Finding Clarity: Design a Business You Love and Simplify Your Marketing by Amanda H. Young

Author:Amanda H. Young
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Difference Press
Published: 2016-01-16T14:00:00+00:00

Permission to Pivot

Throughout your business, you’ll likely be tempted to change factors that seem like they’re not working. Do you might want to shift your definition of who your favorite clients are because you think they will be more fun to work with than your current clients? Maybe you want to create a different offer to support a subset of your clients and fill in a gap in the marketplace? If so, be sure to check with your inner self to confirm that’s the right move for you. If it feels right, test it out. For small tweaks to your business, you can typically offer a pilot program with discounted pricing to see how your clients react to it and if it works. However, there may come a time in your business when the offers you are putting out aren’t working and you aren’t gaining any traction. Instead of giving up altogether, consider pivoting.

In his book The Lean Startup, Eric Reis explains the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP). It’s the minimum offer you can deliver in order to still make a sale and get people interested in what you have to offer. If you’re a bookkeeper, you might offer to enter a small business owner’s expenses into their accounting software. If you can find clients who want to pay you for that service, you have a successful MVP. After offering that service for six months, you might realize that your heart isn’t in it, it doesn’t pay well enough to cover your expenses, and you really want to be offering a comprehensive service instead. At that point, you can “pivot” your business.

Pivoting means shift substantially in another direction. It involves putting a new spin on things and changing up your offerings, but without recreating your whole business.

A woman I met started her business teaching foreign languages to individual students in small private groups. In time, her business pivoted to offer classroom language services to private schools. A decade later, she was considering letting go of the individual private lessons so she could focus all her efforts on expanding her classroom offerings. In order to successfully pivot, she needed to give herself permission to change her mind from the original intention she had set for her business and focus on what was working successfully.

Reflection questions: What could a pivot do for your business? What could a pivot do for your clients? Do you feel like you need permission to pivot your business? What if you had that permission? What do you need in order for it to be okay to let go of offers in your business that aren’t working and explore pivoting?

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