In today’s episode, we’re talking about something that a lot of entrepreneurs might encounter at one point or another in their business career- pivoting.

Let’s face it. People change. Our interests change. Our lives change. And sometimes that means our businesses have to change with it. 

Knowing HOW to navigate a change of direction in your business can be tricky. It brings up questions like “What if people don’t like the new direction I’m going in?”, “How can I pivot without losing my followers?”, and “How can I serve 2 audiences at the same time?”

Well, today we’re tackling the big question on pivoting and going into all those nitty-gritty questions to help YOU navigate a business or brand pivot.

We have both done it with our photography businesses into business coaching, and multiple other things so we have LOTS of nuggets for you.

 

Pivoting your Brand or Business 

Pivoting your brand or business is something that you might deal with sometime in your entrepreneurial journey. Let’s face it, life changes. Circumstances change. Your personal interests change. Culture changes. By default, your business WILL change over time. We can almost guarantee you, the business you start or have started will not be the same business you have 30 years from now.

A HUGE aspect of being a really great entrepreneur is learning to roll with the punches, learning to grow when it’s time, and PIVOT when needed or when your gut tells you it’s time.

However, pivoting is a slow action. It does not and should not happen overnight. Picture pivoting like a huge cruise ship slowly turning in the open ocean. Whether it’s just 90 degrees or a full 180 degrees, when you change direction on a HUGE ship, it cannot happen immediately.

When it comes to pivoting your business or brand, if you turn too fast you’ll either sink the boat or throw off all your passengers (hint: they don’t like that).

Let’s break this down into how NOT to pivot and how TO pivot. 

 

How NOT to pivot:

• Don’t pivot overnight. Don’t up and completely change your brand website, social media, etc., pretending you’re all of the sudden a brand new company serving a COMPLETELY different audience all at once. You WILL lose people by doing that.

Unless you are launching a brand new business. That’s different from pivoting the one you had before.

• Evie example: started sharing more ocean/surfing into personal work to pivot people towards the launch of EvieSwim. But that was also an entirely separate account, so while I led my personal audience through the pivot, I also had the freedom to build a totally different brand image through EvieSwim. 

 

• Don’t delete your entire feed and start fresh. Show people where you came from, and the journey you took to get to where you are now. It shows people the journey of you as a creator and business owner versus showing you have it all together all the time. 

 

• Don’t completely change your personality. Just because you’re pivoting your business or brand doesn’t mean you have to be a different person. The only exception to this is if you have evolved and your old branding or phrases you use to say, and you feel like you have changed and evolved then that’s fine to change. Always stay true to yourself. 

Don’t do it fast and don’t do it not true to yourself. 

 

How to pivot successfully:

• Have a timeline. Have a strategy mapped out of when you want to ideally have completed your pivot. That way you can start working backward from there. Maybe in a year, you want to have completely pivoted from a service-based business owner to a product shop owner. Having a timeline helps you put a game plan in place to get from point A to point B. If you don’t have a timeline you are going to be aimlessly shooting in the dark of when you want that pivot to be completed. 

 

• Know where you’re headed. When you are pivoting you are pivoting out of one thing into another, that thing needs to be clearly defined. Get specific with what the pivot actually looks like. How are you changing your business or brand? What things have to change to accommodate that pivot?

• • Example of changing your brand: Is your branding changing? How are you changing it? Are you hiring a brand designer? Are you redoing your website? When are you rebranding and how are you rolling that out?

If you’re unclear about where you’re headed then the pivot might get really convoluted and messy and confuse your audience. Knowing where you’re going and which direction to start pointing your ship in will help your audience understand the transition slowly happening.

 

• Strategically revamp your content pillars on social media. With a pivot comes rethinking how you structure your social media strategy. If you’re introducing a new aspect of your business – for example – we both pivoted from photography to business coaching slowly over time. It didn’t happen at once. For a good chunk of time, we served BOTH clients who wanted us to take their photos AND business owners looking for marketing and business advice.

 

• Lindsey example: When I became a mom, I naturally slowed down a LOT on photography and started incorporating a ton more business education to be able to still make money while working from home instead of being out on shoots 24/7. I slowly stopped posting as much content that was meant for photo clients and started incorporating more content for business owners. But also because I was a mom, the motherhood lifestyle also naturally became incorporated into my brand by default. When that happened I realized how passionate I was about speaking to entrepreneurs who were also moms and that slowly became one of my new content pillars on social media. So I started creating content that spoke to mamas, entrepreneurs, and women who were both.
• Heart example: we stopped sharing our photography work about 2 years ago on The Heart’s social media and website. When we started as a photography workshop, our client work was a HUGE aspect of the content we shared. It made sense. But as we were pivoting from photography education to creative entrepreneurship education as a whole, our core focus was no longer photography education, but business and marketing education. It is no longer fit to be sharing client work on a company that sold courses and digital resources for creative entrepreneurs. But we didn’t do it immediately. We still serve photo education specifically here and there. Especially since one of our courses is still for photographers specifically. So we shared it when it made sense, for example: on the Photo Major Sales page for that course. 

 

• There might be a season where you’re serving more than one audience simultaneously – THAT’S OKAY! It’s okay to have 2 client avatars for a little bit and split the content you’re creating and your pillars to serve both of them, alternating back and forth who you’re speaking to.

As you slowly pivot, think of the percentage of your income that is coming from your old way of doing business vs. your new pivot. That’s a good way to look at the percentage of your social media content that should be speaking to each of those different avatars.

 

• Example: if you’re a hairstylist serving your clients in your salon but wanting to pivot into business education for OTHER hair stylists. I think this is a really popular type of pivot in a lot of different industries. It’s what we did with photography. Pivoting from just serving photo clients to teaching what we knew to photographers and eventually other business owners. Designers slowly start teaching other designers. 

What percentage of your income right now is coming from your salon clients, and what percentage of your income is coming from other hairstylists learning from you. Whether it’s coaching calls, mentor sessions, workshops, etc. We see it a LOT because going into education is a popular pivot. If you aren’t selling anything for other business owners to purchase or consume, why would you create content for other business owners? ONLY create content that is marketing towards something you offer.

 

• Know you might lose some people as you attract new people. That’s okay. As you slowly steer your ship in a different direction, know that you might lose some followers. That’s OKAY. it’s expected to happen. I know this episode is titled “how to pivot without losing your audience” and when you do it slowly over time, you won’t lose your entire audience. Especially if you’ve honed in on a personal brand. People most likely will be following you for YOU, not necessarily just what you offer. Still, even with YOU not changing, when you do start slowly changing the type of content you’re creating, people are allowed to not like that. You’re changing the rules of the game they signed up for when they followed you. And if they don’t like the new direction, it’s OKAY that they leave. 

 

• Offer different pages on your website for the different aspects of your business – before completely UP and changing it 100%.

 

Example:

• • We both offered pages on our photography sites that said “education” or “resources” or “mentorships” while the rest of our site was dedicated to photography.

• • Lindsey: Earlier this year I finally flipped the “main” target audience my website served from photo clients to business owners. Now the main avatar of my website serves business owners who need help with marketing and I condensed all my photography to one page of my website. Eventually, when I’m wanting to stop photography completely it will be easier to get rid of that page. BUT that happened SLOWLY over time.

 

Pivoting can be done successfully when you go slow. That’s the bottom line. When you map out where you’re going, how you’re going to do it, have a game plan in place, pivoting isn’t that scary. AND the majority of your audience will stay along for the ride. If some choose to leave, it’s probably because the new destination you’re heading your ship to now no longer is where they want to go. And that’s OKAY. 

 

Show notes 

The Heart Shop: www.theheartuniversity.com/shop

 

The Content Photo Minor: https://theheartuniversity.com/content-minor

 

If you want to connect with us and other listeners in the Heart and Hustle community join our Facebook group here.

 

 

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