Plug the holes in your practice

I didn’t think I’d be the type to scream if I ever saw a mouse in my kitchen.  Turns out I was wrong.

You see, I lived in an old house (built in the late 20s) and we had mice coming in for a few months.  One time, I was standing in my kitchen and putting some food into the refrigerator when I happened to turn just in time to see a mouse flying through the air.  No, seriously, flying.  Like Mighty Mouse.  He’d jumped off a shelf in the pantry and nearly landed on my dog, then he made a U-turn in front of my other dog and went running down the hall into the dining room.  In my shock, all I could do was scream.

There’s a flying mouse in my kitchen!  SCREAM!  It’s going to land on my dog!  SCREAM!  My dog is going to catch the mouse!  SCREAM!  My dog is chasing the mouse down the hall!  SCREAM!  And so on.  Happily, sort of, the mouse made it safely into a heating register, and I didn’t have to deal with the horror of trying to pry a dog’s jaws open to let a rodent escape.  (SCREAM!!)

I called a mouse specialist the next day, and he explained how hard it is to plug all the holes into an older home.  “We can plug the ones we see, ma’am,” he explained, “but it may take us some time to find all of them and to get them completely plugged.  Until we do, you’ll have a continuing problem, but as we work on it, it will get better.”

Why do you care?  What does this have to do with business development?

You probably have some holes in your approach to business development that you should plug.  Perhaps you’re letting prospective clients slip away because you don’t have a reliable follow-up system.  Maybe you aren’t getting repeat business that you could if only you would keep in touch with your former clients.

Having a hole is hardly unusual; your task is to sniff it out and close it.  It’s unpleasant enough to let mice in.  But it’s worse to let business out.