The Best Business Development Happens When You're Not Doing It

Relationships Born Outside the Boardroom

Anne McPhail has spent her career at the intersection of finance and community. As Managing Director at Novare Capital Management in Charlotte, NC, she has been deeply involved in the city's arts, education, and philanthropic circles throughout her professional life — and the relationships she's built there have quietly shaped the firm's growth in ways no prospecting strategy could replicate.

"Through that involvement, I've established great relationships with people who've become clients," Anne says. It's not a formula she engineered — it's a pattern she observed over years of showing up.

Kyle Van Pelt, co-founder at Milemarker and host of the Next Mile podcast, has seen the same dynamic play out firsthand. "Some of the best business development opportunities came when you're not doing business development — you're out building homes with Habitat for Humanity and the person next to you swinging a hammer turns out to be an incredible client." The shared work, the shared cause, the context stripped of any transactional dynamic — that's where real trust begins.

Good Friends, Arts Plus, and the Augustine Project

Anne's community involvement isn't abstract. She talks about specific organizations with the kind of warmth that comes from years of genuine commitment.

Good Friends is an organization where 100% of funds raised go directly to helping the working poor — no administrative overhead siphoning resources away from impact. That clarity of mission draws people who care about the same things.

Arts Plus has been providing music and arts education to underprivileged children in Charlotte for over 50 years. Anne describes its founding with particular affection: it started with Mrs. Bridges driving around Charlotte in a paneled station wagon, picking up kids for music lessons. That origin story — humble, personal, born of someone deciding to do something — has shaped the culture of the organization ever since.

Novare supports the Augustine Literacy Project in a concrete, operational way: four members of the team spend time each week tutoring first and second graders. This isn't a check written from a firm foundation — it's people showing up, consistently, to do something that matters. That kind of commitment signals something to clients and prospects about the character of the firm in ways that polished marketing never could.

Practical Advice for Young Advisors

Anne's advice here is both counterintuitive and immediately practical. The instinct for a young advisor looking to build a professional network is often to aim up — to get in front of the most established attorneys, CPAs, and estate planners they can find. But those relationships rarely take root. The established professional has their referral network. They're not looking to add new advisors to it.

The better approach is lateral. Find the 32-year-old attorney who just made partner. The CPA who recently launched their own firm. The estate planner building their practice from scratch. These are people at the same career stage, facing the same challenges, building their networks at the same time. Those peer relationships, formed early, tend to become the deepest and most durable partnerships over the course of a career.

The same logic applies to charitable involvement. Anne's advice is to resist the temptation to diversify across many organizations in search of maximum exposure. Pick what you're genuinely passionate about and go deep. Consistent, meaningful involvement in one or two causes builds far stronger relationships than scattered appearances across a dozen events.

Get married, raise children, build careers at the same time as the people around you — and show up for the causes that matter while you do it. Those become the foundations of lifelong partnerships, both professional and personal.

Giving as a Privilege

There's a risk in discussing community involvement through the lens of business development — it can make the whole thing sound calculated. Anne is clear that the motivation has to be something else entirely.

"We've all been blessed with a lot," she says. "I think it's a privilege to be able to give back."

That's not a disclaimer added to make the strategy sound more palatable. It's a genuine statement about why the approach works in the first place. People can tell when someone is showing up at a charity event to collect business cards. They can also tell when someone genuinely cares about the work and has shown up consistently for years because they believe in it.

The advisor who tutors first graders twice a week because they find it meaningful will build better relationships through that work than the advisor who joins a charity board for profile exposure. The former is building something real. The latter is just doing a different kind of prospecting.

Genuine generosity, over time, creates the conditions for the strongest relationships in an advisor's career. Not because it was designed to — but because that's what happens when people with shared values work toward something they care about together.

What This Means for Your Firm

The implications aren't complicated. But they do require a shift in how community involvement is framed internally — from a marketing activity to a cultural value.

• Get involved in causes you genuinely care about — Not causes that appear on your target client's donor list. The authenticity is detectable and it matters.
• Find peers at your career stage — The 30-something attorney, CPA, or estate planner building their practice alongside you is worth far more than a corner-office introduction that goes nowhere.
• Don't approach community involvement as a prospecting strategy — Approach it as service. The relationships will come from the shared work, not from treating the work as a venue for networking.
• Encourage team members to volunteer in meaningful ways — Novare has four people tutoring twice a week. That's not a PR campaign. It's a firm that has made community service part of who they are.
• Go deep in fewer places — Consistent presence in one or two organizations builds far more than occasional appearances in many.

The business will follow. It always does — but only when it isn't the point.