The Pivot Point: When and How to Change Your Business Direction

Things have felt different this year with online course businesses, online coaching businesses and online businesses in general. And we're seeing more and more people actually talk about this feeling. A few months ago Vanessa Lau came back after taking a year off of social media and she shared a lot of things in her first couple of videos back, one of them being why she decided to take a break. And the follow up video to that was sharing all the trauma that she had experienced experience building her online business. And she really talks about building this business she was told to create by mentors and coaches that ended up creating a business she hated. And this isn't uncommon. In fact, I've also seen Ashlyn Rice, a friend of mine, also talk about building this business she hates. She actually did an entire video on it. And this year she's decided to start from scratch because she has this business she hates. Now if you go look at both of their videos comments, you will see a lot of discussion and a lot of people feeling this way of pivoting from trying to get in this rat race to this massive seven figure multi eight figure business to really scaling back in simplifying their businesses. So if you're feeling that, you're not the only one. Another mentor I've been following for I feel ever Mariah Cause also talked about on her podcast this year about how she is restructuring her business, simplifying it. She actually took her website down like two or three pages and in that particular podcast she talked about how she basically did this entire pivot in 30 days and I was intrigued. I will link to all those videos in the description box below, but the overarching theme I'm seeing in the online space in 2024 is pivoting and getting away from this massive big business and getting back to the roots and stop chasing basically your tail. And I've always said I want my YouTube channel here to be completely transparent where I share all my thoughts, my struggles. Then what's really going on? This here on YouTube is not my Instagram version. In fact, fun fact, I decided to quit Instagram for the time being because it wasn't serving me and a load of other reasons, maybe for another video, but I have decided to completely change my business this year as well. And so those of you that are watching you may be thinking, well, how do I know when it's time for me to change my business? Or is this just another shiny idea that I'm going to chase down a rabbit hole that's going to take me off the path that I created and then another shiny object. And then another shin shiny object. So I want to share in this video how to know when it's time to make that change and then how to actually make that change. I would love to know in the comments. How are you feeling about online business this year? How is your business feeling? Is it feeling forced? Is it feeling overwhelming? Is it. How are you feeling right now? And you may be feeling great about your business. That's fantastic. I am starting to actually feel really good about my business six months into 2024. But again, I want to get a feel of the room here, so to speak, on where you're at in your feelings with your online business. So how do you know when it's time to make the change? The first thing that I realized is it was time to make the change when I was feeling uninspired. I will say there are so many ideas that we get thrown at us. Social media, Instagram in particular is so loud with new ideas, new strategies that everybody is touting is the next big thing. So it can be hard to really figure out if is this you getting sucked into this hype or is this your gut telling you, I think this is the next best step? And I have fallen down the route of getting excited about the next big thing. And two weeks, three weeks later, realizing that wasn't really what I wanted to do. But they made it sound really great. So don't feel bad if this has happened to you before. If we're watching good marketers, they're doing their job right. I actually made two pivots in the last two years, which is really kind of whiplash for me. And in 2022, I was just feeling uninspired about creating YouTube content. I had actually had a situation in the YouTube space, and it just made me feel that I needed to step away from talking about YouTube. It made me feel imposter syndrome. It made me feel like I just needed to get away from that. And so I started talking about business coaching, and I love talking about business. My background is in business. I have a master's degree in business. I ran my own business for eight years, and it was great. But most of you are following me here for YouTube and business coaches are honestly a dime a dozen. But what made me unique here on YouTube and what made me unique in my business was YouTube for business owners. And so I had this. I don't know if it's this resurgence or entering a new era since I will be 40 next year. Let's watch it. I realized what am I doing? I'm good at teaching YouTube. I'm good at helping business owners use YouTube. Why am I running away from it? So I think this first step in figuring out is this the pivot you should make is sit with it for a while, maybe journal, maybe talk to a few friends. Don't make the jump immediately. Kind of like I did where I just business coach now. Oh, back to YouTube. I wish I would have just slowed down, maybe even took a break for a minute, A minute, maybe like a few months and realized how to find my confidence again in my content. The second thing you want to look at when deciding if it's time to make a change or not is I think it's when you feel like you're pushing this constant boulder uphill and you are just freaking tired. And so I did feel that way again. It's almost two different eras in my business to where I'm now in my third era, but with the YouTube side the first time, I just felt exhausted of trying to prove myself, trying to make myself not a thing in the world, but make me feel like I was good enough. And that's why I switched to business coaching, because that's a little bit more broader, a little bit more vague, and so I could feel like I'm good here, right? But when I was doing business coaching, I heard so many people tell me, well, you were talking about YouTube, I want to learn YouTube from you. And so it was another boulder of pushing this business coaching side of my business up the hill. So when I switched back to YouTube, I decided the strategy I was going to use to build my business was a paid workshop. And maybe you went to it profit per view. And it did really good the first couple of times I hosted it. And then just like things with businesses happen, things shifted in the marketplace. Paid programs or paid courses just weren't performing like they used to. And it felt exhausting week after week after week trying to get people to sign up for this paid workshop that was doing so well in 2023, but now in 2024 was crickets. So that's when I decided I had to sit back, listen to my gut, stop listening to what coaches were saying, stop listening to what mentors were saying, and really sit back and decide what do I really feel good doing? What is my gut telling me to do? And so for this step, again, it's just really sitting with yourself. And that feels weird. And I'm not like a woo woo person, but it took me stepping back and thinking about what do I really like, in fact, Mariah Causes podcast this year has really enlightened me and inspired me in a way that I haven't been in a while. And so I think listening to that allowed me to really listen to my gut and make the current changes we're making in our business. Then the third thing you want to think about before you make a change is do you hate what you're doing? We had an agency, an all inclusive agency, where we gave strategy, edited videos, uploaded, optimized, and I hated it. I thought this was the best step for my business. I was told, build an agency, run an agency, an agency is a great thing. And I hated it. So we actually pulled the cord on that over a year ago now. And then with the paid workshop, I started to hate it too, because it felt like a grind. And so if you're starting to hate something, it's your business, your rules. You get to make the rules. Don't keep doing something that you hate. Which is another reason why I did end up quitting Instagram too. I'm not forever quit, but I am taking a break from Instagram because I hate it. Not only creating the amount of content that I need to create, but also being on there and constantly feeling like I'm comparing myself to this person or wanting to do what that person's doing. And I just needed to step out. Now, once you've decided, okay, I really think this is a change I need to make. It is not something trendy. It's not me feeling FOMO about this new strategy. I know there is this change. I feel it in my gut. Let's make the change. How do you do that? First, I'm going to say, don't make any sudden movements. So I did feel like I needed to do something different other than the paid workshop. And I felt that almost three months ago. But we had kind of in the pipeline, our plans and our strategies, and so I didn't make that immediate change. I started thinking a few months out, here's how I can start dripping the next thing that I want to do. Here's how we can start working on it. And so I think it's important to not take it all away at once. We also did this with our agency. We didn't just cut off all of our agencies, we let the contracts run out and didn't renew them. We didn't just say, on May 1st last year, Bye, like, we're not going to take your money anymore. Right? Start making incremental changes. Then, as I said, you really want to Start thinking through it. One exercise that I'm currently working on in my business that Mariah talked about in her podcast and that Ashlyn watched as well because I told her that she should watch it and then she shared on her YouTube channel as well, is this checklist of thinking about where do you want your business to go? It's almost like a business vision. But she talks about, you know, what are your business core values? What are your offers? Like, it goes through all of these lists of things and I will link to that below. But taking the time to sit down and really think through all of these steps or all of these elements to your business that you want to move towards and maybe you're thinking, I feel like it's time to pivot, Trina. But it is freaking scary. And I get it. I am still working on getting to the point. My business was with my agency and I, like I said, I didn't just cut my agency off immediately. It took me about 18 months of finally accepting the feeling that I hate this to getting to the point where I no longer have it available on my website. So know that this will take time. In fact, a really great book to read that I'm reading right now is 10x is easier than 2x or 10x is better than 2x. A friend of mine bought it for me for my birthday and it's not about, you know, hustling more, but it's really about focusing on the things that are going to make the biggest difference. And so I highly recommend that. It's been really eye opening for me. The third thing that you want to do is talk to a close friend that understands kind of the business space. I am beyond appreciative of the mastermind group that I do have because there are people I know I can reach out to that understand what's going on in the online space that also understand my business, specifically my coach as well. I can always go to her and be like, I'm freaking out. I don't know what to do. I'm thinking I need to do this. And I literally just had this conversation with her the other day because I had this idea and how it would fit in this new idea of my business. And she said, well, I think that's an idea, but it may actually take more effort from you than what you're going to make out of it. And right now we're trying to get the business back to where it was with my agency, revenue wise. And she said, long term, that idea is going to work out for you. But if you want to move your business right now and get it quickly back to where you were, that's not going to do it. We need to think about staying focused on the initial idea that you had. I think it's really important. I know the coaching industry has had crap, crap experiences. I have wasted money on coaches by far and it's a reason why I didn't want to be a coach for so long because of the bad experiences. But when you can find somebody who really cares about you and your business and starts to understand your business, not just one of another hundreds of people in their program, it can be very helpful to bounce those ideas off almost like a mirror and be like, oh, actually that's not the problem. I am trying to distract myself from this problem because this problem's really solid scary. But I have to fix that problem before I get to that next step that I want in my business. So I think it's really important as you are starting to change your business once you decide to pivot, speak to somebody that understands what's going on with you, what's going on with your business and the space that you're in. One of my favorite ways to really create this plan and think about what projects I'm going to work on to get to my goal is hosting a CEO Day. And we typically host CEO Days in December, but we are deciding for the first time ever to host a mid year CEO day on June 12th. This day is about three to four hours. Not only me walking you through what metrics to look at to help you decide what to focus on going through a decision matrix and figuring out which projects, which ideas are best to work on next to get you to your goals. But it's also going to be a interactive workshop where you are going to be planning out the rest of 2024. The responses we always get on this CEO day is amazing. That's why we decided to bring it back for the summer. So if you want to join us, it's totally free at trinalittle.com forward/CEO. I know that making a change brings fear and uncertainty. So in my next video I'm going to be sharing some of the ways that I dealt with that fear in making this big change. The good things that came with that and the bad. Because trust me, it's not always going to be a smooth transition. So I'll be sharing with you as well how I dealt with those bumps in the road to make it as smooth as possible. You can watch that video on your screen right now.