September always seems to bring a change of pace.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had lots of conversations: some short, some much longer, with new contacts as well as people I’ve known and worked with for years. And there is a definite sense of energy in the air. After the summer, people seem ready to get going again.

Projects that had been sitting in the background are coming back onto the agenda. People are making plans for the final months of the year. Diaries are filling up; introductions are being made and conversations that started months ago are being picked up again.

What has struck me most is how valuable those conversations are.

Not every meeting needs to have an immediate outcome. A coffee with an old contact can lead to an introduction six months later. A quick catch-up can uncover something that has changed within a business. A conversation at an event can turn into a meeting with someone you would never otherwise have approached. It is easy, particularly when everyone is busy, to focus only on the conversations that have a clear business development objective attached to them. But relationships rarely develop in such a straight line.

This is particularly true in architecture, engineering and the wider built environment, where relationships can span many years, different projects and even different organisations as people move around the industry. And, of course, this is closely connected to the work I do with clients.

Good client relationships need conversations too. Not just when a project has gone wrong, or when the next piece of work is being discussed, but while the relationship is developing.The most useful conversations are often the ones that create space for someone to say:

“This is working really well.”

“This has been frustrating us.”

Or even: “There may be another opportunity here.”

That is why I continue to believe so strongly in independent client listening. A proper conversation can reveal far more than a satisfaction score or a standard feedback form. It helps businesses understand not only how they are performing, but how the relationship itself is developing.

So, as September gets into full swing, my main observation is a simple one: keep talking to people. Reconnect with the client you haven’t spoken to for a while. Have that coffee. Go to the event. Pick up the conversation that went quiet before the summer. And, perhaps most importantly, ask your clients how things are really going.

There seems to be a real hunger to get going again, and it would be a shame not to make the most of it.