There is often a dilemma with small and growing businesses - they get busy servicing clients, neglect to focus on generating new business opportunities, then end up panicking and looking around for work. It can be a vicious circle – being needy does not leave you in the best mind-set to build your client base with the ‘right’ sort of clients.

Utopia would be to have a controlled pipeline of orders from committed, paying clients who have the potential to allow you to grow with them. Reality might be somewhere in between.

What’s certain is that an ideal pipeline won’t happen unless you have targets, a plan to get there and the commitment to follow the plan.

Clearly that means you have to allocate time to working your plan and guard against using that time for a short term opportunity. Just think of it as being time already allocated to a project for your top customer – yourself.

So how much time should you ring fence for this?

Obviously that will depend on your targets, the number of prospecting activities in your plan, the nature of the activities, and the intended results. Relying only on passive activities such as direct mail or e-mail are likely to be less productive than direct contact, networking or proactive referral generation, where you have the opportunity of generating a dialogue with a prospect. Aim to have four or five different prospecting activities, and keep track of where your clients come from. You can then identify which are working best for you.

As you client base builds you can then change the balance of your prospecting to bring more referral generation and repeat business, whilst considering how to penetrate new industry sectors. Looking for opportunities to become involved in a small project in a new sector to generate experience or partnering up with someone can help in that respect.

Have a plan and be proactive and persistent about creating opportunities with the clients you would like to have.