It’s absolutely normal to get lost at times and it’s absolutely fine to turn the compass and pivot once you find yourself there. In this episode, ShawnQ discusses the top 3 scenarios when it’s best to change direction or pivot while on your entrepreneurial journey…

Hey ShawnQ here, and in this episode, I want to share with you how you know when it’s time to pivot. How you know when it’s time to shift, to change. Now, if you have a business, it’s very often the first idea isn’t the last idea. The first idea, oftentimes isn’t the billion dollar idea. Yet it’s the first idea you have to pursue in order to get to the second idea in order to get to the third idea in order to get to the billion dollar idea.

I remember when I first started my business, I started a business that was an event driven business. I would host these events locally and I was so determined. I was so driven. I said, “I’m going to figure out how to make this happen, and if it doesn’t happen, I’ll make it happen somehow”, and I was so driven to make it happen.

If you don’t have a make it happen, attitude, I want you right now, put your hand on your heart and make a commitment. I will make this happen. I will figure it out. I will pursue, I will figure it out. Now there were points where obviously I don’t run that business anymore. We had to let go of it. We had to shift. We had to pivot.

Here’s when you know, you need to pivot number one, you can’t afford it. That’s an easy one, right? You have money that it needs to go out and you don’t have money coming in. Well, you got to make a couple of pivots in order to either reduce your expenses or begin to make different offers so that you can actually sell something.

So the biggest reason you would pivot is if you have no money coming in and you need money coming in and you just like, you’ve tried to do something it’s not working. You need to pivot in order to profit. That’s number one. Now, if you’re pursuing something, you also want to make sure you give it enough time to profit, and what I would encourage you to do is set a timeline.

I remember having a conversation with my wife and I said, “I’m going to give this six months. If I don’t make a single dollar in six months, I’ll shift and I’ll pivot. I’ll make a different, different decision. I’ll go get a job even”, because I wanted to provide for my family. So give yourself a timeline.

Maybe it’s three months, Maybe it’s six months. Maybe it’s a year. Maybe it’s two weeks. You want to make sure you have enough time, and you’re also giving it enough effort because I know so many people quit too early. So you want to make sure you’re putting in enough time and you’re putting in enough effort, but also give yourself a timeline.

One of the greatest tools to help you know whether or not you should pivot is the power of clarity. When you have clarity, you know you should move left, where you should move right. How do you get clarity? Well, you go and do work. You take action.

You ride the bike and figure out, “Okay I should probably balance better because I don’t want to end up in the Bush again”, or like me you don’t want to break your dad’s window from his brand new car. While riding your bike and learning how to ride a back whole other story, but get clarity by taking action.

You also get clarity by having conversations with people who are 10 steps ahead, because they can look back and say, these are the steps I took to get where I want to go. So before you pivot, if you’ve hit your timeline, you feel like you’ve put in enough time and effort, you’ve done the work. Go have a conversation with someone who’s 10 steps ahead and ask them, “what did you do to make this work?”

What do you think I need to do to make this work? How should I keep pursuing this? But shift, maybe my message, my offer, my packaging, my positioning, my market. What do I need to pivot?

Sometimes you don’t even need to pivot everything. It’s just pivoting like one thing, and then that’s that one thing that really changes the game.

So when do you know you need a pivot? Well, number one, you’re not making any money. You got to do something to start making money. So you got to shift. If the thing you’ve been doing, isn’t giving you money. Number two, you’ve hit your timeline. You set three months in order to make this work. It’s not working yet. So you figure it out and you have a conversation with someone. See if you needed to tweak everything or you needed to just shift everything. Number three, collect data.

I can’t tell you how many times people pivot because of a gut feeling, but a pivot is a data-driven decision, not a gut decision. What does that mean? Well, you should have numbers. How often have I tried doing this? How many people have I talked to about this? How many people have said no to buying this? What were their reasons? Can I overcome those reasons?

All of that information, all that insight, all that data should help to inform your pivot. It should not be, I’ve been doing this,  maybe I should try something else. That is the worst, most risky pivot that you can make. So you want to make sure that you were being driven by data by insight, by information that you’ve collected.

If you’ve been trying to make a business work for a really long time, and it’s not working, it’s time to have a conversation with someone. It’s time to give yourself a timeline. It’s time to look at the data and ask yourself, what is all this information telling me? I’m excited to see you make it work and make it happen. I’m also excited to see you pivot I’m ShawnQ, your high ticket sales coach, and I’ll see in the next episode.