2 When might you pivot?

There are different ways in which you can expect to ‘pivot’ your product or business idea and some of these are expanded upon in the next section.

The first thing to say is that pivoting is not done lightly. It should be done with good reason, careful thought and planning to ensure that any potential knock-on effects are understood. Pivoting is designed to lead to success in the marketplace, so understanding your growth and potential to scale up requires a realistic assessment of the size of your market, and an assessment of how competitive it is.

However, when you consider your own progress in relation to the opportunities, you might ask:

1. Is your business gaining as much traction in the marketplace as it should be? Did you get the take-up you forecast?

2. Is your business still growing?

3. Is your business competing with other companies, perhaps some bigger and better resourced?

If the answer to these questions is no, no and yes respectively, blindly throwing more time and resources at the situation is unwise.

Look carefully at what the feedback is telling you about what works for your customers. Timing of this feedback is important, and what it tells you may vary depending on the buying cycle for your product or service. For example, for a high-value, infrequent purchase, the time lag between purchase, use and discovering issues will be much longer than for a frequent low-value purchase, such as a snack, where the feedback may be much more immediate.

The feedback may lead you to consider a number of alternative actions, some of which are covered in the next section.