Overcoming feast or famine

Nobody warns you about the see-saw.

When you first go out on your own, the famine arrives before you’ve even printed business cards. So you work your network hard - coffees, calls, favours - and it works. You land those first clients. And then you do the thing every decent professional does: you throw yourself into serving them brilliantly. That’s the responsible choice. That’s who you are.

Network building quietly stops.

You feel it, too - that low-grade guilt about the catch-ups you’re not having. But the client work is real and the networking is… postponable. Until the project wraps up, or the client’s budget changes, or their new CFO has a mate in your line of work. Suddenly you’re back where you started - except now the relationships you’d need are six months colder.

Here’s the part nobody says out loud: it never goes away on its own. I’ve watched this cycle run in year one and in year twenty. However mature the business, the question underneath is identical - where is the next piece of revenue coming from?

And there are only two honest answers. You can advertise - rent a stranger’s attention, at prices that climb every year, with an ROI you can never quite pin down. Or you can be known, remembered, and recommended - by people who already trust you. One of these compounds. The other one you buy again every month.

Most people know this. So why does the famine keep coming back?

Because of a quiet assumption almost everyone carries: that network building is an activity - something you do when you have time. And activities compete for hours. Put “coffee with an old colleague” up against “deadline for a paying client” and the coffee loses every single time, as it probably should. The see-saw isn’t a discipline problem. It’s built into the paradigm. You can’t fix it by trying harder, because trying harder is exactly what you were doing when it broke.

The businesses that escape it make one mental shift: they stop treating their network as an activity and start treating it as infrastructure. Nobody does their bookkeeping “when things slow down.” It runs every month, busy or not, because the consequences of letting it lapse are unacceptable. Your network is the same kind of asset - it just rarely gets treated like one.

So here’s the question worth sitting with: if your network heard from you just as reliably in your busiest month as in your quietest one - what would that make possible? What work would you say yes to? What would you never again have to accept out of desperation?

Maybe you’re already pushing back: you’ve been nagged about networking before, and it never seemed worth the hours it demanded. Fair - under the old way of doing it, it usually wasn’t. That’s the part we’ve quietly changed. Treating your network as infrastructure used to mean cloning yourself; now the right process and the right tools carry almost all of the load, and it fits inside a normal working week. That’s the possibility this series is about - more on how next time.