We all start our businesses with great dreams. Owning your own business is an opportunity to achieve a level of success that most of us will never realize in the corporate world. Why then is success so elusive?

Without a doubt there is a huge gap between dreaming about success and actually achieving it. What holds back so many small business owners and entrepreneurs? There are certainly many factors but one of the main culprits is business development.

Put simply, many new business owners, especially those in services businesses, greatly underestimate how difficult it is to attract consistent streams of new clients. This comes as a surprise to many entrepreneurs, especially when their business model only requires that they add two or three new clients each year. Intellectually we think to ourselves that this can’t possible be all that difficult.

What makes this deceptive is that getting our first few clients is usually fairly easy. If we’ve done anything close to a reasonably good job of developing a network of clients, a few of them will throw some work our way.

However what most fledgling consultants and advisors fail to realize is that their network doesn’t have an infinite amount of business to give them. After the first rush of activity it’s likely that you’ve received most of the business you will get. Returning to to this group in 6 months is likely not to yield much more gold. The reality is that you can very quickly lap the track if you are not bringing new people into your circle of relationships. This is where things often start to fall apart.

Which is why systems become so important. Systems for getting new people to raise their hands and express interest in who you are and what you do, and systems for building trust and credibility through regular contact.

Without such systems, small and solo services providers are almost always doomed to failure. The initial clients go away, pleased with the work you’ve done, but unable to offer you more. This puts you back at the starting gate. From this proverbial square one, you must once again start the process of trying to get that next piece of business. Since the cultivation time for developing prospects into clients is often considerable, the repeated cycles of feast or famine become inevitable.

Although it’s not particularly difficult to set up a system that will alleviate this problem, so few business owners do. Which raises the question of, why?

It’s my belief that many people think that it is too complicated and too much hard work. I find that ironic that these same people are willing to work extremely hard servicing their clients, but are unwilling to do so on their own behalf.

What do you think?