In Episode 26 of the podcast I sit down with my September guest host, Ayngelina Brogan, to talk about a timely subject: pivoting your business during times of change.

We have to say it - if you’re of a certain age then you can’t hear the word pivot without thinking of a particular Friends episode. Have you got that image of Ross firmly stuck in your head now? Excellent! Onwards…

As we learned in Episode 25, Ayngelina makes her living as a culinary travel publisher… and if there’s one sector that’s been hit hard by our current global pandemic it’s travel, tourism and the restaurant industry. Ayngelina has had to figure out how to pivot her business while still staying true to her core values and her engaged audience.

This week we talk about how to change and eventually thrive when life throws you a curve ball in your business.

One important note: a global pandemic is an extreme example of change. There are many, many other reasons you may find yourself having to pivot your creative business. Some might be planned, like the birth of a child or a move across the country. Others may come at you out of the blue like losing your job, an illness, a death, a downturn in your industry or the economy as a whole, changes in technology. Or, you may simply fall out of love with what you do.

At some point, nearly every single business, regardless of what type of business they are, will find themselves in a position where they have to pivot or, in all likelihood, close up shop. But pivoting is possible for nearly everyone and in many cases, the direction you turn might even have you being more successful than your original path!

Listen To the Episode

Here’s a direct link to Episode 26 - or you can listen via the players below:

When this year started, Ayngelina, the publisher behind the popular culinary travel site Bacon is Magic, fully expected to have her most profitable year ever and, she had set some very aggressive goals for herself that reflected her expectations.

Instead, she found herself in her mid-40s, living with her mother, in a small town in Nova Scotia with no real idea of when things might go back to “normal”. But, as she noted, while the pandemic may have brought about change, looking at it as an opportunity may have just put her business in a better place than it would have been otherwise.

Look For The Opportunities

No matter how negative a change may seem when it first hits you, the one thing change always brings (yes, always) is opportunity. Change can close a lot of doors but it also opens an awful lot of them too - but you won’t see them if you’re wallowing in the depths of despair.

Yes, it’s perfectly acceptable and normal and healthy to grieve what’s been lost. But there comes a point where you need to take a step back and look at what is opening up in front of you. Look for opportunities and needs that are surfacing and ask yourself how you could fill them.

Pay attention to what people are doing, where they are going, how they are spending their time and what’s challenging them. Find ways to meet them half way and serve them where they are.

In Ayngelina’s case, she lives a life that is constantly on the go and suddenly, she was in quarantine for 14 days in her childhood bedroom with potentially months of no travel stretching out in front of her. She decided to view it as a gift of time that she so rarely gets to experience and did a deep dive into her business. She made a three month plan and looked at what she could work on - including some of the more tedious but very necessary tasks of owning a digital content business like SEO, working on a backlog of content ideas she had stored away waiting for a rainy day (she wrote one article for her site per day based on ideas she already had in draft) and a backlog of other technical things that needed to be addressed.

But what about her travel heavy content? Nobody was looking for it anymore. Her website’s tagline has long been “here we share the best food around the world and how to make it at home” so she pivoted hard to the “how to make it at home” pillar of her content. If people couldn’t travel to eat, she’d show them how to make those dishes from their travels in their own kitchen - something she often didn’t have the time to do while she was traveling and without a permanent kitchen. She found the opportunity and went to work filling it. This made sure she could pay the bills while she figured out what her next steps are.

PRO TIP: If change has come at you out of left field and is threatening your income, look for ways to make sure you have enough income coming in to pay your monthly bills so you can make decisions with a clear head instead of going into panic mode.

Can you freelance?
Can you teach a skill you have? Look at your skill set and see what you can do with it.
Can you move to a different business model? The pandemic forced a lot of creatives to get comfortable selling online.
Can you pick up a part time job or some gig work?
Can you make something that you can sell? A course? A recipe book?
What can you do that brings people together?

Learn to Get Comfortable With Change

What a lot of people don’t realize when they start out with a brand new business is that change is inevitable. It’s going to happen regardless of what kind of business you open - and probably far more often than you realize.

The amount of change can vary by industry. A very tech driven industry - like digital content creation - experiences change on an almost daily basis. A business that makes hand crafted wooden furniture might see less frequent change in how they make their product but that business probably relies on social media or email marketing or an online shopping platform to sell their products and those industries see rapid and frequent change that will trickle down to that small business.

Owning a business is a series of small, weekly and sometimes daily pivots. Change is going to happen and you need to be accepting of that and get comfortable with it. Otherwise, being a small business owner might not be for you.

Plan For Change

You can, to a certain extent, plan for change:

create a system that helps you store and track ideas that come to mind but that aren’t a good fit right now so you can review them a month, a year or 5 years from now.
keep a list of things other people tell you that you should try - no matter how silly or far out you think they are. One day they may make a lot of sense for you. I would never have opened an etsy shop on my own - it wasn’t until many, many people told me I needed one. Sometimes others do know best.
know your numbers: your sales numbers, your revenue stream percentages, your profit numbers, your best selling products, your email subscribers, your website traffic - know the bones of your business and check in with your numbers every month and if you spot a trend you don’t like, act on it
know which assets you own. You do own your mailing list (but not the platform that sends your emails out), your website content (but not google, which controls search engine results), your skill set - which you can constantly evolve, and your intellectual property. You don’t own your social media subscribers or the social media platforms. You likely don’t own the platform your on-line shop resides on. You don’t own the markets that you sell at. You may not own the property that houses your studio space. Knowing what you own and what you don’t can help you set your priorities and work out where to put your time and energy and what to keep a closer eye on.
Can you reach your customers if something happens to your social media challenges or you on-line selling platform? If not, figure out how you can make that happen
Keep an eye on industry trends. You don’t have to act on trends but you do need to be aware of them so you can make good decisions.
Keep learning - keep up your skills and learn new skills - both in your craft and as a small business owner.
Brainstorm with friends - even ones not involved in your business or industry. Get them to give you all their ideas for your business and you never know what might work or what you can tweak to make it work. And remember, your friends may come at it with the mindset of a customer, rather than a business owner.

Staying on top of your business, your industry and your market can help make sure that instead of getting a nasty industry or tech shock that requires a big pivot, instead you can manage things by making a series of planned, small pivots.

Generate New Ideas and Try New Things

The more new things you try, the more new ideas you’ll generate. It’s exactly the same as creativity begetting creativity. You don’t have to try every idea - but store them all away somewhere for when times of change are upon you.

Getting those ideas out of your head helps keep your head clear for what you need to focus on right now while still keeping those ideas somewhere safe so you can go back to them. Put them in a shoebox, store them on your phone, keep a journal or a notebook. Use mind mapping to help generate even more ideas.

But it is important to try some new things. Otherwise you become stagnant and even burnt out and that can make pivoting very difficult.

Diversify Your Income

You know the saying: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The same goes for your business.

Don’t have all your revenue coming from one spot. Diversifying your income and ensuring no one revenue stream is responsible for your standard of living protects you during times of change.

If all your revenue comes from your Etsy shop, think about selling on other platforms. If all your revenue comes from craft markets, think about getting online. Can you teach the fundamentals behind what you create? Can you teach online as well as in person? Can you create prints and cards from your large scale paintings? Can you sell your jewelery wholesale? Can you self-publish your books? Can you do commissions? Would a patreon account work for you?

Do not build your entire business on platforms you don’t own (ie social media). Don’t put your business at the mercy of a landlord.

Don’t Be Afraid To Go Back To Being a Beginner

The jumping off point for this episode actually came out of a conversation Ayngelina and I had when we first met back around 2015. I was in conversations with her to bring her on board as a speaker at our annual Food Bloggers of Canada conference and, as was the norm for this conference, a lot of the speakers were bloggers.

be a beginner.jpg — The more you do something, the better you get at it.

One of the big pivots Ayngelina has also made during this period is embracing video - something she did not feel comfortable with from a skill level. Video is a lot of new skills: filming, editing and and being on camera.

But what made her most uncomfortable about this pivot wasn’t the workload - it was that she would have to go back to being a beginner. She’d have to get comfortable with not being very good at something while she learned.

This is a touch mindset change for a lot of small business owners. We don’t realize it because most of us are learning every day - but small things. Like how to update the descriptions in our shop or how to accept credit cards at a market. Things that build on what we already know and do every day.

You also get to a point in your business where things are ticking along and you’re doing well and you’ve become a seasoned pro at what you.

But a big pivot can make us feel like we’ve gone right back to kindergarten and… like everyone is watching us. And that can be really scary. Suddenly, you don’t have the skills to execute the vision you have in your head.

The truth is people aren’t paying as much attention as you think and even if they are, your first few attempts at something new are never going to be as bad as you think they are. In fact, to an untrained eye, they probably look great. Case in point - Ayngelina’s first few videos. She saw all the mistakes. The rest of us saw fun videos about Atlantic Canada. But if she had waited until it was perfect, the 35K+ people who saw that very first, less than perfect, video the first week it was released, would never have seen it. Better done and out there, than perfect.

Don’t be afraid to be a beginner. It can, in fact, be very liberating if you just immerse yourself in the act of trying something new with no expectations! (and you will get better).

If this is resonating with you, go back to Episode 3 of the podcast on Masking Fear with Procrastination and Perfection. It’s one of our most popular episodes of the podcast.

Pivoting can be stressful but there are lots of ways that you, as a creative (don’t forget that word!) business owner can prep for change so when it does land on your doorstep, you can still move forward!