Kick Off September with the 4-Week BD Challenge

I recently caught up with a friend of mine, someone who has held senior sales leadership roles and has extensive knowledge of business development. He told me he enjoys reading my BD articles, but then he admitted something that made me smile. “Doug, I like the ideas, but sometimes I just don’t know how to put them into action.”

If a seasoned BD pro can feel that way, no wonder the rest of us do too. We all fall into the gap between knowing what to do and knowing how to do it. And in business development, that gap is where momentum often gets lost.
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It’s a little like football—you don’t score points just by drawing up clever plays on the whiteboard. You’ve got to execute the plays. As a big American football fan, this time of year always gets me fired up. Preseason is over; it’s time to kick off the season. And just like on the field, in business development, it’s not the playbook that wins the game; it’s running the plays.

So here’s your September kickoff challenge:

The 4-Week BD Challenge
Starting the day after Labor Day, reach out to at least one business contact a day, five days a week, for four weeks.

• A business contact could be a colleague, referral source, past client, prospective client, or existing client.
• The outreach can be a quick touchpoint (“How was your summer?” / “Congrats on your promotion”) or a deeper conversation over coffee, lunch, or Zoom.
• For some, this may sound daunting. But think about it—how long does it really take to reach out to one person? A quick email, text, or LinkedIn note is all it takes.

By the end of September, you’ll have made 20 or more meaningful touches. Enough to re-energize your network, reinforce key relationships, and surface new opportunities before the fall workload really ramps up.
The professionals who consistently win aren’t the ones with the thickest playbooks. They’re the ones who get off the sidelines and run their plays, every single day.

Closing Thought
My friend isn’t alone. We often find ourselves stuck between ideas and action. The 4-Week BD Challenge is one way to close that gap. And here’s the real payoff: by forcing yourself to do one simple outreach a day, you’ll start building a behavioral habit that will stick well beyond September. That’s how momentum becomes consistency, and how consistency turns into long-term success.