2 - Should You Pivot Your Business?

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE HERE:

Fast forward nearly a year, and the world has been upended since Danielle last recorded an episode. The reason why she didn’t is that the team were busy re-pivoting our people-gathering business to the virtual world, while COVID was raging. As you all know, this was such an unstable and scary time that it required all the attention of the team to develop the new direction of the Business Babes Collective. Dive into this episode to learn the challenges and struggles to pivot your business and if it’s right for you. The Business Babes are cheering you on whether you pivot or apply different strategies to your current business!

Key Takeaways:

Overview of my pivot from in-person to virtual based events with the development of online education resources.

How to determine if you should pivot and how to successfully accomplish this.

4 Key reasons for a pivot not related to COVID such as:

1. Business is not currently profitable

2. One product is having more traction and sales over another

3. Working unsustainable hours with current business

4. Your market wants something different

6 Ways to pivot after determining it’s the way to go:

1. Consider integrating new technology to streamline and simplify business processes. See show notes for details.

2. Sell products online instead of wholesale orders and vice-versa

3. Create an online course, masterclass or simply record yourself teaching something valuable online

4. Start an affiliate program or be an affiliate for another business

5. Shift your marketing strategy, e.g., shift away from only being on Instagram and focus on Pinterest

6. The drastic pivot – completely change your business

5 Tips for when you are pivoting include:

1. Get a clear vision (a much as you can!) of where you want your business

2. Have patience

3. Set goals that are strategic and specific

4. Ask for help

5. Celebrate the small wins

6. Surround yourself with people similar to you – people with big goals

Show Notes:

Platforms Danielle mentions:

o Schedule management system: Calendly

o Task management system: Zapier

o Podcast transcription service: Temie

Join our membership collective or apply for our mastermind here: https://www.businessbabescollective.com

Connect with Danielle and the Collective on Instagram: @danilivinglife and @businessbabesco

Transcript:

Welcome to the Business Babes Collective Podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Wiebe in this podcast, you'll learn tangible business tips and strategies on how to grow successfully and sustainably.

We'll also interview seasoned entrepreneurs, So you can listen in on their stories and see behind the scenes of what it took to grow and scale their businesses. Let's dive in as we discussed the wild, exciting, crazy challenging roller coaster ride of entrepreneurship.

It has been almost a year since I recorded the first episode of this podcast. So if you're curious why it took me so long, I'll be sharing all the details of you. In this episode today. I want to talk about pivoting in business, what it looked like for us and whether or not you should pivot. I'll be sharing the challenges, the struggles that we've had this year. And finally, I'll end with some ideas on how you can pivot your business. If that's something you want to do. So I want to take you back to January, 2020. It was the start of a brand new year. And I don't know if any of you are like this, but I just love the clean slate of a new year. I was so excited at the beginning of 2020 had so many goals of what I thought this year would look like. And I was so confident that this was going to be our biggest and best year ever. Hopefully this sounds familiar to some of you, but for five years before this moment, our team had been hosting consistent monthly in-person events and workshops. We had grown our collective into five chapters across North America and our community was thriving. It honestly felt like everything that I had worked for over the past five years, the hard work, the dedication that I put into this community, the heart and soul, it was finally beginning, beginning to click, and it felt like we were in a, such, such a good place within the business. And I had so much clarity and confidence and I was super organized when it came to the plans and the goals that we had for the year when it came to hosting events, tickets were getting easier and easier to sell, and we could pretty much max out the venues that we hosted our events in. And as you know, beginning of 2020, after a few months, everything totally changed.

I remember it so clearly, one of our chapter leaders calling me up and she basically said, Danielle, we need to cancel the event, this was just a few days before the event was launched. And I remember thinking like, Oh my goodness, is this actually happening? And everything, as everything in the world started shutting down, we really had to make some big decisions. How were we going to move forward? Our business model? And our strategy was becoming something that was going to be banned and actually dangerous for people's health. So when everything, I think we had planned had to be cancelled, they're shut down or postponed. Our team was forced to make some really hard decisions. Do we give up, do we reschedule all of these events and or do we just wait until things open up again or do we pivot and do we try something scary and new and something that we had never done before? So we were also in a very unique position because not only are we a business, right? We host events and support other women in business, but we were really, you know, people would look at us for education, for resources and for the community. And a lot of these small business owners were also really struggling. You know, we knew that our community needed us during this time. And so even though we were struggling, we knew that they were counting on us for support. So, no, I am actually usually a very optimistic person. You know, people who know me, they know I'm pretty upbeat, pretty positive, and always trying to think of the best-case scenario and looking on the bright side.

I don't know if anyone listening to this is in the room events industry, but you pretty much have to be this way when you're an event planner because so many things can go sideways and there's so much, so many opportunities for, you know, things that you can't control to happen. So you really have to be thinking on your feet and thinking of solutions rather than just focusing on the problems. But I have to admit that during this time, especially when we found out, you know, we're not going to be able to host our in-person events for the foreseeable future events that we had worked so hard to put together. I definitely threw myself a little pity party. Then I had to try and look at things from a different perspective. And we decided that instead of cancelling our events, we would just host them online. So I remember we had an event planned for March, and I remember calling up our speakers, calling up our vendors and our sponsors. And I told them the plan and we were going to pivot. We were going to put everything online. And to be honest, I didn't really know how everyone was going to respond. I was really nervous at like what people were going to say, or people were just going to be like, Nope, don't want to be a part of this. But to our surprise, actually, our community members absolutely loved it. They loved having the ability to connect online. And I think it was a time and a place where people felt really alone and scared of what was going to happen in the future. So over the next few months, we actually cut completely pivoted and reinvented our entire business with the time that we otherwise would have been spending planning in-person events.

Our team was able to Brainstorm and innovate new products, new services that we could provide for a community. So some of those things were that we launched a blog, we created a, a resource section on our website where people could download free resources. And we actually came together with all of our different chapters and we hosted our very first virtual conference, which was for some Of you that might be listening that attended. It was so much fun. And I am so incredibly proud of us for that, but it was definitely a lot of work that went on behind the scenes for all of us. We also recently Fall launched the collective, which is our membership portal. And this is something that we've actually been thinking about doing for a while. Lauren, our Toronto Business Babes chapter leader had brought this idea to me back in early 2020. And I remember thinking, Oh my goodness, we have too much going on. Like we have so many things going on, let's do this, you know, sometime in the future. And so we just decided like, Hey, now's the time let's, let's make this happen. So we launched the collective and we also decided that we were going to pivot our action takers club program, which is normally a six-week business program that we either run in-person or we run it live virtually, and now we're pivoting it into a completely evergreen product. So people can jump in and do it as a self-study course and take it any time. So that's a lot Of things that we pivoted in one year. And although this year has come with so many challenges we might've never had, you know, been able to have these accomplishments if it wasn't for all of the things that we've had to overcome this year. So, you know, we don't really, really know what the future holds at this point. None of us do, but we are continuing to evolve and change and pivot and we're open to change and we're open to new opportunities that can come our way.

So that's a little bit of our story, obviously, in a nutshell, there's so much more than happened and I'm sure we'll kind of get into it in other episodes and we'll dive in deeper, but I want to kind of pivot and switch and talk about your business because this is why you're here. You might be thinking, you know, your business might be in a place where you might want to shift and change and pivot. So maybe you're wondering, should you pivot your business? Is this something that's even, you know, something that you want to do, So let's go through It. And let's kind of think of some ideas of, you know, if you should pivot and then also how you can pivot. So often when people think about pivoting or changing their business, they think of this big, massive change, but really that's simply not true. It could be a very small or a slight change to what you're currently doing. So let's go through first, some reasons why you might want to pivot your business. So, number one, you might not be able to run your business profitably right now. Number two, you might be profitable. Maybe you're making good money in the business. Potentially you're able to you know, have a side hustle on top of your full-time job, or maybe you're able to run your business. Full-Time and that's awesome, but you might be working around the clock. You might be working 24, seven evenings and weekends. And to be honest, that's just not sustainable. And so that's where we want to maybe pivot and change and do some things differently so that you can have a more manageable schedule. Another reason why you might want to pivot is because one of your products or one of your services within your business is getting a lot more traction than the others. So say for example, you have, let's say you have 10 different products, right? Your product-based business, you have 10 different products and you find that like three of those products are performing very well and your sales are really high and the other products are not so high. You might want to pivot your business to put more of your time, attention and effort into creating more of the products that are selling really well. That could also be in a service-based business. So maybe one of your services is performing way higher than your other ones.

You might want to pivot and change even in your marketing strategy with what you are putting your resources into promoting. Okay. So that's another, that's another way the next one is your market wants something different. So maybe you're, you know, you've been running your business for, for a while and you just realize that maybe some of your products or services are outdated and it might be time to refresh or revise, revitalize, or update. And that might be the pivot that you need to make in your business. So once you figure out that, yes, I want to pivot. I want to change. Here are some ways that you can actually do that. So if you have a pen and paper, write this down, if you're listening in the car or while you're working out, whatever that might be, then definitely just come back to this because you want to write these things down because these are really important. So number one ways to pivot is to consider integrating new technology into your business to streamline and to simplify your processes. So if you feel like within your business, you're, you're kind of, it's kind of clunky. So for example, you know, everything that you're doing in your business is, is you're doing manually, right? You have no automation, you have no programs where you're actually able to automate some of your processes. So I would highly recommend looking into some technology that you can introduce to your business. So you can streamline and simplify. When I started doing this in my business, it was a huge game-changer, and it really just makes things, makes things run so much more simple within your business. And that could be automating whatever that may be for you. So I'll give you some examples. Obviously, there's lots of different automation tools out there, but one of them that I currently use for booking clients are booking calls with potential mastermind members or coaching clients, whatever that might be is something called Calendly. So Calendly will book your appointments for you. So all you have to do is create your schedule and then you send people a link and they can book on your schedule. It'll send you an email, it'll send them an email. You can get their information, you can ask them questions. And then I'll also send, if you have the paid version, it'll send them a reminder, send you a reminder, and it's all automated instead of having to go back and forth with, you know, different times that you can meet. It's all automated through, through Calendly.

Another program is called zap. Zapier. Now look up Zapier because they have lots of integrations basically lots of different integrations with different platforms where it can say, okay, if you let say post here, it'll automatically update something there. So look into Zapier and definitely check that out for automation. Another one that I want to tell you about is called Temi. So I don't know if this would necessarily be under automation, but Tammy is actually a really cool program that lets you transcribe. So for example, say you have a podcast, right? And you want to write show notes, or maybe you want to transcribe instead of actually, you know, transcribing it yourself or having to write those notes, you could put it into Temi and you pay, I think it's about 25 cents per minute, and it will completely transcribe your entire podcast episode or if it's a zoom or whatever that is, audio, it'll transcribe it for you. And then you can just update it yourself and, and put that up on your website or whatever that may be. So that could be a really, really great way. Maybe if you enjoy speaking things out, instead of necessarily writing, if you have like a blog or whatever that might be, Tammy will be a really cool program for you to use. So there's are just some that you can kind of take a look at, but I really highly encourage you to look at some other programs that you can use to simplify your processes. Okay. Another way. So second idea to pivot your business is if you have a product based business, selling your products online, directly to your consumer, to your customers, instead of just solely relying on wholesale orders. So if you are used to relying solely on wholesale orders, you can start selling online and then vice versa. If you're only focused on selling online directly to consumer, maybe you want to have some wholesalers, so maybe it's worth reaching out to some stores or wholesalers that you can actually sell to as well. So it can kind of go both ways, pivoting, whether it be selling more online directly to your customer or selling more wholesale orders as well.

All right, number three, is it create an online masterclass, an online course or program teaching something valuable and selling online? So I absolutely love this one. This is so much fun. And I've seen a lot of clients, or even people within our mastermind groups do this. If they have, maybe they already have a coaching program or they coach clients one-on-one, and maybe they're used to working one-on-one with people. And then they either side, okay, you know what? I am sharing the same thing over and over with a lot of my clients. This is something that I could put into a online program and our online course and sell that as a program that actually is just either a self study program or a three week program, six week program, whatever that might be for them. And so that's another way to, to pivot. Even if you have a product based business, I would really look into what are some of the skills that you have that you could potentially, you know, record yourself doing and sell online. This is a really cool brainstorming activity. I absolutely love doing this. When people bring it up in our mastermind group, I love, love, love, brainstorming on what they can do for an online class course or program. Okay. Number four is start an affiliate program for your business or be an affiliate for another business. So if you have a program already, then you can look for people who might be great affiliates for you. So maybe it's someone who has a similar ideal client to you, but they don't, they're not selling the exact same thing as you, and they could have an affiliate you know, code or something that they can share with your community and they can earn an income. And that's also bringing you business as well. So there's tons of different ways to create affiliate programs or have affiliates within your business. And it really, really helps to expand your reach as an entrepreneur. Now, the flip side of that is to become an affiliate for another business. So if you want to add an income stream into your business, you could become an affiliate for another business owner. So say for example, you've taken a program or you've taken a course and you absolutely loved it. And you're like, Oh my goodness, this is the best course ever. You could actually ask them, Hey, could I be an affiliate for you? And if you promote their program, you could take a commission of that program. So there's, there's both sides of it. You can promote other people's programs and they can promote your programs. So that's a cool way. And then also just products. So for example, say you love a product. You could have an affiliate code for that product and then earn a commission on it. Vice versa. If you have a product someone that loves your product could have an affiliate code and earn a commission on selling your product. Okay. So number four, Five is shifting your marketing strategy. So this is technically not changing anything in your specific business, what you're doing, but it's actually just changing the strategy around what you're doing for marketing. So for example, maybe you are used to putting all of your marketing efforts into Instagram. This is one of the most common things is that everybody's only on Instagram, they're spending all their time on Instagram. Now I agree. Instagram is a great resource, but you don't necessarily have to have Instagram in order to grow a successful business and market strategically. So you could actually shift from only being on Instagram to maybe spending some of your time on Pinterest.

Maybe Pinterest is a really great way to drive traffic to your website. So that's another marketing strategy. Maybe you are wanting to get into podcasting, right? And you're going to shift into focusing more on podcasting or maybe podcasts, guesting. So being on other people's podcasts, versus maybe you're used to only promoting within a Facebook group, or maybe you have a Facebook page and you're doing ads, right. So just really figuring out, like, what is your marketing strategy right now? Is it working? Is it actually bringing in revenue to your business? And where are your ideal clients spending most of their time, that's something to really consider because if your ideal clients are all, let's say ma maybe most of them are on LinkedIn, but you're not even on LinkedIn. You're mostly just on Instagram, right? So that might be a marketing strategy that you would want it. Yeah. Implement. All right. Number six. The last One way to pivot is the drastic pivot. So this could look like kind of like what we did as a business, right? We went from doing all in-person events to now everything is virtual and everything is online. So our business looks completely different than it did at the beginning of 2020 now at the end of 2020. Right. So that could Be a completely drastic pivot or maybe it looks like completely changing your business. Maybe you have a business right now and you know, you, your heart just isn't in it anymore and that's okay. You don't have to continue on just because you've started something doesn't mean you have to do that for the rest of your life. So maybe the pivot looks like something totally drastic, you know, maybe you have I'm just gonna like give an example. So maybe you have a jewelry business right now. And you're like, you know what? I would really love to start a service-based industry and start doing, Hmm, let's say career coaching. Right. That's totally different than what you're doing now, but that doesn't mean you can't do it. You can totally do it. There's so many people that I know that have gone from doing one thing and they've completely shifted. They've completely pivoted and they're doing something totally different today. So whatever that thing is, if you know that there's something else that you want to do, or, you know, a way that you want to pivot, don't let your mindset hold you back and don't let yourself talk you out of it. Right. So just start to explore what that could look like and what it would mean if you were to maybe do something completely different. So I know the first five that we talked about were kind of more slight pivots, like actually improving your processes, you know, figuring out where to sell your products creating online courses, affiliate programs, shifting marketing strategy. And then, but the last one, I just wanted to put it out there that if you really want to do a drastic pivot, that's totally possible for you. And definitely don't hold yourself back just because it's scary. Cause I can tell you that we did a drastic pivot and yes, it was scary, but we were able to do it. And I am so incredibly excited for the direction that our business is going in. Now, now that we've talked about how to pivot, I want to give you some tips when you are pivoting. So my first tip for you is to get super clear on the direction you want to go in your business. Now this might sound super obvious, but I really want you to have this clear vision of where you see yourself one year from now in the business. You know, you might, right now, it might be foggy and you might have a hard time thinking about what it could be like a year from now because you could be working around the clock and not knowing how to slow down or not knowing how to automate or outsource or whatever that looks like. But I promise you that so much as possible one year from now or two years from now, three years from now, 10 years from now. And you can make those changes. Yes. It's going to be hard. Yes. It's going to be challenging, but you can make those changes. So don't let where you are now blur the vision of where you want to be one year from now. Okay. So that's my first tip.

The second tip is to set some goals. So set some actual goals and really strategic and be very specific with those goals. So this is something that I do a lot with my clients is, you know, I ask them like, where do they want to be one year from now by the end of 2021? And then they'll tell me, okay, where are they want to be or what they want their schedule to look like? And then we set some really specific tangible goals on how it is that we're going to get there. So, you know, if their goal maybe has something to do with sales or the amount they want to make or whatever that, that might look like, okay, let's actually break that down and what actually needs to happen in order to get you there. So that could be, you know, marketing and sales activities. It could be maybe their goals are completely not related to income. And maybe it's more about getting featured so featured in media outlets or featured on podcasts or whatever that might be. And so we break it down into super, super small manageable tasks, right? So let's say that one of my clients wants to be featured on 12 podcasts by the end of 2021. So let's assume that the percentage of people that they pitch, it's going to be one out of 10 that will say yes. So then, then we break it down into, okay, how many people do they have to pitch every single month for 2020, 21, that would be 10 people, right? And then it could be, you could even break it down weekly. So it could be two to three people a week that you're pitching. So really breaking it down into that really small goal will make your big, massive goals for the year. Seems so much more manageable. And then you can check in with yourself every week or every month to actually see if you're on track to meeting those goals. The third tip that I have for you guys is to have patience. So when you're going through a pivot and when your business is changing, often we, we S we compare, you know, where our business is at, and maybe we compare it to other people, or we compare it even to ourselves like, Oh, why isn't this happening as quickly as it did for me in the past or whatever that might look like, just have patience with yourself and have patience with your business. Because even though you can make small little pivots, sometimes it takes time for you to see that momentum building up. So put in the work, put in the time and just have that patience to know that you are planting seeds and it might take a little while to see those seeds grow And flourish. Right. All right. Another super powerful tip is To ask for help. They seem obvious as well, but often we get so caught up in thinking we have to do everything ourselves. And so it's so important to know that you can ask for help, whether it's, you know asking, or maybe it's hiring someone outsourcing strategizing with someone, it could be a family member or a friend, or maybe you want to hire a coach or hire someone to actually help you pivot. So this is something that I actually love to support people in. So if it's something that you're interested in brainstorming, I would actually love to do that with you. So if you're interested DME at Danny living life, and let's get you booked in, because I would absolutely love to brainstorm a pivot with you for 2021.

Okay. My next tip is to celebrate all of your small wins that you're taking towards your new goals. Now, I want you to focus on what you can control because there is so much in business that we can't control, right? We can't control what other people do. We can't control, you know, how many sales we get on our website because we can't control that other person, right? We can have the best sales copy. We can have the most beautiful templates we can have. You know, we can put in all the marketing activity, but we can't actually control the end result. We can only control the action steps and what we are doing on our End. So I always Tell my clients like focus on what you are doing and what you are putting into the business, rather than the results that you're seeing. Because if you focus more on the action steps that you're taking, instead of only celebrating, when you have someone say yes, or when you make a sale, then it's going to be so unmotivating for you to take those action steps that, you know, you need to take, because you're only celebrating when you see a result, you're not celebrating all of the small little seeds that you're planting that yes could show up within a week or within a month, but maybe they're going to show up a year from now, and you have no idea, you know, where those connections that you're making today will show up for you. So celebrate all of the action steps that you are specifically taking instead of only celebrating when you see, you know, a big win or a big sale, or when, you know, there's an outside accomplishment that that is really obvious celebrate each step that you're taking. And then I want you guys to remember that change is inevitable. There's always going to be changes, whether it be in the economy you know, in the world, in your business in your life, like maybe your life is changing maybe you are starting a family, or maybe you're moving to another city, or maybe you, you know have a change of, of passion, right? Maybe, maybe you don't love your business anymore, or your job anymore. And you want to pivot and you want to change. So change is inevitable. It's always going to be the consistent thing in your life. The only consistent thing really is change. And so just remember that through those changes and through those challenges, it's making you a stronger and better person. Okay? Lastly, surround yourself with people who are on a similar journey to you, surround yourself with other people who are working towards big goals as well, have let them cheer you on and support them and let them support you. You know, we'd love to have you part of our community, but regardless of whether you join our community or another community that resonates with you, just get connected and show up, show up for others and let them show up for you too. So to end off this episode, I just want to say how excited I am to connect with you.

If you're going through a pivot in your business, I am cheering you on so much, and I know how difficult it is because you know, we've gone through it ourselves this year. And so if you want to share with me what you're doing to pivot, I would love to hear from you again, DM on Instagram at @danilivinglife. I would love to hear that, or you can DM our business account @businessbabesco but either way, I just want to say I'm so excited for this podcast. I'm super grateful for all of you who are listening. If you're listening in, definitely connect with me, I would love to hear what you liked about this episode, and then also what you want to hear more of, because I'm so excited to show up for you and to talk about the topics that you want to talk about. So please let me know what kind of topics you want to hear about, and we're going to be bringing you some incredible guests. I cannot wait for you to meet some of the amazing people that I've had the privilege and opportunity to connect with over these past few years and just know that I'll also be just sharing authentically and vulnerably what I'm learning and how I'm growing in my own journey and how we're growing this community. So thank you so much. I'm so excited to see you in the next episode, and I'm sending you all the love and I can't wait to see you next time.

If you loved this episode, make sure you screenshot post and tag us on Instagram at business vapes, co want to know when the next episode goes, live, subscribe on your podcast app. And while you're there, leave us a review until next time, keep dreaming big setting goals and taking action. Hey, before you go, if you've been looking for an entrepreneurial community to connect with enrollment for our collective membership is now open inside. We host weekly work sessions, monthly virtual networking parties, workshops, and so much more head on over to BusinessBabesCollective.com/signup for all the details there.