A Well-Planned Company Pivot Can Save Your Business

Take it from Twitter and Starbucks, among others: A slight tweak to your model can make all the difference.

Sometimes in business, something just isn’t working, despite the best efforts of everyone involved. This is when founders have a choice: Either close up shop, or consider a strategic pivot into a new direction. If the founding team isn’t quite ready to call it quits, there are certainly a few telltale signs that a pivot should be considered.

According to Chris Porteous of Business.com, some of these reasons could include losing passion, dissatisfaction with growth rates, inability to retain employees, and an unattractive brand. The reason why you decide to pivot will be entirely up to you and your team, but there’s power in the potential of a change in strategy. 

The power may just be in keeping the company afloat. As stated in a 2018 article on this site, “Though pivoting incorrectly can lead to failure, not pivoting at all can be nearly as bad, with 7 percent of failed startup entrepreneurs wishing they would have pivoted when they needed to.”

Pivots will happen in varying sizes and extremities to every business owner, and they can turn out to be the best decision you’ve ever made in your company. 

Think of building a business as hypothesizing

Sometimes, we consider needing to pivot as some type of failure. And while it certainly arises from something that needs fixing within the business, Adam Alpert, the CEO of Pangea.app, which connects companies with remote college talent, offers a different consideration. Pangea.app recently underwent a pivot in strategy that paid off big time, securing $400,000 in a pre-seed round investment for their new business model. 

“In business, you start with a hypothesis: a theory about how to solve a problem you know exists,” explains Alpert. “But most hypotheses are wrong, and in our case, we learned that what we had initially come up with wasn’t the solution the world needed. In running that test, we discovered a solution that actually works and decided to pursue a new direction.”

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