Mastering ‘The Pivot’
Posted by Tollfreenumber.ORG at July 9th, 2014
When a business begins to fail there aren’t a lot of options. Some people fight. They scrimp and save and restructure until they pull through. The recovery can be slow and they may not ever get back to the way things were before but they survive. However, these stories are few and far between. More often than not entrepreneurs trudge ahead, doing more of the same and ultimately failing. It’s a sad story and it’s one that’s oft-repeated. Don’t worry though, there is another way. It’s bold and risky but can lead to even more success than you ever anticipated. It’s called the pivot.
Some of you may be familiar with pivoting. It’s what brought us companies like Twitter, Pinterest, and Foursquare. Simply put, a pivot is when a company shifts their product or service to something different. It can be as easy as focusing on just one aspect of your company or completely changing the way you do business. For example, before there was Twitter there was Odeo. Odeo started off as a network dedicated to helping people find and subscribe to podcasts but pivoted when they realized the competition they faced from Apple was just too great to overcome. At the suggestion of employees Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, the company decided to focus instead on micro-blogging. Thus, Twitter was born.
A good pivot can be a beautiful thing but it’s not easy to reinvent the wheel. Entrepreneurs see their business as it is now and so it can be hard to deconstruct it looking for the new big thing. There’s a tendency to over-think things and to preserve what should be removed. In order to perform a successful pivot you need to see what parts of your business works best. What gets the best response? What generates the most revenue? Can you use that model to provide a more profitable service or product? Often brick-and-mortar stores find switching over to e-commerce to be far more profitable with much less hassle. That’s a simple change that can be made with most businesses. The possibilities are only as limited as your imagination allows them to be.
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