If you’re considering a business pivot, you need to be open to trying some new things. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Is It Time for a Business Pivot? Start Here

As you work to grow your business, there inevitably will be times when you feel an overwhelming need for a business pivot. Whether it’s tweaking your offerings, revamping how you deliver them, or something even more dramatic, change can be scary.

Once you have an established business that’s consistently earning the revenue you want, it is a scary thing to consider changing things up. But, sometimes, a business pivot is exactly what you need to do to get to the next milestone you’re shooting for.

And here’s the thing: It’s okay if you don’t want to drastically change your business on a whim. You don’t have to blow things up to make a change. You can focus on small, incremental steps to help you achieve the shifts you’re seeking. Going about it this way can be far less scary when your livelihood depends on the revenue your business generates.

Let’s look at three strategies that can help you execute a business pivot by testing and delivering something new — without throwing everything that’s working out the window in one swoop.

Create a Pop-up Offer

A huge part of adding new offerings is building the infrastructure for ongoing support and delivery. Before you know whether this new thing is viable, it can be hard to justify the resources for execution.

With a pop-up offer, though, you can test out the offer in a very minimalistic way without a long-term commitment.

A typical pop up is offered as a limited time, limited quantity item that doesn’t use a lot of bells and whistles. You generally use a very minimal sales page or simply an order form to launch this to your existing community. Any necessary deliverables or delivery support should also be as minimalistic as possible.

The goal is to test the offer, generate an extra bit of revenue, and see how it fits into your business. If it all pans out and you find it could be a long-term asset you want to pursue, that’s when you can spend more time and money developing it.

Prelaunch That Thing

One of the most daunting aspects of creating a new program, course, or product is all the time and money that goes into creating it before you sell it. Using a prelaunch strategy allows you to both test the idea before you build and raise the capital to help you when you’re building it. Pretty awesome, right?

With a prelaunch, you’ll again focus on a pretty minimal approach. You want a really solid and complete picture of the offer and the outcome you can help people get, but you won’t want to create a huge platform or collateral until it’s sold.

Depending on your timeline, you may want to create a little bit of the content you’ll need, but you definitely don’t want to build out 12 modules, a membership site, a fancy sales page, and an email sequence if you aren’t sure it will even sell. Instead, consider just fleshing out the offer in its entirety and making a solid plan for what you’ll create after you have the buyers.

The added bonus of waiting until after it sells is that you can use that “extra” revenue to support its creation rather than finding the resources from your regular revenue. For more on a beta launch, check out this post.

Get Extra Help

If you’re looking to change things up, it’ll likely require some extra work! Whether that comes in the form of creation, serving new clients, or some combination of both, you’ll certainly see some added workload. So rather than shouldering that all yourself, consider getting some extra help.

This could be support centered specifically around the new offer, or it could focus on your existing offers, so you’re freed up a bit. If you have an existing team, you could simply add some extra hours into the mix temporarily. If you don’t have a team, consider hiring someone to start helping out.

Get creative here — don’t feel like you can only hire someone who would be directly involved with the new offer or even an existing one. You may find outsourcing things, like setting up blog posts, newsletters, or social posting for your regular content frees up some time you can spend elsewhere.

Sometimes the day-to-day operations of running a business take far more time than client deliverables or creating new offers. Finding the support you need to get daily ops off your plate can be hugely beneficial and liberating!

Embrace the Business Pivot

At the end of the day, change doesn’t have to be impossible or terrifying. As your business grows, you’ll likely find business pivots are required. It’s not a sign of failure when you decide to change your business focus, create new offers, or tweak how you work with clients. Sometimes, it’s simply a natural evolution of your journey as a business owner. Spending the time to strategically pivot as you grow will help make the process as painless as possible.

If you’re considering a business pivot, you need to be open to trying some new things. Here are some ideas to get you started.