We’ve previously looked at The Dip, a helpful process for deciding when to pivot and when to persevere.
Perseverance is simple but not easy, in the same way that running a marathon is simple but not easy – just start running and stop after you’ve gone 42.2km.
Pivoting isn’t so simple, you’re going to have lots of interesting options to navigate.
My suggestion is to consider all of these interesting options, but not all at once.
Instead, let’s look at what a pivot actually is, then work through three stages of brainstorming…

Pivots Are About Assets
Every (good) business is full of assets, the things that allow them to trade and make a profit.
These might be physical assets like buildings, factories and machines, or they might be intangible assets like a secret recipe or a familiar brand.
A thriving business has a wealth of assets, and generally doesn’t want anything to change.
A startup begins with almost no assets, and can make drastic changes to their business overnight.
Pivoting is when a company decides to let go of some assets and processes, while still holding on to others.
Much like a literal pivot, where part of your body stays still while the other parts swivel around; you’ve changed but you’ve also remained grounded.

For example:
·      Keeping all their production equipment, but making a different product
·      Keeping their trusted name, but writing messages to a different audience
·      Keeping their same audience, but offering a different service
·      Keeping their talented team, but changing their position in the market

We’re not talking about scrapping everything and starting over, but rather choosing what level of change and experimentation is required.
If you don’t have any assets, it’s not a pivot, it’s essentially a new business.
If you aren’t removing or changing any of your previous assets, it’s an expansion not a pivot.

Here are some specific examples near me:
·      Dexter, a BBQ restaurant transformed into a temporary deli
·      Gypsy Hub, a distillery started making pure alcohol for hand sanitiser
·      The Social Studio, fashion designers who started selling medical scrubs to hospitals
·      Céramiques, a pottery school who started offering online classes for working with hand-moulded clay
·      Flowers Vasette, a florist who started offering fruit and vegetable boxes delivered to your door
·      Two Birds Brewing, who switched from B2B sales to now offering B2C sales via drive-thru

Short Term Pivots – The Next 4-6 Weeks
For businesses that have lost major clients or seen a sudden drop in sales, there’s probably not time to dedicate to strategy weekends and redefining your vision for the future.
The most urgent task is to reverse the momentum and stabilise your cashflow.
A great starting question is: What headaches do my customers have right now?
Your old menu of products and services might be obsolete, but your knowledge of your customers remains valuable.
What needs do they have?
What’s on the top of their To-Do List?
Where are they spinning their wheels?
What problems would they pay someone to solve?
How might your knowledge of their situation make you a trusted partner?

For example, at the start of the COVID lockdown we saw 90% of our revenue disappear over the course of two weeks, predominantly accelerator programs and consulting projects that involved travel.
While the contracts were postponed, our clients still have obligations and challenges, and they still trust us as partners.
Therefore, our first action was to arrange impromptu customer interviews, with the intention of designing hyper-relevant product offers.
It’s still early days, but so far we’ve been able to re-create the majority of our lost revenue, and are able to help our friends out of a difficult situation in the process.

This might be a case of redesigning your products and services, or as simple as reframing them.
You might rename your packages, change your descriptions or emphasise different strengths, to better match what your customer is shopping for.

So for the next two months, the question is “How might we solve new and valuable problems for our customers?”.
I recommend putting this through the Can If Map, as well as the Value Proposition Canvas.
Each of these tools help you brain form creative ideas for new products and services that delight and satisfy your audience.

Medium Term Pivots – The Next 4-6 Months
The next level of work is in designing new customers for your products and services – who else would find great value in what you have to offer?
Who shares your passion?
Who has a pain point?
Who is willing to spend money to improve their situation?
Are they individuals, companies or institutions?
What Value Propositions would they find incredibly compelling?

For example, a social enterprise might make the switch from retail to wholesale; forming new partnerships that will see your wares sold through new channels to a new audience.
Or you might create a premium version of your product or service, triple the price of the entry level offer but with substantially more value for money.
Maybe you’re interested in selling online, creating digital assets that let you serve customers all over the world instead of just your home town.
Our company pivoted out of B2C sales and into B2B contracts, a lucrative but time consuming process.
We have customers who value our work and bring us in to work with 10-15 businesses at a time, which is much easier that trying to recruit these enterprises individually.
That said, this shift took a deliberate effort over 6-12 months, slowly building trust and credibility with a new audience.

Entering a new market takes a while, since relationships and reputations are often the slowest part of growing your startup.
You’ll talk to a wide range of people, most of whom won’t be your customer any time soon, but these interviews and experiments will help you decide which market you’d like to enter.
I recommend drafting some options on the Business Model Canvas, filling in some Test Cards and reading The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.

Long Term Pivots - The Next Twelve Months
We’ve looked at finding new products for your customers, and new customers for your products, but in a lot of cases people want a more radical overhaul.
This might be the decision to leave an industry altogether, or move to a different part of the value chain, or to transform the way they are perceived within their field.
These thoughts develop over a long time, and my guess is that if you’re thinking this way for your brand, it began well before COVID changed your plans.

For example, I work with a few entrepreneurs who want to pivot their work to a higher level of status – changing the way the market views their value.
They don’t want an additional ten customers, they want customers who engage with their brand in a totally different way.
e.g. developing a genuine appreciation for Indigenous artwork and culture, valuing the strengths of people with a disability, becoming a provider of choice in their field, educating customers about their mission, creating an active online community who uplift each other, etc.

These are all great targets, but they take a well-designed effort to make them a reality.
It takes time to shift your market’s way of thinking.
It takes time to remove old prejudices.
It takes time to develop a meaningful brand.
It takes time to nurture a healthy community around your business.
It takes time to retrain your staff.
It takes time to instil a high performance culture into your workplace.
It takes time to do content marketing well.

These longer term pivots require the entrepreneur to set up a leading measure and a lagging measure, since they’ll be pushing their idea for a long while before they see visible results.
A leading measure tracks how much work you’re putting in, such as the number of sales you make, the amount of content you produce, the number of experiments you run.
A lagging measure tracks the results you’re seeing, such as the profit in your business, the clicks on your website, the results of your experiments.
You’ll want to celebrate both of them, preferably with a scoreboard that you can track each day.

I recommend spending more time refining your goals when it comes to these larger pivots.
You want to make sure that the riskier manoeuvre has a large enough payoff; and that building this new business will actually make you happy.

Remember, while it might not be a great time to launch a new business, it’s an excellent time to test a new business idea.
A pivot lets you take some risk, whilst still taking advantage of the valuable assets you’ve accumulated.
The combination of lateral thinking, cautious optimism and honest testing will let you explore lots of ideas without making a big commitment.
It might not always be smooth, but it could be the start of a lucrative new revenue stream, or even reshape your business for good.