How to Pivot Your Business & Double Your Revenue

What are some signs that your business model has plateaued or isn't scalable?

If you are going backwards despite doing everything, it's a sign. So if you had some success and you're doing all things that you were doing then and you're adding more strategies in now, and you're still going backwards, that tells me that it's time to make a change. And there's a period of that. Like, business goes up and down, but if you're going backwards for a period of more than six months, it's a problem.

Welcome to the Success School podcast. We're on episode 78 today. Steph, how you feeling? It's been two months since we've recorded, and I have my new arm.

We. What is it?

You got new arms?

They are more jacked. They are more jacked and dieting.

So on YouTube, if you guys are there, let me know. They look more jacked.

I don't know if you just heard the background noise, guys, but Tim just cracked a diet.

I am health.

Hey, Tim, your new arm. Arms aren't the only thing that's kind of moving and taking shape in your world. What else is taking shape?

That's a great segue. So a little bit of story about something weird I do with a rope.

So that wasn't my segue, but this is awesome.

Okay, cool. Yeah. So I do something new with the rope before Steph coming off. I know she really wants to take over this podcast on her own, but is it okay if I tell a story?

Bring back the Steph Gordon.

Yeah. Is this okay if I tell a story?

Apologies.

So I've been doing this weird thing where I do a bit of spinal flow, so left right articulation, but it's like a skipping rope spinal articulation flow that really gets your hips moving. It's really good for if you got really rigid hips, which is good for business and personal life as well. But I've really butchered this story. But basically what I'm doing is I'm doing a rope flow, and you basically move a rope. It's not skipping, and you go side to side. Very hard to explain. Hopefully our podcast team can put a clip up of what a rope flow looks like, because I'm butchering this story anyway. I feel amazing hips at moving. Epic. My spine feels good. Discount code is Tim10 on windingrobes.com. i'm just kidding. It's not, but I've been doing rope flow. Did I explain that? Well.

That was like my hips and gyrating. Yeah, I Don't know.

I didn't say gyrating, but I think you're dreaming about the gyrating stuff.

So for anyone listening, we would have put a clip up. It's basically where you. It sounds really lame. He's trying to make it sound cooler. It is actually cool in real life. It's just. It sounds lame. It's like when you get a rope and you like flick it from side to side and it really helps with moving the body in rotation which. Which honestly, because we sit at our laptops all the time, we just don't move in rotation enough. So.

Yeah, we work so hard at all times.

You know, in a caravan we're driving sat down, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But anyway, that's cool.

Anyway, if you see me walk and you see like my side to side flow, I'm less of a brick now.

I was actually referring to your teeth.

Oh, my teeth. Yeah, they're super straight as well.

Super straight.

I got my braces fully connected so my teeth were doing like gang signs in my mouth prior. So if you're watching gang signs is like anyway, they're doing X's and got braces and got them all connected because they're less up now and my bottom teeth are straight. Straighter than yours. How does that feel? They are the most buck teeth in the family even outside of our dogs. Oh my God. Their little teeth is a more straight we.

The little teeth is all straight. I have got an appointment with the orthodontist because I can't let you win this game.

You need it.

Okay, so my personal update is that we have a toxic trait that we only have recently identified. We have many toxic traits, but this one that I've really noticed recently and some of our friends will know this because we'll message them when it's happening. But we've done a lot of travel this past year and one thing that's come up for us a lot has been that within the first three days of pretty much getting to most places, not all, but most places, we will fantasize about living there. Anyway to the point, pretty much anyway to the point where we're looking up real estate, we're looking at the property market to see how much we can like, you know, sell our home for. We're talking about how much we could get for the caravan when we sell it. We're talking about.

Are we selling the caravan?

No. Well, yeah, we would sell everything. Right.

Okay.

Depending on.

We move to contentious issue.

Are you going to take the caravan to Montenegro Yes. So we have this toxic train and then like five days later we've decided we're not going to move there. And then we'll actually get really icked by the place. That place we get. So who would ever live there? And it's this incredible thing that happens every time to the point where like, we've messaged our friends about it and they've literally, they don't reply anymore. They're just like, here we go. In five days they'll be over and they'll be back in Perth and loving Perth. So that's one of our toxic traits. I just thought you guys should know.

What other toxic traits do we have?

Well, every December we like to think about buying houses. Yeah, that's a different.

We're going to do that this month.

This month. I think it's actually going to happen. Last year we toyed with it, didn't do it. We bought this house in December and yeah, two years ago.

Studio. It's not a house, sorry. The studio. You know, we bought this studio.

So that's another one. We have many toxic traits. Diet Cokes, 8am, another one. You know.

Yeah, we have a normal man. Dry folks at 8am is normal. All right, let's make it normal. Steph, what are we talking about?

So today we wanted to talk about. Actually a couple of weeks ago we did an episode and we had a lot of people reach out after. It was our goal setting episode. And we said, and this is the quote, unquote, we said one of the dumbest things that you can do in business is stay married to a certain goal or business model or identity just because you said you would, even if it's detrimental to your growth. And so many of you reach out and actually asked about it. So you kind of said, like, Steph, I think that that might be me. You know, Tim was getting messages too, like, how do I pivot? How do I know it's time? And we thought that we break this down today. Like, how do you know when it's time to pivot? How do you know when? Is it just a hard moment or is it actually time to jump ship and do something else? And so we thought that we'd break this down today before we get into this.

How do you know that it's a sign of pivoting or you're just not that good at business and you just need to get better at the skills of running a business.

I think that you would know if you have the systems in place and you got to be really honest with yourself here because no one is going to tell you that you're doing a great job or you're doing it right or you're doing it wrong. People want to save your feelings. I mean, unless you sign up with us, coaches will tell you. But if you have all the systems in place, so you've got a marketing system that you know does all the things, you're sending emails, you're putting out quality content, you've got incredible filming, high quality stuff, you're talking about topics that you know, that you're really proud of, that you feel really good about. If you have a sales system that you know, you're following scripts and you've got objection handling and you're creating the gap and you've got a funnel set up where they're getting videos and they're reminded to get on calls and you're incentivizing that and you've got follow up processes in place. If you've got all of these things and you're still not getting clients, that indicates to me that you may need a pivot. Is that probably a good time to think about it?

Yeah, for sure. You need a marketing system and it needs to be consistent for at least 12 months. You need a sales system, aka getting on the phone, closing, using an actual sales system. And then you need to scale that and if that is still not working, then maybe consider a pivot.

Yeah. And if you try to heap of different offers and if you tried low cost, you tried high costs, still people aren't buying. It's probably in a pivot thing.

Yeah.

Tim, what other examples like right now, what other kinds of people should be pivoting?

Yeah.

In today's economy. So going into we're in 2025. Well, who needs to pivot this year?

I think like first step is if you are general anything, that's a no. No. Okay. So if you're a general business coach or you're a general social media manager or you're a general copywriter, I think like having a niche within that niche is the next step. I think once that is still exhausted, then it may be a pivot into learning some skills that are hot right now. But usually the industries that are really easy to get into get flooded and get fucked really easily. So Instagram coaches, I know 200 of them, like just a general social media manager, I know more than I've had hot dinners in the last, you know, four years. Copywriters, general business coaches, general fitness coaches, general nutrition coaches, they're all kind of getting Rolled right now.

Just talk me through general.

General talk me.

What does that mean?

So like how you know, I was. I'm a business coach and I help anyone. Hey, I'm a fitness coach and I'll help you get fit, build muscle, run a marathon, do hireocks like any of that stuff? Hey, I'm a social media manager. Any business. I will help you grow. I think like the generalist movement is kind of coming to an end because they are a red ocean.

Talk to me about copywriters because the copywriters is a very. If you're a good copywriter, it's an incredible skill and I don't think it's a flood of market actually. But why would copywriters be needing to think about having a pivot?

I think the top of the top copywriters are still going to be fine. But I think like if you're just getting into it or you're pretty new into copywriting, you're going to have a hard time because people can use AI now. Not that I think AI is better. I think a good copywriter is going to shit on AI like 10 times out of 10. But I think the general population or the general business owner is going to be like, I can put in chat GBT and it's going to give me good enough. They're not going to know what the next level of copy looks like. Therefore you're battling someone's perceptions versus actually what is good. I think like the general copywriter is probably going to morph into more of a prompt engineer with.

Yeah, and I think like on that, you know, if you're a copywriter and you're doing things like writing people's captions or writing people's emails, AI can do that stuff pretty effortlessly. But if you're doing sales pages that are actually going to make people money and high value marketing campaigns for big companies, I think that there is so much value to be made in being a copywriter but I do think that you need to think about, you know, in this current economy. So you know, obviously social media platform is moving to pay to play. So if you're constantly doing organic and you're not looking into paid, it is going to be hard for your clients to get results and so it's going to be hard for you to sell the thing. Secondly, social media management, it's one of those where it's great when things are good and then the minute that the economy drops, it's really hard to be in that. Yeah, totally. So I think that there's Some. Some pivots. If you're in those industries, it's probably. And any kind of pt, general PT especially, it's time to kind of think about making a pivot.

So, Steph, what are some signs that your business model has plateaued or isn't scalable?

Yeah, if you are going backwards despite doing everything, it's a sign. So if you had some success and you're doing all the things that you were doing then, and you're adding more strategies in now, and you're still going backwards, that tells me that it's time to make a change. And there's a period of that, like business goes up and down, but if you're going backwards for a period of more than six months, it's a problem. Yeah, it's a three months. You know, you can dip down and dip up and it could be your energy and there could be a lot of other things. But if you're consistently going kind of backwards for six months, it's time to change. You will also know. Yeah, it's a gut feeling. You just know. This doesn't feel good anymore. No one's buying anymore. There is doubt here. I think I need to change something. And it doesn't mean you have to shift industry. Yeah, Completely. But it means you have to change something.

So I'm just going to say this. It's a bit of a real talk. We did touch on it before, but I know a lot of people, they might listen to this and be like, oh, yeah, it's the market. That's why my business sucks. You have to give this thing 10 out of 10 before you even make this decision.

Yes.

Like, you have to give it everything. On marketing, you should be DMing people every day, running ads, like doing organic, like networking. You should be doing the whole gambit. You have to be dialed in with your sales processes, checking KPIs, doing your KPIs, doing all the things in your business before you, like, ask the market. I think I should pivot. No, you have to exhaust all options, give it 10 out of 10 effort, and then you're like, okay, maybe I should pivot here.

Let's talk about the mindset behind it.

Yeah.

Sometimes I think that things that can hold people back from making a pivot might be ego or pride of something they built or having. Probably another way of looking at it is like a sunk cost bias. Right. So I put so much time and energy and effort into this thing. I don't want to give up on it now because it could just Be about to turn around.

Yeah.

You've experienced this 100% with Helix.

Yeah.

Talk me through how you knew it was time to give up versus we could have pivoted.

Yeah.

And now that we've had space, we can see how that would have worked.

Yeah.

But you didn't. How did you know?

Yeah. So I was in this gym. I'd been in there for 10 years. I'd run it. I built a seven figures. It was making great profit, it was running well. Now I get the realization that it was probably the most profitable gym in Western Australia in terms of group training at the time when I was in it, I didn't know that, so I didn't have the perspective on it. I knew I wanted to change. I wasn't super into it. I've kind of done it to death. I've done the business model to death. I've exhausted all options. All the things I'm talking about. I did. Like, I went 10 out of 10 with this thing. I would sit there on the weekends and be like, steph, what else can I do? And she was like, you can't do shit. You are doing everything. Like, you have given this thing a 10 out of 10 crack. And I just knew that I needed to shift my energy into something else. Some people might see that as giving up, and there are certainly rumors online that he's fucking thrown in the towel or whatever. But for me, I was like, I need to channel my energy into something else to see what potentially that could be. And that meant shutting down something that was super profitable and so much money that people would kill to have that kind of business. And I shut it down and sold the business.

And so I think it's that. I mean, and to be really fair to Tim, 10 years. It was 10.

10 years of crack.

You know, this wasn't, you know, two years. And it's been tough. It was 10 years of trying everything. So, yeah, you just. I think, you know, you really do know when it's time.

So, Steph, tell us about a success story of someone that we've seen in our network that has pivoted just to give the audience hope. All the listeners hope. That's you. I'm talking to you.

I want to just preface this with every single time you pivot, it's really hard.

Too hard, too.

But painful. It's emotional. It will feel right and it will feel so wrong, and there is just no in between. Like, every time, guaranteed, it's going to feel like that. And I can recall the first person that comes to mind is beautiful Becca, who will love that we're talking about this.

Yeah. Hey, Becca.

Hey, Becca.

Student.

She. Becca's a student in success school. She came to us. Oh, maybe like, well, she's been with us for two years, but in the first year she came to us, she was a human design coach and she had kind of a mid ticket mastermind where she would coach you in using your human design types to help you kind of grow your business as a coach. But the longer she went through that process of coaching people in that container, the more she realized that she didn't actually want to do it. She felt bad because Tim and I preach high ticket. We love group masterminds. And she thought wrongly, but she thought that people, myself included and Tim included, but mostly herself because it's always a projection of what we think about ourselves. She thought that people would judge her for doing what she actually wanted to do. And what she actually wanted to do was to sell a 49 product or online course, effectively a digital product. She came to me, she was crying and she was like, I really want to resign into my second year of success school, but this is what I want to do. And I'm terrified because I'm going to take this tens of thousands of dollars that I'm earning and I'm going to go to zero so I can sell a 49 digital product because it's really scary. She was like, I don't want to coach people. Really. She's, you know, in her 40s. I think she just wants to live a free life. She wants to travel the world, she wants to have time with her family, she wants to spend time with her partner who's lovely. And I said, let's do it. And so over the last four months, Becca's built out a 49 product with some cool upsells on the back end. And she went from literally zero. I think before she was making about 10k a month. Before that, doing the online coaching, she went to zero. And now she's at 50, 40, 50k a month cash from a $49 digital product. And that's a pivot. It's a similar thing, but it's completely different business model. It's a wildly different business model. It's all marketing, no delivery. It's crazy. And it worked.

Let's talk about what went into that because we're going to have a bunch of people that are like, I'm going to do $49, like digital product now. So I'll speak from my perspective. So Becker is a student of paid advertising with me. She has mentored by me. She does a bunch of other courses around this. The big lift when it comes to selling a $49 product is how do you get people into it? And organic just runs out eventually. So you have to do paid. So if you're thinking of doing this, you're going to have to become a wizard at paid or you're going to have to have a mentor that can show you how to do paid. So that's the big one. She spent a lot of money to make a lot more money. So there's that as well. You have to be willing to invest. You have to be willing to invest your time and you have to be willing to invest your money and you have to be willing to go through a lot of bullshit. So when you transition from high ticket to low ticket, you get the questions, you get the time wastage, you get all the nonsense that comes along with this. On top of it, we're just like rainbows and butterflies. She went from 10 to 50k months, you know, by selling something that was 300 times less. Business is not like that. There are costs that come with this, but she has made a really good move and she's 5 extra income and killed it with it. But there are other problems that come with just switching a business model. The other analogy is like when you change business model and this is not to put you off, but imagine we're rolling a boulder up a hill and the hill is like Mount Everest and you get halfway up and then you change position, you change tactic, you change strategy, change business model. The boulder rolls to the bottom and you got to roll that thing up again. Okay. Because you lose your contacts, you lose your network, you lose all the customers that are right on the edge. You know, in successful, we've probably got like 30, 40, 50 people that are right on the edge of joining at any one time. But as soon as you change what you're going to do, they're gone. Like, it's reset. You start again. It's Groundhog Day all over again. So that's my perspective on it. Anything I missed?

Yeah, I. I just want to also preface. Becca's average order is not $49.

Yeah.

And there's a whole other process that goes into this. There's five upsells on the back end. She's had to optimize the landing pages, the funnels, the buy in, the email marketing sequences. Like, there is so much to it. It's crazy. But because she's Become a student of it and become obsessed with it. It's grown. Yeah. And, yeah, she's probably spending roughly 50% of what she makes on ads. And so, yeah, it's great because she was making 10k month before. She's a lot outgoing now she's making 50amonth and she's keeping 25 of it. It's wonderful.

Yeah.

And it's way more money than she was making before in a model that she loves. But if anyone's looking at going, oh, that sounds easy, maybe I'll swap. It's not easy. So nothing is easy. The only easy thing is the thing that you work at. That's it.

So, Steph, talk to me about the blue and the red ocean theory. Let's kind of just go through that a bit. Like, what is a blue ocean? What is a red ocean? How does that apply to kind of everything we're talking about today?

So red ocean would be an industry that is flooded or a market that's flooded. So think pts, General.

Anything.

General anything. Think photographers. Anything that is a flooded market. Business coaches. Flooded market. And so a blue ocean is something where something is new. So, you know, when I first came out and we had people who were teaching. We still do. I think it's still relatively blue, to be honest. There's not that many AI coaches that are teaching people how to use AI, implement AI. They're starting to be on the rise and soon there'll be a flood of those. And so a blue ocean is something kind of new. There's not many people doing it. It's very. And usually a blue ocean these days because pretty much everything that's been thought of has been thought of and is being sold. So pretty much now the only way to get into a blue ocean is to niche. To niche on a problem or to niche on a type of person. And that's pretty much it. So if you're a photographer, you might think, okay, well, I'm going to be a family photographer. Wrong. Red ocean. Absolute red ocean. So many people, anyone can pick up a camera and take a photo of a family and call themselves family photographer. It's crazy. So then you become more niche. Maybe it's become a newborn photographer or become a toddler photographer or become a photographer for schools to take their yearbook photos. And the more niche you become, the more money you will make every single time with our file.

Yeah. The easier it is, the easier it.

Is to make that money every single time. Yeah.

Yeah. A couple of great ones there. Let's talk about the Mindset here on niching. I think that's a really good one. I think a lot of people would assume that they are going to find it very hard to find people once they niche because they already don't have this audience when the opposite is true. And we'll kind of tell our story here. So I guess we were anti niche forever within success school and other programs that we ever run. Steph's always been the general business coach and then when we went into success school we said we do coaching and service. And then we kind of had it reflected at us probably 6 months ago now when we were in a presentation with someone, we were just chatting to someone and they asked us, what are you guys doing? We said, oh, we service. Da da da da da da da da da da da. And the list was like fucking 42 things long. So the guy said back to me, he goes, oh, so you help everyone? And I was like, fuck, I'm not even like living what I preach here. So we niched into coaches, change our ads, changed our website, redid our copy, started changing our messaging to it. And the key and the scariest part of all of this was it was easier than ever before.

It was instant.

It was instant.

It was instant. So like the next week we had five top tier coaches apply and sign on for successful the following week. Yeah, our perfect clients.

Yeah.

Came out of the woodwork because all of a sudden it was clear that it was for them. Yeah, crazy. It was crazy.

Yeah. So we changed all this stuff. We started running ads, ad costs halved and the people we were getting were actually coaches. So our team, our setting teams, getting on the call and every single person we speak to is a coach. It's not like what do you do anymore? It's like they're a coach of some sort, which is incredible. So our marketing message became so clear, the content that we can produce in terms of TOEFL finally so clear because the pain points and problems are literally the same. So then we rework success school so we create successful 2.0 for coaches. And the easiest part about that is we are coaches and we have built a coaching business so everything that we've done works for everyone else.

Yeah.

So the simplicity of it is so easy. And the easiest part of this is you should probably just nation who you are or who you have been in the last five years a version of yourself because you're going to understand the pain points, you're going to understand their problems, you're going to understand the solutions, you're going to understand everything about them. I think that's one of the hardest things in marketing, you probably agree, is trying to get into the psyche or the mindset of your prospect because you don't know how they think.

One of the stories that will come up people here is, oh, but I really enjoy working with everyone. And, and we had. I. We laugh and we're frustrated because this was actually us. Yeah, this was us. I was like, yeah, but we love our this person clients. We have to be really clear. We have a lot of consultants. We have a lot of agencies as well. And honestly, most of the stuff is the same. And we can coach agency really well because we have. We've had agency. We can coach consultant really well because we've been consultants.

We just don't market it.

We don't market that. Okay. But we still get them. We literally signed on agencies recently, like, so this is. We still get them. They still want to sign up with us because we get them from word of mouth usually. And so it still happens. Okay. But the story that you're telling yourself if I really enjoy working with everybody is a story that's you're telling yourself. Keep yourself safe.

Yeah.

Because you're too scared to actually nation to the thing that you know you need to nation do because you're terrified of losing the market share or the money or whatever. Just try it. Just try marketing to your new niche for four weeks.

Yeah.

And try it now. The other thing I really want to touch on before we wrap this episode up. To niche on a person or to niche on a problem or to niche on outcome. Talk me through it. Because you don't just. A lot of people think niche is. I will pick a type of person to market.

Yeah.

Yeah. Which is what we did.

But I would niche on an outcome first. Second, niche on a problem. Third, niche on a person. Yeah. I'm a fitness coach and I help dads. Doesn't really work anymore. I'm a fitness coach and I help you lose five kilos in five weeks. Very attractive. Although it's been done to death, the outcome nature of it makes it super appealing because you just go to them. Okay.

We could make it super niche. Hey, I'm a fitness coach and I help dads lose five kilos in five weeks. Even more niche. Perfect.

Better.

So surfers. Amazing.

You need one of those three things or multiple in the same sentence is better. That's what I would do. So if you're a general business coach listening to this niche. So what are you going to teach? Are you going to teach marketing, sales, specifically? What are you going to teach on that or mentor on that or are you going to help a certain type of person for fitness? Like, the bums thing was pretty big for a while. It's like, I do booties, I do transformations. Like, that's. That's pretty hot. I haven't seen, like the biggest one ever in fitness. And the biggest success story of all time is knees over toes guy. He helped people fix their knees and he was making like two and a half million dollars a month helping people fix their knees on a $49 program. Organic.

Yeah. Your best lead magnet from the gym. What was it?

Skinny to strong? Yeah, Skinny. The Strong was our best ever. So that's an outcome in it. And super general as well.

That's general. But there was one about biceps.

Yeah, there was one about biceps. I had like a biceps program. Yeah, like 40 cent leads.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The biceps program crashed. Right. So the answer here is to. To niche, niche, niche, Niche nation. Like the niches. And on outcome problems, we're speaking with one of our clients and she was like, I'll help you elevate your brand. And I was like, like, that's cool. But what if it's like, I'll help you build a brand that doubles your business in 90 days? Sign me up. Outcome based. So I think that in a world where there's more noise, you have to cut through by being more specific. General will kill your business.

I think, like, niche on something that no one is doing is the key here. We get. We see this all the time. It's like as soon as we niched into business coaching to seven figures, imagine how many people niched into business coaching coaches for seven figures. Like tons. And then you're just up against everyone else. So it's just this like, pissing match of everyone doing the same thing online because you decide to niche into the same.

Trying to get someone to 10k. Yeah, yeah.

Pick your own niche, guys, and pick your own lane and go after it.

Yeah. All right, so wrap this episode up, guys. I think that we have it at home. It's time to pick a foggy nation. If you in your gut feel like you've been doing everything and it hasn't been working, it might be time to pivot. And the pivot may not be an entirely different business or an entirely different business model. It may be as simple as niching down for you in terms of your pivot. It doesn't necessarily have to be a huge thing or adding some more skills to your tool belt. I think that for a lot of you, if you're. If you're a social media manager, learn ads. If you're a social media manager, learn email marketing. Just add something else to your toolkit to make you valuable in any climate.

As always, guys, share the show.

Tell me how she did it.

I was wondering if she was going to do it, but yeah, guys, share the show. We appreciate it. That's how we grow. Without you sharing the show, we're going to die a miserable death at the bottom of the charts forever in the podcasting world, and we do not want that. Thanks, guys.

Thanks, guys.