How to Build Business Development Around Dunbar's Number

Every Implementer I talk to says some version of the same thing about business development:  It's a grind, it's hard, it's the part of the week they don't look forward to... I understand the feeling, but I want to hand you a different frame, because I'm not really doing business development, at least not the way that word usually gets used.

The phrase itself is the problem.

Business development sounds like a task you schedule and dread. What I actually do is decide who I want around me, and then I go be around them: that's it.

It's not hanging a banner up at a trade show or sponsoring a golf tournament. Those are fine, and you can do them, but the thing that actually fills my practice is having real conversations with people who I really bond with.

That is not a slogan, it's a method, and it runs on an idea I picked up about twenty years ago called Dunbar's number.

Here is how I run it.

Fix the soundtrack before you fix the tactics

Before any of the relationship work matters, you have to deal with the story playing in your own head. When somebody tells me their business development is stuck, my first question is about the soundtrack running through their mind, because that is almost always where the block is.

The move is to make sure you're telling yourself the right story, and that right story has got to be written in your personal V/TO™. Not a mission statement you wrote once and filed away. The actual narrative you run on: who you are, who you serve, where you're headed. The books I keep going back to are all about this, about mindset and the story you feed yourself. 

If your internal soundtrack is garbage, no clever tactic downstream is going to save you, and you'll feel like a fraud at every networking event you force yourself to attend.

So start here. Get your own head right and get it on paper. 

Map your concentric rings

Dunbar's number is the finding that we can each only hold so many real relationships, and that they nest in rings of rising closeness. Robin Dunbar put rough sizes on them: 5, 15, 50, and 150. The inner rings take the most of your time and shape you the most.

That last part is the whole point for business development.

You become the version of the people you hang out with, so you better really make sure you're hanging out with the right people. Read that as a business strategy, not a life-coaching line. The five people closest to you are quietly setting your standards, your energy, and your expectations of what's normal.

So map your rings on purpose, and do it for both sides of your life. Start with your two groups of five. On the business side, mine is a small circle where, when I look at it, I feel like we could take on the world and win: a mentor, a coach, the people I'd call before I called anyone else… Then do the same five for your personal life.

Those two groups of five are a bigger deal than any lead list you'll ever build.

Then move out to the next ring, the 15. On the business side, that's where your best clients live, and on the personal side, it's the twelve to fifteen people you actually spend your real time with. Get honest about who is on each list.

Audit who feeds you and who drains you, then adjust

Once the rings are on paper, run an audit.

Go name by name and mark one thing next to each: does time with this person leave you sharper, or flatter? This is not about being ruthless with people you love. It's about being awake to the fact that your inner rings are shaping you whether you pay attention or not.

Then act on it.

Take a name that consistently drains you and move it to a wider ring, and guard the hours you get back. Take someone whose work and values you genuinely respect and book a real hour with them this month. Do that every quarter and your rings slowly fill with the kind of people you'd happily work with anyway.

The subtraction matters as much as the addition. I go through my own commitments and decide what I'm going to say no to, and the relief when I clear something that was quietly draining me is hard to overstate. Protecting the inner rings is most of the job: if your calendar is full of people who flatten you, no amount of hustle at the top of the funnel will fix your practice.

Only keep clients you would genuinely choose

This is the part people resist, so I'll be blunt about it: you've got to love working with your clients, because you can't fake it.

If you and a client aren't a real fit, you can't push them, and pushing is the job. When there's genuine respect running both directions, you can say the hard thing in the room, and they can say it back to you.

One of my clients is a construction company I started with about five years ago. As we worked through their Core Values, I realized the founder and his business partner were two of the most humble people I'd met. We became actual friends, I'm still the coach in the room, but we do things after hours now, because we like the same stuff. And here's what that fit produces: they refer me. They sit down with other business owners and say, this guy helped straighten out our business, you need to talk to him.

I didn't ask for that, it's the natural output of working with people you'd choose to be around anyway.

You cannot manufacture that with a client you tolerate, so stop trying. 

Do your business development where your life already happens

Now put the rings and the fit together, and business development stops being an activity you bolt onto your week. It becomes the byproduct of living a life you actually like, surrounded by the kind of people you want in your rings.

I'll give you the clearest example I have.

This past winter I was heli-skiing in Revelstoke, British Columbia. Three buddies and I planned it about a year in advance, and then it grew. I mentioned I had a couple of friends who were also clients who wanted to come, and by the time we went, we had 15 like-minded, fun entrepreneurs on the trip.

The relationships and the conversations went as deep in two or three days as I thought I'd ever go with people I barely knew. One of them I later onboarded as a client: no intention there, I wasn't selling, I was skiing with people I'd want to ski with regardless.

That is what this looks like when it's working. You're not out there hunting: you're at the concert, the horse races, the surf break, having real conversations with people who share your values, and some fraction of them turn out to be people who could hire you or send you someone who will.

Let the outer rings feed the inner ones

The 5 and the 15 get most of the attention, and they should, because they shape you the most. But the outer rings, the 50 and the 150, are not decoration. They're your feeder pool. They're the people you see a few times a year, the ones you've had one good conversation with, the friends of friends who share your world.

You don't manage the outer rings the way you manage the inner ones, you just keep showing up in the places where those people already are, and you stay open. The Revelstoke trip is the whole system in one weekend: a handful of people from my inner rings, a wider group pulled from the 15 and 50, and a couple of strangers who, by the end, weren't strangers anymore. One of them moved inward over time and became a client.

That is the rings working as designed: the inner ones hold your closest relationships, and the outer ones quietly refill them.

Protect the inner rings fiercely, and stay generous and available with the outer ones, because that's where next year's inner ring is currently sitting.

What you get if you run this

Do this consistently and the two lists that used to feel separate, the people in your calendar and the people who could hire you, quietly become one list. Your next good client is usually already somewhere in your rings, or one warm introduction away from them. The referrals start spinning out on their own, because people who genuinely like working with you can't help talking about you.

It also gets easier, which is the part nobody tells you. When business development is just spending time with people you'd choose anyway, you stop dreading it, because there's nothing left to dread. There's only the life you're already living, pointed on purpose at the right people.