Picture this: You’ve had a strong 12-18 months in your practice. Maybe you didn’t make as much money as you wanted, but you had some solid first engagements and learned a lot.
Then the projects end, with nothing lined up next.
You thought you were poised for growth. But the people who initially helped you get traction don’t have more work for you.
You then realize that you were delivering services but weren’t building a sustainable business.
This scenario hits almost every business owner eventually: at some point, you will exhaust, drift from, or simply not have access to the relationships that sustain your business. The question isn’t if — it’s when.
Scenario One: The Cold Start
You go out on your own, tell the people in your network what you’re doing… and there’s no appetite to hire you. Or maybe you’re established but changing the market you serve, and don’t have any relationships in your new space.
The signal is clear right out of the gate: you need to build a new network from scratch, from clients to referral partners.
This was my scenario. Even with my credentials, I had no established relationships with the owners of $500K-$2M small businesses who I wanted to serve as a Fractional Chief Operations Officer. So I hustled to build a network: went to every networking event in town, joined online and offline programs, and tried to meet as many people as I could.
I made 75% of my first year revenue (which covered the bills) with subcontracting consulting projects from my previous world. It took me nine months to get my first 3 retainer clients for my own book of business. I talk about the reality of how I made my first $100K here.
The network move: The hard part here is cash flowing your life while building a network, and the sheer awkwardness of having to build a network with zero footholds and people to help make intros easier.
But at least the Cold Start is visible. The next two scenarios are sneakier.
Scenario Two: The Second-Year Slump
You got some traction in your first year or two, with a set of initial projects. Then, you hit the time crunch: delivering those projects and doing all of the business-building activities that seem to be required in your first few years (branding! Social media! A one-pager! Starting a newsletter!).
Building new relationships always got postponed to “later.”
And when that first round of projects ended, there weren’t more relationships to tap into. Your initial demand came from relationships you’d already built before you started the business, and while you were busy serving those clients, you hadn’t built the next layer of relationships yet.
With shorter-term coaching engagements or delivery projects, you likely hit the slump early because engagements are shorter and/or lower priced.
However, you might not hit this slump for a year or even two. Land one solid corporate project at high five figures, or a fractional retainer, and your revenue looks solid—right up until that engagement ends.
The network move: Network expansion can’t be the thing you do after your projects end. The steady rhythm of expanding and deepening relationships needs to be protected in your schedule during both the busy and slow seasons, even when the siren call of delivery wants to squeeze everything out.
Scenario Three: The Aging Network
You’ve built your business, found some solid lead sources or referral partners, and it’s been running well for a few years. Then, you notice a slowdown.
- The referral partners you built start to drop off: people retire, they switch roles or return to corporate, or they slow down their own business development efforts.
- The networks you relied on dissolve: the community leader changed their focus, a program you got clients from ended.
- Or your tenured clients exit: your point of contact for recurring work at an org changed, a cohort of long-standing clients move on and aren’t renewing.
But your business relied on these partners, networks, and client base. And when these shift (because they always do), you’ve lost a major lead source even though your business hasn’t changed.
Several strong revenue years might actually be masking an aging network.
(And to be clear—I don’t mean aging in years. I mean a network that matures, where people gradually fall away.)
It’s happening all over the coaching industry right now. A lot of the supplemental providers for newly certified life coaches—the web designers, the sales coaches, the marketing coaches—built their lead flow on one or two big-name coaches. When those names shut down their practices or stopped aggressively marketing, everyone orbiting them took a major hit to their new client pipeline and had to change their business models accordingly.
The network move: Scenario Three needs everything Scenario Two needs—ongoing network expansion, plus an honest diagnosis about where your client roster or referral engine carries load-bearing risk.
Which partners, which organizational relationships, which single contacts are holding up too much of your pipeline? If one of your best referral partners stopped sending you new business tomorrow, or if your past clients stopped renewing, how exposed would you be?
You want to know that while the shift is happening, not after it shows up 3-6 months later as a revenue gap.
The common realities of networks and how Relationship Rhythms closes the gap
In all three scenarios, new relationship-building was an activity that only happened reactively.
Network engagement happened:
- when revenue dipped
- when projects ended
- when panic hit
- when someone needed something
Instead of being treated as an ongoing part of how the business itself operates.
The goal isn’t constant “networking” or endless coffee chats.
The goal is building a low-intensity rhythm of expanding and deepening relationships before urgency forces you to.
This is the final email in this Relationship Rhythms launch.
Everything I’ve walked through here—expanding relationships, deepening them, reading the health of your network before it shows up in your bank account—isn’t a one-time fix. It’s a practice. And practices are easier to hold when you have structure, prompts, and a rhythm to return to instead of relying on yourself to remember.
That’s exactly what I built Relationship Rhythms to do.
A repeatable way to build the relationships that build your pipeline, before the gaps become emergencies.
Join before June 1 and you’ll also receive live bonuses: monthly Q&A sessions during the summer and CRM office hours to help you build the Relationship Rhythms approach into your own system — or use the one I provide. (Members, check the Circle community for your 10% discount).