Guide · 13 July 2026 · 5 min read
A BD director's first ninety days in a professional firm
You inherit spreadsheets, folklore and polite scepticism. The sequence that works: see, then standardise, then systematise.
New BD directors in partnerships fail two ways: arriving with a transformation deck before understanding the firm, or dissolving into the bid queue and never surfacing. The path between is a sequence. First make the current state visible, then agree shared definitions, and only then bring the machinery.
Days 1 to 30: see
Assemble the true pipeline from wherever it lives, spreadsheets, inboxes, heads, without criticising its condition. Interview the partners who win most and ask how, specifically. Read the last two years of wins and losses. Publish one honest page: what we have live, what it is worth, what we do not know. Visibility before judgement.
Days 31 to 60: standardise
Agree the smallest set of shared definitions that lets numbers mean one thing: stages and their probabilities, what qualifies a pursuit as real, who owns bid/no-bid, what a next action is. Small vocabulary, partners consulted, then written down. Every later system inherits either this clarity or its absence.
Days 61 to 90: systematise
Now the machinery, sized to the definitions: one place for pursuits, a weekly ranked-priority rhythm, a board number produced from records. Pick one visible win, a framework renewal run properly, a key account replanned, and let it advertise the method. The mandate you actually need arrives with the first result, not the org chart.