Ask any established consultant where their work comes from and you’ll get the same answer: referrals and repeat clients. The website helps, the LinkedIn posts help, but the engine is the network. Which makes it strange how few of us manage that network with anything resembling a system.
I ran my consultancy for years on the default system, which is to say: memory, guilt, and the search bar in Gmail. It worked until it didn’t. Past a certain network size (for me, somewhere around 150 active relationships), good intentions stop scaling. People you genuinely like go quiet for a year. Promises evaporate. A former client hires someone else for a project you’d have been perfect for, because you weren’t on their mind that week.
Here’s the system I wish I’d adopted a decade earlier. Four parts: capture, memory, timing, and review.
1. Capture: get people out of your head on the day you meet them
The rule is simple: every new meaningful contact gets recorded within 24 hours, with three things attached:
- Context. Where you met, who introduced you, what they’re working on.
- A detail. Something specific they told you: the house move, the difficult board member, the daughter starting university. This is what makes the next conversation warm instead of cold.
- A next step, even a soft one. “Reconnect when their funding round closes.”
Where you record this matters less than doing it. A spreadsheet works. A personal CRM works (I’ve compared the main personal CRM options for consultants separately). What doesn’t work is your head.
2. Memory: one place, attached to the person
The failure mode of most systems isn’t missing data, it’s scattered data. The proposal is in email, the meeting notes are in your notetaker, the personal details are in your head, and the phone number is in WhatsApp. When you prep for a call, you’re a detective reconstructing your own relationship.
Whatever you use, enforce one rule: everything about a person lives against that person. When you finish a meeting, the notes go on the contact. When they mention something that matters, it goes on the contact. Six months later, you should be able to open one record and be ready for the call in two minutes.
This is also where AI tools have changed the game honestly. Meeting notetakers like Granola capture more than you could type (I’ve written about the notetakers, and their limits, here). The remaining trick is getting that capture attached to relationships instead of piling up in an archive.
3. Timing: the part that pays for everything else
Memory without timing is a filing cabinet. The whole return on a managed network comes from acting at the right moment:
- The follow-up you promised. Do it when you said you would. This alone puts you ahead of most of the market.
- The dormant relationship. Anyone important you haven’t spoken to in 90 days is drifting. A two-line message costs nothing and restarts the clock.
- The trigger event. New job, funding, reorg, a post that tells you their world changed. These are the moments a light touch is welcome and a pitch isn’t necessary.
You cannot do timing from memory, because timing is precisely what memory is bad at. You need something that watches the clock for you: calendar reminders, CRM cadences, or an assistant (human or AI) whose job is to tap you on the shoulder. I’ve written more about why follow-ups slip, because the reasons are more mechanical than moral.
4. Review: 20 minutes, once a week
The keystone habit. Once a week, same time, look at three lists:
- Open promises. What did I say I’d do, and for whom?
- Live opportunities. What’s moved, what’s stalled, what’s the next action on each?
- Gone quiet. Who haven’t I spoken to in too long?
Then pick a handful of actions for the week and schedule them like client work, because they are client work: next year’s.
That’s the entire system. Nothing in it requires software, and a disciplined person could run it from a notebook. The catch, and you knew this was coming, is the word disciplined.
Where Aldous fits
I’ll be straight about my interest: I built Aldous because I couldn’t sustain the system above by hand. What I wanted was never software. It was a colleague: someone at my shoulder who whispers the name, the context, and the detail worth asking about before I walk in, and who keeps one eye on where the practice is going. Aldous is an AI assistant built to be that colleague, on one principle: you talk, they do the admin. The four parts of the system, run for you:
- Capture happens in conversation. Tell Aldous about someone on WhatsApp, by message or voice note, the way you’d tell a colleague, and the contact, the detail, and the next step are saved. Meeting notes attach themselves to the right people.
- Memory compounds automatically. Aldous connects to your key apps (inbox, calendar, meeting notes) and builds a rich picture of every relationship, so you show up to the call remembering the house move and the daughter at university without a scramble beforehand.
- Timing comes to you. Aldous plans your day each morning: the meetings, the due follow-ups, the people gone quiet. A check-in after each meeting catches the promises before they evaporate.
- Review is the weekly kickoff, and it’s where Aldous becomes a growth partner rather than a filing system. You set 7, 30, and 90-day goals together; each week Aldous walks you through what moved, what stalled, and where to focus, then turns the decisions into scheduled actions.
The system runs whether or not you’re feeling disciplined that week. And the payoff is the one this whole piece has been circling: you get to be present with people, because the remembering is handled.
Aldous is in invite-only alpha. If your network is your pipeline and it’s currently managed by memory and guilt, tell us about your practice.