We all understand the concept of client development and the way the term is used. But it's not helpful.

Your clients are what they are, clients. The idea that they can be turned into bigger clients by you developing them is a myth. It comes from the wrong place. It assumes that your firm is a perfect offering, and that the clients just need schooling to see it. That's backwards. Your clients don't become bigger clients by you developing them, they do it by you developing yourself.

Here's the key question: If you need to develop yourself to make your clients bigger — such that they send you more of their business more often — how do you go about it? As the "wrong place" lesson in Lean Adviser discusses, clients will always prefer to buy from healthy, well-aligned, enterprises over unhealthy, dysfunctional suppliers. This is your goal — to fix the health and hygiene in your own firm, in all the ways that matter to clients.