I recently moderated a panel with four partners from across the restructuring profession for the ARITA Mentoring Program, and they openly admitted that business development didn't start out easy.
Between them, decades of experience winning work and building networks. And yet the most consistent message of the session wasn't a formula for confidence, it was permission to still be figuring it out.
That matters, because the mentees, a few years into their careers and technically strong but still building their networks, are exactly the people who assume everyone else has already worked this out. One partner described walking into rooms early in his career convinced everyone else already knew each other and that he had nothing interesting to say. Another admitted her biggest regret wasn't networking too little, but being too transactional about it, building great relationships on a job and then letting them go the moment the job ended, without ever asking where that person might end up.
This is the trap professionals fall into when they think of BD as an event rather than a discipline. It isn't something you do at a seminar and then stop, it's a habit built in small, repeatable actions, that compounds over an entire career.
The most practical advice started closer to home than most people expect: internally. Senior colleagues are, in effect, your first clients, and peers across other service lines are the people who will vouch for you externally once you've all progressed. The same is true beyond the firm. The peers you meet early in your career, at industry events and in your professional associations, are all progressing too, and they will become some of your most valuable sources of referred work and trusted introductions in the years ahead. Building those relationships now is practice for everything that follows, and it's often under-leveraged because we assume we already know our colleagues well enough, or that it's too early to matter.
On style, the panel challenged a familiar myth: that BD rewards the loudest person in the room. Each partner described a completely different approach, from LinkedIn to small coffees to public speaking, and every approach worked because each was authentic to the person doing it. The advice wasn't to find confidence; it was to find your style and use it consistently.
Listening was treated not as a nice-to-have but as the mechanism through which trust gets built. The professionals who follow up, who make the introduction they promised or send the article they mentioned, are the ones who get remembered. Meeting someone is easy, but following through is what separates people who build real relationships from those who simply collect business cards.
Perhaps the most useful reframe came on timing. It's tempting to treat BD as something for the quiet periods, something you'll get to once the pipeline eases, but the view from the panel was: if you wait for quiet, your pipeline runs dry exactly when you need it. The busiest professionals usually have the most recent, relevant stories to bring to a conversation.
None of this required anyone to fake a personality, master a script, or develop a talent for small talk. It required consistency, curiosity, and a willingness to follow through, applied in small ways, starting now rather than at partner level.
BD doesn't get comfortable. It just gets normal, which is a far more achievable goal.
