BDF Service Offering

Intro to BDF Partners

We help you turn technical expertise into sustainable growth.

A boutique business development practice for technical and professional services firms that win work through trust, not persuasion.

Why BDF exists

BD in technical services is genuinely complex.

You sell expertise and judgement, not a product. Every client and every solution is different. The one constant is your commitment to solving your clients' problems. Turning service quality and trust into a steady pipeline is hard, and it shows up in familiar ways.

BDF Partners was born from a simple recognition: technical services BD needs clarity, structure and simplicity, built on the real foundations of growth.

Structure without bureaucracy · Discipline without noise · Growth through focus

Does any of this feel familiar?

You will not have all of them. The one you recognise is usually the place to start.

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BDF Service Offering

How can we help you?

Six ways to work together: pick where it hurts most, and explore.

Founder

Frans Oosthuizen

Twenty-five years in technical services. He built and ran business development at scale, then designed BDF for firms your size, based on what works.

Academic Background

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Built deliberately for firms where improvising is no longer enough, but full-time senior BD and heavy systems would be overkill.

The practice is deliberately small: a few clients at a time, and never two who compete with each other. You get senior attention rather than a share of it, and nothing you tell me is of use to anyone else I work with.

He implemented and ran the regional BD operating system at multinationals Jacobs and Worley, first as Inside Sales Manager and later as Director of Business Development for Sub-Saharan Africa. An earlier decade with Schlumberger, across Europe, Russia and Africa, built deep cross-cultural operational intelligence in more than a dozen countries. He has worked across various sectors, including energy, oil and gas, mining and industrial, on pursuits that range from secondments and small task orders to large EPCm projects and mega partnerships.

Twenty-five years brought real success, and hard lessons too: what does and does not work, and where effort gets wasted. BDF distils his experience, cross-checked and informed by industry best practice and the professional-services literature.

Frans's key strengths include:

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Inside the corporate BD machine, from both seats. That is also how I know it is too heavy for a firm your size.

How we engage

Each step earns the next.

We start light and build only what fits, designed to your needs.

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Email Frans

I'll respond within two business days. No deck, no pitch.

Questions

The things people usually ask.

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BD Fundamentals

A clear framework for how to think about BD.

Technical and professional services firms that win work through trust.

Before reaching for tools and systems, get clear on what business development in technical services actually is, and what really drives growth.

This is not really a service you buy. It is the philosophy we bring to everything else, and the thinking the rest of the offering rests on. Everything further down assumes it.

What is business development in technical services?

Business development is the structured approach that converts strategy into opportunity, by identifying, shaping and pursuing work that creates value for clients and sustainable growth for your firm.

Clients buy expertise and judgement, not a product or commodity, so the usual sales playbooks don't fit. BD itself has no settled discipline of its own, which is why most firms improvise. BD starts with strategy: where to play and where to focus. Done well, BD is deliberate, not heroic.

The three foundations of growth

Be clear on what drives growth before you build a system on top of it.

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Recognise the asymmetry

Good delivery without visibility is survivable. Visibility without service quality is not: BD cannot fix poor delivery.

The highest return is usually nearest

Deepening trusted accounts beats only chasing new ones. Most firms invest the opposite way.

Mapping the BD approaches

Two questions sort the whole field: does BD live in people or a system? Is it aimed at today's work or where the market's heading? Select a quadrant to read it.

Future / strategic →

← Present / operational

← Individual-led

System-led →

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◆ Target

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For a technical services firm we want to be top-right: a light, strategy-led system. Off-the-shelf solutions don't fit. They aren't designed around the real growth drivers: service, trust, visibility, and turning delivery into the next opportunity.

In one paragraph

The BDF Approach is a lightweight, strategy-led way for technical services firms to turn good delivery, trusted relationships and visibility into deliberate, sustainable growth, with enough structure to be repeatable, but never enough to smother judgement.

Read the thinking behind it

The BDF Insights series works the same argument in full, in order: why capable firms stall, what growth actually rests on, what kind of system fits, the beliefs underneath it, and how to measure it.

Diagnose BD status

See clearly where you stand, and what's holding growth back.

A picture of how your BD works today, and where to focus first. The low-friction first step.

The BDF Diagnostic

A focused round of interviews with your leadership and key BD people, synthesised into clear themes and priorities. Deliberately self-reported: your people already know what's working and what isn't. The value is in the reading, not the gathering.

You get a short report and a leadership readout: the themes, a Health Index baseline, and the two or three priorities that shape the plan. In a couple of weeks you go from "our BD is a bit ad hoc" to a shared, evidence-based plan.

The flow

1Interviews

2Themes

3BDF Health Index baseline

4Top 2–3 priorities

The BDF Health Index

Eight dimensions, scored 1–10 against one maturity scale (absent → partial → systematic → embedded) on observed behaviour, not intent. Move the sliders to sketch your own baseline.

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Your BD profile

The shape redraws as you move the sliders. A balanced firm fills the web evenly. The dents show where to focus first.

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Review 2 · live · mean {{ avg }}

Review 1 is locked. Move the dials to sketch review 2.

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Take it with you

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A baseline, not a benchmark

Firms differ too much for a cross-firm score to mean anything. The comparison that matters is you now against you then. "We moved from three to five against the same evidence" is a finding you can act on; "we are a six" is a number to argue about.

Capability, not results

It scores whether you are getting better at the work that wins work, so it moves before the revenue does. Read it alongside your commercial performance: the two answer different questions and will not always move together.

Delivery sits outside it

Delivery quality is a precondition for growth, not a BD activity, so it is deliberately not a dimension. BD cannot fix poor delivery, and a strong BD system on top of it only wins you work you will disappoint people on.

Baselined at the Diagnostic and re-scored on a light cadence, so the picture is a trend rather than a snapshot. A low, honest baseline is one of the most useful things a firm can own, because everything after it can be read as movement.

Sharpen your BD focus

BD doesn't replace your strategy. It flows from it.

We review your strategy through a BD lens and help turn it into clear choices: the inputs that give BD its focus.

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BDF Partners helps you translate your strategy into clear BD inputs, so effort points where you have chosen to grow. We help make your strategy BD-ready.

Structure BD lightly

The BDF Process: a light growth rhythm.

A practical, four-phase system connecting strategy, pursuit, proposals and delivery into a continuous cycle of growth. Just enough structure to be consistent, without slowing your people down.

Strategy sits above the cycle

It shapes every decision and sits before the cycle as its precondition. Services → Sectors → Clients → Geography.

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01Market Positioning

→

02Opportunity Pursuit

→

03Propose

→

04Momentum

← Momentum feeds back to 01, 02 & 03

Main flow: 01 → 02 → 03 → 04 Entry points: opportunities can enter at 01, 02 or 03 Feedback: Momentum strengthens 01, 02 and 03

A loop, not a funnel

A funnel ends at the win. Technical services growth keeps going, through delivery, relationships and the next opportunity. The shape has to be a cycle.

Built to stay light

Enough structure to give BD focus, discipline and rhythm, without the bureaucracy technical firms rightly resist. Every step ends with an owner, a next step and a date.

What feeds the cycle

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→

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← Momentum feeds back to 01, 02 & 03

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The real differentiator

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What this phase covers

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Outcome

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Governance & tools

Light gates at the points that matter: each one a short, deliberate decision, not a form-filling exercise.

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BD drives, specialists own the depth. BD owns the relationship and the negotiation; legal, commercial and risk each have a qualified specialist, and final sign-off sits with an authorised person. BDF takes no legal liability.

Every gate has a one-page template.

The BD rhythm

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The role of a CRM

One shared place for your pipeline, accounts and next actions, out of inboxes and people's heads. It mirrors your BD process and stays light enough that it actually stays current.

No standalone product, no single right tool. Use a spreadsheet, customise software, build one, or generate one with AI. BDF helps shape it to your firm. The memory and rhythm-keeper of your BD, not the system itself.

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Demo See what one looks like.

A demonstration instance with sample data, shaped the BDF way. It is there as an example to react to, not a product for sale. Sign-in required, so ask for access.

Open the demo CRM →

Keep BD on track

The rhythm holds, and your people grow into it.

This is the long-term half of the work, and it has two sides that depend on each other. A system nobody owns quietly stops running, and you cannot hand a rhythm over without building someone to hand it to.

01 · THE SYSTEM HOLDS

Who owns which activities, how the shape changes as you grow, and how involved we stay. From fractional BD lead through to light-touch advisory.

02 · YOUR PEOPLE GROW

Coaching your leaders, account leads and technical sellers, and building the internal owner we eventually hand the rhythm to.

01 · THE SYSTEM HOLDS

BD is a set of activities that need clear ownership.

The activities, in every firm of every size

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…plus input from commercial, legal and risk. What changes is the level of effort in each, how they're combined, and who's responsible.

It is scalable.

It scales by changing how the activities are packaged, grouped and assigned, not by adding headcount. Only two things really move: who originates, and who holds the rhythm. Technical credibility stays with your experts; senior time stays in the work.

High intensity

Fractional BD lead

Light touch

Advisory

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Where you sit on this spectrum, and how it shifts over time, is set by your needs and BD maturity, in line with the mutually agreed BD plan.

And sometimes a full-time BD hire is the right answer.

If that is where you are heading, we will help you work out whether it fits, what the role should actually own, and what to look for. We would rather you made that call well than have you avoid it.

There is also a middle option that often works better than either extreme: bring in a more junior BD person at a cost you can carry, and use us to build the system around them and coach them into it. You get senior BD judgement and an owner who is yours, without paying for a senior hire before the pipeline justifies one.

02 · YOUR PEOPLE GROW

Winning work is more teachable than most technical firms assume.

Reading a client, shaping a conversation, asking for the work at the right moment: that ability matters enormously and always will. It comes more naturally to some than to others, but it improves with practice and honest coaching. Assigning an activity to someone who cannot yet do it is not ownership, it is a gap with a name on it.

So the point is never to replace your people with a process. It is to take the instinct that already wins your work, make it explicit, and spread it beyond the one or two who have it naturally.

Who we work with

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How the coaching runs

In the flow of real work, not as a training course. Mostly a short standing one-to-one with each person carrying pipeline, working their live pursuits. Plus sitting in on client meetings, pursuit reviews and gates, and debriefing afterwards. The work being coached is work that had to happen anyway.

It builds over the engagement rather than arriving as an event, which is why it sits in the long-term half rather than the build.

What it is for

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This is the half that decides whether the engagement ends well. The system can be installed in months. An owner who can run it, and a team that knows how to win work deliberately, is what makes it yours to keep.

Prepare BD for what may come

Position for where the market is heading.

BD positions you in line with your current strategy. Foresight pushes that strategy further, to account for the shifts that could redraw the market. It doesn't predict the future; it prepares you for several.

Why it matters here

Capital projects run on long lead times, while energy and mining are mid-transition: decarbonisation, critical minerals, gas, electrification. Spot a shift early and you're positioned for the work it creates, before it ever becomes a tender.

Where it fits

Foresight sits in strategy, above the four phases, not inside. It sharpens your own strategy, and helps you read a customer's future, which becomes real value in how you engage them.

What is foresight?

Futures studies, briefly.

Futures studies is a structured way to read how your market could change: the trends, signals and forces shaping it, and the range of plausible futures they point to. It doesn't predict one outcome; it widens the picture so you can act early. This is a capability we are building, and one we expect to deepen over time.

Foresight

Read the shifts

The trends, signals and forces shaping your market.

→

Strategy

Sharpen the strategy

Clearer choices about where to play and what to back.

→

BD

Position BD early

Engage and build for the work before it becomes a tender.

You don't need to predict exactly which future arrives. You need a strategy that holds up across the plausible ones, and the early signals that show which way your market is leaning.

Why BDF

You already have what BD needs.

Capable technical firms already have the raw material for business development: good delivery, trusted relationships, and a reputation worth knowing about. The gap is that few firms convert it deliberately.

BDF turns three foundations, service quality, trusted relationships and visibility, into a light system your own people can run. The point is simple: every project should make the next one easier to win.

Why capable firms still struggle with BD

You will probably recognise some of these.

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Why the typical sales funnel doesn't fit

Most sales models were built for products: things you can define, price and compare. Technical services don't work that way. Clients often don't yet know the full problem; value is co-created, not pre-packaged.

Good BD here helps clients see problems worth solving, then earns the right to solve them. Persuasion has little to do with it.

How the BDF Process compares

What matters

Most approaches

The BDF Process

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The result

BD your technical people can actually own.

Strategy sets the focus, trusted relationships become the pipeline, and every project makes the next one easier to win.

BDF Process · Templates

One-page templates for every gate.

Light, practical and plain-language, designed to be used under delivery pressure. The detailed templates are part of a BDF engagement.

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Provided with a BDF engagement

The BDF vocabulary

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BDF Partners

Legal and privacy.

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Responsible party

BDF Partners, Johannesburg, South Africa. For anything on this page, write to {{ contactEmail }}.

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Legal notice

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BDF Insights

Thinking on how technical firms grow.

A series on business development for technical and professional services firms: why capable firms stall, what growth actually rests on, and the light system that turns delivery into the next opportunity.

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Further reading

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Want to talk it through?

If this resonated and you want to explore how it applies to your firm, start with a short conversation. No deck, no pitch.