.
Imagine what becomes possible when your pipeline is managed with the same rigour as your delivery, when the end of one engagement is a transition, not a gap. That kind of practice does not happen by accident. It is built deliberately, in the margins of a busy week, by consultants who understood the forces working against them and built systems anyway.
What would your practice look like if your most productive delivery months were also your most consistent business development months?
Footnotes:
1 Maister, David H. Managing the Professional Service Firm. Free Press, 1993. Chapter 9, “The Anatomy of a Consulting Firm.”
2 Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Chapter 26, “Prospect Theory.”
3 Hinge Research Institute. Inside the Buyer’s Brain, Third Edition. Hinge Marketing, 2018. See also Blair Enns, The Win Without Pitching Manifesto, RockBench Publishing, 2011, on professional services sales cycles and relationship lead time.