10 Ways You Can Pivot Your Business

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Hey, Roland Frazier here. Today I want to talk a little bit about pivots. How can you use pivots to make more money or to kind of get yourself either out of a challenge that you're facing or directed towards an opportunity that's better? Or. So we think about what a pivot is. Typically a pivot is that we keep one foot planted, but we move the other and then we're facing a different direction. And that's really what pivoting is about, is what are some different directions that we could take than the direction that we have right now for the business that might be more profitable or achieve some other objective? Maybe we want to be more environmentally conscious or we want to build a better culture or we want to have more sales, even though we won't have that much profits because. Because we're interested in growing big and we'll worry about profits later. There's a lot of different reasons that somebody might think about doing a pivot. So let's talk about what some of the major pivots are. One of the, probably one of the most popular would be how can I zoom in? So a zoom in pivot is where I've got a whole bunch of different products that are out there and I'm gonna turn them into one product. This a great example of that would be Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite. So Microsoft had PowerPoint and Outlook and Excel and Word, and those were all individual programs for a long time. And ultimately they said, we've got this bundle that we're going to do and we're going to create a suite of products. And out of these individual products, now maybe you've got a single product right now and you're thinking, that would be great. I like the idea of A pivot, because we are missing some things, but we don't have those other products. Well, that'd be a good time to think about acquiring. Maybe you could say here's the ideal product suite that if we could provide that, that would blow our competition away. Our customers would say this is the clear choice. And each of these things then would become the standard. Because there's interoperate, you know, there's inter, interconnectivity between the products that allow them to draw from each other. That can be a really, really strong pivot. So think about the zoom in, where we've got lots and lots of products that are out there and we're effectively zooming into just making them all one product. The reverse of that, the second kind of pivot is a zoom out pivot. So this is where one product becomes many products. So what's the breakup that you could do to take one product that currently exists and turn it into more now? That's a great potential revenue opportunity. Because maybe people don't need all of the products that you've got. Like we used Creative Suite as an example for Adobe and there you've got Photoshop and Illustrator and all of these Adobe Acrobat, you know, all of these cool programs. But maybe they do research and they find out that really people don't want everything, right. So we're just going to give them the opportunity. Instead of paying, let's say it's, I don't know how much Creative Suite is. Let's say it's a hundred dollars a month. Instead of paying $100 a month and having a thousand subscribers, there are, there's so much demand that if we were to break these products out and let into four products, let's say, and each one of them was $30 a month, we would actually make more and get more subscribers than we would just having this be one product. So what it does is it gives people the option of just having one of the products that you've got instead of having an entire suite of products and you can offer both as well. So that's a, that's a zoom out kind of option. Another is just simply a tech pivot. Maybe there's a new technology that's come about that either obsolesces something that you've got right now, or maybe it's something that you'll be able to introduce to your customers. We owned an agricultural machine manufacturing company several years ago and we were constantly finding that there was new technology that would make the existing machines that we were Selling obsolete. And so we had to stay on top of that. And, and it wasn't in that case so much a pivot as it was just being aware of technology. But if you're having challenges or if you find that your customers are going away, going to some new product or they're going away because they're not being served by the thing that you've got right now, check out the technology that's out there and maybe there's something that you could license, maybe there's a patent or some other thing that relates to that technology that you could license, or software that you could implement and make your product or service offering more efficient and more palatable to your customers. Another thing would be what is your current sales platform? So are you selling in house right now? And that's the primary place that sales come from. Because if you are, maybe there's a possibility of adding an affiliate sales platform so that you're pivoting from just in house sales over to affiliate and you're saying, hey, we're our in house sales team is too expensive and they're not performing that well and they, they just don't aren't in touch with the market enough because they work for us that you're instead going to find an affiliate network of people who can sell that have their own business, but they'll sell your product and receive a commission for selling it instead of being in house. That'd be a pivot from an in house sales platform to an affiliate platform. Another pivot there might be to a marketplace so that you say, hey, we're not just going to sell what we sell. We have a real estate business that's a retail brokerage. Right? We sell. We have real estate agents that work for us. We've got 11 or 1200 of those and they are supported by us helping them connect to buyers. But also we created a marketplace so that all of the other service providers that were being used by them can be aggregated in a single place that we can provide this marketplace for all of these thousand plus agents and their 10,000 plus customers. And now there's this additional revenue opportunity for us. So marketplace versus affiliate versus in house sales would be a good example of a sales platform pivot. Another would be a channel pivot. So maybe your channel right now is primarily that you sell through SEO, through organic SEO and you've got rankings for lots of keywords, but you realize that there have been changes in the Google search algorithm and Google Drives 75% of your sales. So you need to make a pivot away because you feel that you're overly dependent, or maybe you just got slammed in a search update. Now you don't have those customers anymore. Well, it's time to pivot. So a channel pivot could be a pivot from SEO with Google to paid advertising with Meta, right, With Facebook and Instagram. So that'd be a pivot of a different channel. Or maybe you decide that, hey, we're gonna do a channel pivot away from these kinds of social ads and go to podcast advertising. That's, that's a different channel. So there's a lot of channels. There's like 45 of them categorically that we've identified. So that's, there's plenty of opportunity there. Now, you could also just add those. But if one is failing, like a true pivot means that we're kind of not looking in this direction anymore. We're looking in this direction now. That means that this direction is probably going to get less attention paid to it than was being paid to it before. The next would be a value capture. So a value capture pivot is where do we get the value and where do we give the value in the relationship? So a good example would be maybe our value capture pivot has been that we give away our software so that we can get people to like us and know us and trust us and then use us for support or training or something like that. Or maybe they hire us for integrations of the software. We give it away so people can get it and use it, and they might be able to figure it out and use it. But we also have teams that will help migrate from software that they've got over to ours or something like that. And we say, we're not going to give it away anymore. We're going to do a pivot. We found that that wasn't effective. We're going to go to a, a software sale or a free trial. That would be a different kind of value capture. Or maybe we're going to give away the services and sell the software. So we're saying, hey, we'll help you migrate for free and we're going to sell the software to you. And the software costs this much. There's a lot of different ways to capture the value. Another would be thinking about what is the growth engine that we've got right now? Should we do a growth engine pivot? Do we, are we depending right now on paid media and we should go to organic or are we dependent on paid and we want to go to Viral, or maybe we're counting on stickiness and we're going to move to paid because people aren't sticking as well as we thought. So that would be a growth engine Pivot. How can we grow our business in a different way than we have? Another would be customer need. Like what could we do to tweak the product to satisfy a more important customer need? I think probably the best example I can think of this was Airbnb. I think it was when they started out, had a focus on a different service than what they ultimately ended up with. They were initially basically just thinking about putting a mattress, you know, like a blow up mattress in an existing apartment or house to provide additional rooms. And it came from just leasing a room to leasing an entire property. Or on Instagram, where originally there was a much, much larger set of online stuff that was going to be provided as a portal. But people really liked the fact that people could post their photos online. And so they actually said the customer need is different, the customer desire is different. So we're going to serve that customer need or desire instead of the one we're doing now. So that's a pivot from what we're focused on. I think PayPal was that too. Is that originally it was started out as like a BlackBerry service. And then they're like, well, we can't, we're not making money here. And they pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot. And additionally they initially, excuse me, ultimately they found that people wanted to be able to send money via email and that became a billion dollar business for them. The same thing could apply to customer segments so that you're providing the same product that you're providing right now, but to a different customer. So when we had a business that sold a utility card, it was like a credit card thing that was a knife that folded out. And we were selling that to the survival market. We found that there were actually other markets for that too. So it was the same product, but EMTs liked it. The emergency medical people liked it because it was something that was easily, that would easily fit in their pocket. It wasn't as bulky as a big knife, but if they need a little knife, they could fold it out and use it. That would be then a new market that we could target with that. That'd be a customer segment pivot. And then last but not least would be a business architecture pivot. So this is where we've got like we're saying, okay, we're a high margin, low volume business. We're focused really on not selling a lot of stuff, but selling very expensive things that we make a lot of money on. And maybe we're going to go to a cost leader model. So then we're looking for a whole lot more people. Our margin is going to go down, but we're high volume, low margin as opposed to low volume, high margin. Those would be 10 of the top pivots that I would look at when I'm thinking like if, if things aren't going exactly as I want or if I'm just kind of running the mental exercise of what if I did any of these pivots? Could any of these pivots really have a needle moving impact on my business? Because if they could, like if you do that mental exercise, you may find that, hey, a zoom in product is gonna be perfect for us. That's awesome. Or this customer need thing. This customer need pivot. Our customers like, we never really looked at it before, but it turns out that most of our customers don't care about all this other stuff we're doing. They only care about this one thing. So we should pivot and lean into that. Right? Whatever is working. I think that even in a business that's doing great, if you run through this 10 pivot analysis on a regular basis, let's say at least once a year, if not once a quarter, then you'll find that there are huge opportunities that are sitting dormant in your business right now that you wouldn't have thought of if you weren't pivot friendly. So that's 10 pivots that you can use in your business and I hope that helps. You've been listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. If you're enjoying the show, let us know by subscribing and leaving a review. And for more information, go to businesslunchpodcast.com thank you for listening.

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