I recently had a meeting with a couple of brilliant lawyers. These are the kinds of people who can outlast almost anyone—working late into the night, sharp as a tack, precise to the letter. But when I asked them about their business development (BD) strategies, I was surprised by how sheepish, for the lack of a better word, their answers were. They said the economics of their profession began and ended with “billable hours.” To them, the math was simple: billables = money. But as any economist or business owner with a long enough horizon would tell you: they have it exactly backwards.
The Arithmetic of Value
Billable hours have an intrinsic problem. They are capped. You can raise your rates, work longer days, and even push efficiency, but you hit the unavoidable ceiling. BD, on the other hand, has no ceiling. None at all. Spending an hour on outreach, pitching, and relationship-building can yield hundreds of thousands of dollars in future work.
You think this is just talk? Big words that can neither be quantified nor implemented? Consider this study of major law firms by ALM Legal Intelligence and Calibrate Legal. It found that for every million dollars that firms invested in marketing and BD, they brought back a whopping $47 million in revenue. Think about that: a return on investment north of 4,000%. Now compare that to another hour at the desk, worth maybe a few hundred bucks at most.
“Because its purpose is to create a customer,” Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, once put it brilliantly, “the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation… All the rest are costs.” My lawyer friends weren’t investing in the future. They were doubling down on costs.
Why We Hide
So why do so many professionals, from attorneys to consultants to small-business owners, avoid BD like it’s the dentist’s chair? Psychology offers a pretty convincing answer. Humans gravitate toward the comfortable and the certain. Drafting a contract, for example, feels safe while cold-calling a prospect is terrifying.
American entrepreneur and podcaster Tim Ferriss wasn’t wrong when he said, “Being busy is a form of laziness… a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.” We tell ourselves we’re being productive, but what we’re really doing is nothing more than just rearranging the furniture.
And this avoidance shows up in the numbers. Surveys of consultants, for instance, find that fewer than 25% market themselves daily and nearly half struggle with converting prospects into clients and as a result many firms run perpetually at the mercy of the next referral instead of steering their own growth.
From Opportunity to Obligation
Here’s the harder truth. Once you employ others, BD stops being an “opportunity.” It becomes an obligation. Your associates, analysts, or junior staff can’t pay their rent on your billable hours alone. They need you to bring in business.
Henry Ford captured it a century ago: “Nothing happens until someone sells something.” If you’re leading people, you don’t get to opt out of rainmaking. Pretending otherwise is both unwise and costly. What would your reaction be if the government decided to slash infrastructure spending in the name of fiscal responsibility? This may look prudent short term, but in the long run? It’s ruinous. That’s exactly the same thing when you consider BD as something for the back burner.
Learning to Rainmake
The good news is that nobody is born a rainmaker. Just like golf, BD may feel awkward at first, but with practice it doesn’t just become tolerable, it becomes rewarding. As Zig Ziglar once put it brilliantly, “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly—until you can learn to do it well.”
But what does this exactly mean in BD? It simply means tracking progress: calls made, meetings scheduled, deals closed, and setting KPIs for growth just as rigorously as you track billable hours. You must stop seeing BD as a nuisance and start considering it the highest-return on investment of your time.
Stop Hiding
Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited, once said that if you spend all your time working in the business instead of on the business, you don’t have a business at all—you just have a job, and perhaps not even a sustainable one in this day and age.
The economics are clear. Billable hours can keep the lights on but it’s BD that builds the future. You must stop hiding in the comfort of busy work and face the discomfort. Make the calls today and remember that no one is born a rainmaker. They’re built.
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Sept. 2025
