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Here’s what I know about pivoting. It’s probably the entire existence of myself as an entrepreneur. I think it’s very easy for creatives to be in a place where we’re building the solutions to our own problems. There’s likely the assumption that many people would need this solution that you’re providing. I know I did. The concept though, pivoting is that we do it constantly in micro and macro ways.
You likely do it in your personal life and you definitely do it in your business. You’re pivoting your plans, pivoting your schedule, pivoting your ideas. I mean we’re just a bunch of indecisive visionary humans. But here’s the deal, pivoting done well can be the absolute ticket to seeing success. An opportunity to feel excitement again in your ideas.
Rushing your pivot could mean messy and broken, probably a shit experience, etc. So like I said, I’m a big pivoter. When I launched my first company, I launched as a co -work space. I was dead set on this concept. So much so that I don’t think anyone could have talked me out of it had they had a differing opinion.
Mostly because it didn’t exist yet and… really, I just wanted a place where I felt like I belonged, having not felt that in so many spaces I showed up in. So okay, the picture is, dead set on my idea, I’m launching an all -women co -working space. It was big vision, okay? It had everything you could possibly need, childcare, healthcare, like a health facility inside. It had all of the services and concierge and all the things that you would need as a working woman in this world, and in this United States so that you didn’t have to focus on everything else that we’re balancing because as women we are balancing so much.
So this was the dream. This was the vision. So I launched that co-work space. Once it launched, I hated it. If you listen to a few episodes back, I talked a lot about this, about how once doors opened, I really did not want this to be the dream. It wasn’t what I imagined, obviously.
What I was trying to build was community, but it was solely reliant on the community showing up. And I think like when I put this concept together, it required funding, to be real. It required funding in order to have the volume that I was seeking, to have that community essence that I think I was really riding on, hoping for. But like community does, I had a few people show up and that coworking mindset.
And it was interesting. It just wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want people to just be stagnant sitting in a space waiting for doors to close to wrap up their day. I wanted them to be intentionally spending their time. So I wanted that, but I also think the community did too, because once we started doing events that opened up the doors. So to reiterate, I didn’t like it.
I wanted to pivot and we pivoted into several new ideas. Well, it was based on probably my own assumptions of what, if I’m feeling this, maybe the community does too. But because we were on the ground with our community, we were really able to see how to best serve. So after event, after event, after event, we could really understand that education was gonna be the forefront of what this company, my company was going to turn into. And our most popular aspect of our business was something called track. And it is essentially what HDDL is based off of; providing education to creatives and entrepreneurs.
But it really only came from letting my ego go around like this idea I was so dead set on, not only was I dead set on it, but I was seeking investment for, had an entire pitch deck for, had vocalized it to potential angels, had vocalized it to my community and my close friends and fam. So in a way, I could have seen this as this is me failing and now I’m pivoting, but it really wasn’t that.
So I had to put the ego aside. I had to like really check myself that what I built isn’t needed and what is needed is something I could still provide. So one, letting the ego go, but also just deciding that we could actually like solve the problem. And so we did every week was an incubator program and events that supported the education and the really this supports the system and the infrastructure for so many of these small business owners.
We problem solve for what they needed versus offering what I thought they needed, what I built an entire pitch about. So co -work space out, education and community in. But let me tell you, when I did rush a pivot, it was every single time someone else was behind that pivot. I’m sure you can relate, especially if you’ve worked in startups. Startup culture in general is very like scrappy, like, we are all hands on deck.
Every one of us is getting in there and trying to make things happen and trying to move quick in order for shit to transform, to make the business not only successful, but seen and really validated in the marketplace, especially in startup culture when we’re in the midst of continuous rounds of funding. And I’ve had this come up several times. I’ll give you a couple of examples that I think will help kind of lead this discussion about rushing a pivot.
So because startup culture is very much about being scrappy, the concept around being scrappy is that so much more is possible. But because so much is possible, it leads to a lot of factless actioning. So things like guest experience suffering, marketing is shoddy, incomplete brand messaging, mission, attracting the wrong audiences.
Anytime you’re rushing a pivot, it was likely that someone was going to suffer because of that rush. Even if it meant that your numbers increased, even if that meant that press picked it up, even if it meant that the overall perspective is decent. When you’re in a pivot state, when you’re pivoting because you need to make numbers, when you’re pivoting because something else is driving that force and it’s not your community, shit will suffer.
And if there’s one thing that I do know about the land of pivoting, is it’s very forgiving because pivoting is just testing. And when you’re testing, we’re not held to the test because it’s trial and error. And we really are trying to figure out what works best. What’s our next strategy? Pivoting can feel like urgency, can feel like immediacy, can feel like I have to pivot in order to see results or to see a number or to feel like I have momentum.
But I think that there’s a better way that we can pivot where we’re not in a constant state of crisis and we’re not feeding into the chaos that I think again comes under the helm of being results driven simply based off something that is intangible. So if you were to apply this and say your service based business rushing to get offers out the door could potentially mean that you have clients that you wouldn’t have normally wanted to work with.
You attracted clients that maybe don’t actually ladder up into what you offer but they were attracted by the offering you put together based off a pivot. Pivots are truly only successful if we are listening to our audience.
So there are a couple of different things that we can put in place that would help you with your pivot. I know that you as a business owner are constantly being confronted with pivots, whether things aren’t going well, things aren’t having success, things feel like a little shaky and maybe feel like you’re wanting more support to make some decisions.
But there are a couple of other things that would be supportive and helpful as you prepare your pivot without rushing it and without being reactive to your community. A couple of these things are something like, you know, being informed with your pivot. So you’re not pivoting based off your gut. You’re pivoting based off what your community is asking for. So you’re getting in there.
You’re having these intimate conversations. You’re doing one -on -ones. You’re being able, you’re opening yourself up to have the dialogue between you and your community to better inform what you pivot into.
You’re not just going to do another blind guess the next thing that you can do is leave some room for learning. So as you’re building, as you’re sharing your pivot, as you’re bringing up a new offer, as you’re going into something that, you know, feels a little bit like departure, but kind of similar, you really start to listen what your community is talking about. So in our case with Jig+saw, when we were, when we pivoted into education, we were still listening. What were the needs? What could we offer?
What would be more beneficial beyond what we pivoted into, which was education. So we kept the events that we kept the spaces where maybe someone wasn’t ready to go into like an education container. And we made sure that our community base was still a huge part of our business. But then we started to hear about things that were kind of like, I really need a graphic designer. I really need a photographer. I really need a website designer, et cetera.
And so we built what was initially just the pilot for a database of creatives where we can hire each other. The reason why that came up is because I was very intent about listening to what the community was talking about while in these containers like education or like events. So I left room for the continuation of evolving. Our first step was events. Our second step was education. Our third step is bringing creatives together to hire one another.
So it created a little bit of a feedback loop. So I’m able to hear what’s going on. I’m able to action that with my team and then I’m able to put it together as like the next plan or potentially the next pivot. For you, while you’re opening your or expanding your offers or building new services or again, pivoting into something that’s a little bit of a departure, you’re still leaving room to expand on it. You’re still leaving room to create more within it.
And essentially you’re never not learning. I think one of the things that founders tend to get caught up in is they lose a touch point with their community. They get so far away from who they built this for, why they’re here. And it becomes more serving to investment or serving to higher ups or serving to press and PR. It becomes more self -serving than it is community serving. And those businesses exist and go off, do it awesome, but that’s not what this is. That’s not what we’re here for, at least here.
If we’re not listening to our communities first, if we’re not being value first, then maybe it’s time for an overall pivot. Another thing that I think is really helpful in the space of pivoting is allowing for a dialogue to happen. It doesn’t have to happen with your current, like consumers or purchasers or clients or students but it could just happen with the overall community that you have, the community that you foster.
These things could look like hosting like a Q and A session. So you’re able to directly have these conversations within, you know, a open container where people feel free to like share their feedback or share their thoughts. Something that I found really helpful in building what I was building with Huddle in the very beginning was having kind of like pre -interviews with potential students, future students and clients to really hear about how I could best serve because that ended up dictating a lot of the content that got put together.
Some things didn’t feel necessary anymore. Some modules felt maybe a bit more, like a bit too intense and needed to be dialed back. So I really allowed for that two -way conversation to be had so that I can better improve the content that they were given.
But other things like inviting people to have, to share their testimonies and share their stories about what their experience has been like working with you even more so gives you an idea about how people are interpreting working with you or being coached by you or being mentored by you because you’re getting real and in real time their experience with you. It’s such a huge part of what you’re building is really hearing and listening to what the community is saying.
The last thing that I would say is just put the ego to the side. I know that when ego comes up, it feels very negative, but what I’m referencing in this case is that our ideas stem from some sort of self -serving solution. Essentially, we’re solving a problem that we had for ourselves. There are some that solve problems for others in the beginning, but usually in the beginning, you’re solving a problem for yourself because it’s something that you can easily do. It’s like readily available to you. But because of that, our ego is certainly wrapped up all up in it. Like it is probably the biggest part of its DNA is our ego.
And so when things like uncertainties and things like when things aren’t when things don’t have momentum and things kind of feel like they’re when you’re not relying on the probability, you’re relying on the potential, it’s likely because you’re letting your ego still lead the charge.
And so the ways to combat that is a couple of different ways you can acknowledge that there are uncertainties. You can acknowledge that like at the end of the day there you will be in development. Your concepts will be in development.
And I think admitting that to ourselves is like such a key part of moving forward of like knowing that my ideas can have iterations and it doesn’t mean that I’m a bad founder or doesn’t mean that I’m a bad business person. It just means that my ideas need work and that’s okay.
I also think it’s important to be prepared to adapt. So knowing that when these pivots come up that we take them and we run with it, we go with them because it’s likely being asked of us, but we have to put the ego aside in order to actually achieve it to let it happen. And really it’s valuing our community’s input. When we put our ego to the side and we really listen to what our community is asking of us.
And I say this broadly, I’m saying this as a client service based business. When you were supporting your clients, they’re still your community. They still have room for context. You’re still building for them at the end of the day, whether they’re your client or your student or your partner or your whomever.
At the end of the day, whoever the person that is buying the thing that you have to offer, their input is so important. In fact, everything that you’re putting together is driven on it. So the sooner that we can put the ego aside, based off the ideas that you might’ve put together, the sooner we can get into action and making the idea even better. I know that’s a lot. I know that pivoting can feel like if it’s not easy, it’s not worth it. It could also feel like I can just wait it out and see what happens, totally.
But I think waiting it out is different than knowing that I’m up against something that isn’t working. And oftentimes our communities will be the first to tell us something’s not working. In fact, it’s the fastest way to know whether or not something that you have ideated on and put out there is going to work. Now, what I will say, because I think that what I could hear is, I think what I could hear is like, well, my audience isn’t that big or like their response is quite limited or whatever it might be.
So the deciding factor becomes if no one’s engaging and no one’s responding and no one’s sharing and no one’s saving and no one’s in in types and no one’s clicking through and you don’t even have abandoned carts, etc. That’s very telling. But if you have some abandoned carts, if you have people on the website, if you have them perusing, if they’re on there longer than two minutes, if they’re really reading through the shit that you have to offer and they’re saving and they’re engaging and they’re swipe up, subscribes, all those things.
If they’re showing that they’re interested and that maybe there’s just something not quite right yet for them, that’s telling enough to keep the momentum and get curious about pivoting. Well, I’ll leave you with that. I know there was a lot to digest.
And if I could leave you with one thing, it would be that. Don’t let the pressure of what you put together be something that’s so solidified it can’t change. If we’re immobile with our ideas, it’s unlikely we’ll see the success we thought we would get.
If we’re immobile with our ideas, if we’re immobile with our business, it means we’re stagnant. We’re not looking to evolve. But evolution is the beauty of being a business owner. We have the privilege of evolving. When can you do that in your career? You just change titles. You go up a ladder. You change pay grade. But is that really evolution? No.
So the beauty of being a business owner, the beauty of being a founder is we get to evolve and take our community with us along that journey. That is the beauty of this. So being in a pivot mindset means that we’re open. We’re open to feedback, we’re open to growth, we’re open to all the opportunities that come with being open.
