Questions To Ask Before Pivoting Your Business
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Community Advocacy Organization

Questions To Ask Before Pivoting Your Business

Updated: Jan 20, 2023


Questions To Ask Before Pivoting Your Business

In the business world, you must constantly analyze your decisions and what your competition is doing. It’s the best way to see if your methods are working. If something isn’t working, you need to pivot to something else. Pivoting can be tough in the business world, but if you continue reading, you can learn some questions to ask before pivoting your business so you can do it the right way.


Is This the End?

The first and most important question you must ask is if it’s the end. You don’t want to prepare for a pivot only for your product to get picked up by the masses. In that case, you’ll need to decide if you want to move forward with your pivot, hedge your bets, or turn back to your original plan.


Ask yourself if you’ve tried everything and done it correctly. You don’t want to sink more money into a failing business, but you must be sure it’s failing or not. Do a small tour, avoid mobile marketing tour mistakes, and see if that reinvigorates your business. It will be a financial investment, but it’s better to spend that money and succeed than spend a large amount of money on pivoting.


Can Small Changes Make a Difference?

Before making any plans for pivoting, look at your existing project and business model from every angle. Many nuances are easy to miss and can easily be solved with some small alterations. Perhaps you’re targeting the wrong demographic with your products and services. Similarly, the project you’re working on may be too big, and you need to refine your project parameters. Make sure what you’re working on now does not and will not work before investing the time and resources into pivoting your business.


Are You Confident About the Pivot?

If it seems like there’s no future with your current projects and goals, vet your pivot to guarantee it doesn’t make the same mistakes as your previous model. Find out what you missed in the last round of planning, and do everything you can to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Be thorough with the following factors:

  • Market research

  • Testing

  • Competitive analysis

  • Meetings with designers and engineers

A good way to visualize a pivot is by considering a pizza restaurant. For some reason, their expansion into sandwiches wasn’t taking off with customers. After dropping the sandwiches and before going through with anything else, they’ll need to do extensive tests. They will help the pizza business recognize why the sandwiches didn’t work and how it can avoid bad reception with their new products, like pasta, ice cream, and baked goods.


It’s important to ask these questions before pivoting your business so you can guarantee you’re doing the right thing and doing it the right way. It’s hard to recognize what went wrong in the first place without asking these questions, and your business is likely doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Learn what went wrong and what went right, and take that knowledge into your next venture!

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