Pivots
TOPIC CROSS POST
When a companies business model falters many business perform what is now called a business pivot.
While the pivot is most often associated with the dot com startups the likes of twitter, insta-gram, Flickr and Paypal, even companies like Sony, which started making home goods as a rice cooker and heating blankets, have pivoted.
“Pivoting” according to Steve Blank in this post Business plan not working? Time to pivot
is when you change a fundamental part of the business model. It can be as simple as recognizing that your product was priced incorrectly. It can be more complex if you find the your target customer or users need to change or the feature set is wrong or you need to “repackage” a monolithic product into a family of products or you chose the wrong sales channel or your customer acquisition programs were ineffective.
Ken Kaufman Founder & CEO, CFOwise in this post outlines the 10 most common cash-flow pivots in hopes of helping find the most scalable and repeatable way to offer your products and services to help maximize the life-blood, or cash flow of a business.
While Ken’s focus is clearly financial companies would not be looking to pivot if their monetization model was working.
Need something less financial to inspire you to a pivot? Check out Business Insiders 10 trends that could change your business for 2011.
Pivots are all about taking a new direction while still keeping one metaphorical foot in the original business. In 2003, Cheggpost.com offered free classified listings for college students. By 2006 one of Chegg’s co-founders, began rethinking the company’s business model. He noticed that most of their activity was at the start of each semester and revolved around buying and selling textbooks. Ultimately the pivot became about renting books to students rather then helping them buy and sell to each other. Chegg now rents more than one million books a year and has 150 employees.
Is your company due for a pivot?
Are you offering the right solution to your target market? Is your profit model as effective as it should be? Are you to focused on your product and not your customers needs?
- Everything in Business is a Test (businessinsider.com)
- It’s time to reinvent the boardroom (venturebeat.com)
- HootSuite’s pivot: Introducing Happy Owls (thenextweb.com)
- What is a Pivot, and Does Your Startup Need One? (stealthmode.com)
