No One Told You This Would Be Part of the Job

I was thrilled to start at a public accounting firm after I graduated from college, but then my father gave me advice I did not want to hear.

“Don’t go work for an accounting firm,” he told me. “Go into sales.” My father, a lifelong salesman, believed there’s no fun in knowing on January 1 exactly what you’ll earn by December 31.

“Dad,” I told him, “I didn’t earn a Master of Accountancy to go into sales.”

Little did I know.

Years into the career I loved, the expectation arrived: bring in business. The very thing I had dismissed in my father’s kitchen turned out to be part of the job after all. What took me longer to learn was that the expectation was not the thing I recoiled from. I had recoiled from sales. What arrived was business development, which is quite different, and a skill I did not have.

Sound familiar? Somewhere along the way, the expectation shifted: now you are supposed to bring in business. Business development was never part of your training. It was not in the exams, the internship, or the job description you signed up for. You earned the credentials, put in the hours, became genuinely excellent at the thing you were hired to do.

Now something more is being asked, and the underlying message is clear: figure this out, or watch your colleagues get ahead of you.

That is the frustration that shows up mid-career. You are being asked to be good at something you have never learned and then judged for not already knowing how.

Choose to build this skill, and it becomes your advantage.

Turn this expectation to your advantage.

1. Claim it as yours to build. The frustration disappears the moment you stop treating business development as something imposed on you and start treating it as a skill you are choosing to master, the same way you mastered your craft. The change from imposed on you to chosen by you is where the whole shift begins.

2. Serve, do not sell. Reframe business development as helping the right people solve a real problem. You are not becoming a salesperson. You are extending what already makes you excellent: understanding people and being genuinely useful to them.

3. Turn their expectation into a plan you control. Decide what you want to grow this year and break it into a few repeatable weekly actions. Then start with just one this week. Growth will begin to feel confident, secure, and authentic because the process fits your personality and your schedule.

There is one more thing worth sitting with: when you master business development, you set the pace of your growth.

Try this right now.

Write the expectation the way it currently feels, something like, “I am not a salesperson, and I should not have to sell to get ahead.” Underneath it, rewrite it as a decision you own: “I am excellent at what I do, and I am choosing to build the skill that brings my expertise to more of the right people.”

Read the two side by side. Nothing about your situation changed. Only the story you tell about it did, and that changes everything.

Now pick the smallest action that serves your new decision and do it this week.

My own training did not include a word about business development. So, when the expectation arrived, I felt the same frustration you may be feeling now.

The difference is what I did next. I learned a proven process and used it to build a plan I could follow. It worked, and I built a multi-seven figure book of ideal clients. That proven process is what I now share, so other professionals like you can build your own plan without struggling as long as I did.

The skill is learnable, and the timing is yours. All that is left is to begin.

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