Patience has never been one of my virtues. Speed, urgency, and motion are more my, umm, speed.
But rushing not only makes for sloppiness, it slows you down.
When you’re a solopreneur, your to-do list always seems to extend beyond the horizon, and you’ve often succeeded by pushing further, faster, than those around you. So when it comes to business development, speed and scale seem like prime virtues.
But running an engine low on oil even faster in an endurance race is more likely to lead to a breakdown than a victory.
Everyone seems to want to move faster (and there, indeed, lots of advantages to moving faster, if you’re moving in the irght direction). Sophisticated email sequences mean we don’t have to sell (that one seduced me). AI “gurus” tell us that we can further accelerate things with chatbots and other tools that “sound like us”.
But if what you’re doing now isn’t working the way you want, will doing that faster help?
What if you took a moment to focus on quality, rather than quantity? What if you reached out to your favorite former client, rather than that the prospect you know is not really an ideal fit? What if you took a bit to update your website/LinkedIn/elevator pitch to reflect what you really do? What if you could tell the people you meet exaclty who your ideal client is, and give them a a tasty nugget that they can recall in the right situation and relay to that ideal prospect?
Speed and quantity are actually your enemies as a solopreneur. You don’t have time for meetings with the wrong prospects, and make-work that checks boxes, but doesn’t actually get you in conversations with your ideal prospects. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.