Transcript
Several student of mine and entrepreneur asked when to pivot or when to persevere. First of all, I would like to provide a definition of what pivot is. So pivot is a structured first correction to test new hypotheses about the product, business model or engine of growth of your company. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the basketball games, but they use the pivot. It’s a key term, it’s a key figure in the game – s when one foot stays and the other moves to steer direction. So the idea also here is to keep one foot rooted to your previous learning. So also if you pivot and if you want to steer direction you should do that, but you should not abandon or leave behind or forget what you’ve learned so far and what you’ve done so far. So it’s important to be brave and to understand that when you start not going ahead as much as you would like to with your business; and when you start figuring out that you didn’t have the traction that you would like to have, you are not achieving the numbers and your metrics are not the one that you expected and the ones you wish for, It’s important to understand what’s going on, or better what’s not going on and to steer direction. I know that it’s very difficult to pivot, however any time that any entrepreneur I talked to decided to pivot they regret not having done it sooner. They said at the beginning you go through a period of really depression and low morale, but then if you understand, if you start seeing the right results, and if you steer in the right direction, you can just be happy to have done it because sometimes, people want to persevere and they get stuck in the land of nowhere. So basically they still make enough profit to keep on going with the business, but still they don’t manage to move ahead as quickly as they would like to. And so the risk is to keep on investing resources and to keep on dragging on not getting the real results that you would like to have. But why do people generally tend to avoid pivoting? Entrepreneurs set vanity metrics, and so sometimes you just are testing things that are not the real things that you should test, and you are too proud to admit to yourself that things are not going well because it’s painful. And there is fear, sometimes the risk of failing in terms of having to start from a phase that you already overcame and a phase where you were weeks or months, or a year back is not as easy because it means that you have to reconsider all what you have done and to start again. And then of course sometimes people are so engaged with what they’re doing, and so into that, that they miss the overall picture. So sometimes you just need to step back and to have a very clear eye on your business and on where you want to go in order to understand that it’s needed to pivot and steer direction. While if the metrics are going fine, and everything is fantastic, and you have a great feedback from the customers, you just should go persevere and continue like this. You’re in the right direction.
