Business Development

• Business development is among the foremost concerns of any organization, and as a manager, much of your attention will be devoted to developing and exploiting the business opportunities that are presented to you and your company.

• Business development and making your organization successful is reliant on good knowledge of best practice and management theories.

• Business development management involves asking yourself some searching questions. Are you prepared to change to realize the vision created by your business development strategy? What must your business excel at? How does that affect processes, people and customers? Who does the planning and controls the implementation of the business development ideas, answering to which goals, actions and measures?

• Perhaps most significant of all, you have to decide whether to be radical rather than incremental – are you revolutionary in your skills as a business development manager or are you more evolutionary?

• Small business development contains a paradox – if the business turns out to be successful then it won’t be so small any more. The challenge, then, is that of developing a small business to grow while retaining the elements that made it successful in the first place.

• For more on business development, see the articles below.