Not too long ago I took a training course for business owners. The focus was on intelligently developing relationships with other business owners with whom you can refer business back and forth. The key to making this work is to appropriately feed and water these relationships. If you take the right actions, you can have very profitable relationships.

So how do you make sure you’re taking the right actions? The training company provides a scorecard that helps you keep track of your relationship-building actions each week. (The list of possible activities also serves as a reminder of all the things you could be doing.)

The paper version just didn’t do the trick for me, so I created an online version, completely free and open to anyone who wants to use it. People who have taken the training (offered here in Indianapolis by Crystal Synergies) stand to gain the most from this tool, but I believe anyone could benefit.

Savvy observers will also notice that while the system by default is set up to track the “official” activities that appear in the training course, you can add or remove activities as you see fit. That means if you want to use it to track exercise activities or how many hours you watch TV each day, the system will bend to your will.

In fact if you want a simple and easy to use system for tracking the hours you spend on each of your clients in your freelance work, just update the list of activities to the names of your clients.

You’ll bring me great happiness when I check my traffic logs next week if you take a peek at the Online Referral Scorecard sometime today.

filed under: Finding Work, General News, Project Management