What NOT to do when pivoting your solopreneur business

Transcript:

Are you thinking about pivoting things in your business? In this video, we're going to go over what not to do when you're making some kind of change or shift as a solopreneur.

My name is Sagan Morrow and I'm an anti hustle Productivity Strategist and internationally board certified Success and Life Coach who specializes in working with solopreneurs. Be sure to grab my free training, Anti Hustle Secrets to Solopreneur Success! 

Now let's get into today's video: What not to do when pivoting your solopreneur business. My business has changed, evolved, pivoted many times over the years. I actually started out as a health blogger back in 2008, and for quite a few years the main core of my business was freelance writing and also some freelance editing. My business has changed a lot since then!

I want you to know that it is more than okay to pivot in your business. Your interests, especially if you're multi-passionate like I am, will change over time. That is just the reality of the situation. There's nothing wrong with pivoting in your business. But here's the thing: You always want to be strategic and intentional with the pivots that you make. 

One of the big mistakes that I see a lot of solopreneurs making is that they end up pivoting much too quickly. Without doing it with this strategic and intention sort of piece in mind. So they might pivot for reasons like they aren't seeing the results they expected as quickly as they'd hoped; they're not having fun in their business; they're feeling burnt out; or they're experiencing impostor syndrome or self doubt. 

Now, all of these reasons connect back to a similar end result assumption: These solopreneurs are assuming that their chosen business isn't right for them. 

However, that is not necessarily the case. Here are a few things that could be happening underneath the surface for each of those reasons…

If you are not seeing the results that you expected, or you're not seeing results as quickly as you wanted, then this might be because you haven't stuck with a strategy for long enough to know whether it's actually working or not. Or what else could be going on is there might be a missing piece that you are neglecting. Those are a couple of the things that could potentially be happening beneath the surface. 

If you are not having fun in your business, then something that could be happening beneath the surface is that you are using strategies or tactics that aren't a good fit for you. That does not mean that your business idea itself is the problem! It just means that the tactics, your execution of it, need some finessing. 

If you're feeling burned out, this could mean that you are not incorporating good energy management and you likely, I would assume, don't have a burnout prevention or management plan. If you do have those and you're still burned out, then that could mean even more things are happening underneath the surface to peel away and unpack. 

And if you're experiencing impostor syndrome or self doubt, then what could be happening is that you haven't done enough of the deep inner work yet to support yourself through fears and other internal bottlenecks. So what's going to happen here is that you're just going to keep on running into the same problems regardless of what type of business that you have, because you haven't dealt with those underlying internal sort of pieces.

Every time that I've successfully and happily pivoted in my own business, it's because I've made a point of checking in with each of those areas. In order for your pivots to be successful, you need to be intentional with them. 

And those reasons that I just gave, those reasons for what the underlying possibilities that could be going on, though, that is not the full extent of the underlying things that could be going on. There are so many different pieces that could be happening, but those are just examples of what might be happening beneath the surface. And as you can see, it doesn't mean that you need to pivot your actual business itself, you need to change your business or overhaul it entirely. Sometimes there can be a whole bunch of other things that you can play with instead. 

Now, I recently received an email from a solopreneur that I thought was very interesting. I want to share this with you: So this particular solopreneur told me that they initially wanted to do a service based done-for-you service — for example, this could be a freelance service. 

But what they realized, as they told me in this email, they realized that they actually don't want to do the work for other people. So they told me that they had thought about maybe doing coaching for other people, so coaching people to be able to do the work for themselves. Then this person decided that they don't actually have time to do that. So instead, they were thinking that maybe they should create an e-course to teach people how to do this skill. 

Now, unfortunately, this is a flawed process of elimination. 

Doing the service for people (e.g. providing a service for your clients) is a completely different skill set from coaching clients, which is also a completely different skill set from teaching an online course. You absolutely can develop the skills to do all of these things (I myself have!), but do you actually have the skills for this yet? 

This is a really, really important thing to consider what to take into consideration: just because you can do a skill does not mean that you can coach on it or teach on it. Very, very important pieces to take into consideration. 

Here's another reason why this is a flawed decision making process for this particular solopreneur, who was thinking “I'll provide a done for-you-service,” and then “no wait, I'll coach on it… No, wait, I'll create an e-course for it.”

One of the other reasons why this is a flawed decision making process is that it doesn't actually get to the root of what they really want to be doing. 

Just because you know what you don't want — for example, in this case, they don't want to offer a done-for-you service (or they think they don't want it) — it doesn't mean that you know what you DO want. 

Just because you don't want something, doesn't mean that this next thing must be the thing that you do want. 

Because you'll want to look at, what about done for you services do you not actually want to do? Does it really mean that done-for-you service is not a good fit, or is it your approach to those done-for-you services that isn't a good fit? So there's a lot of questions that you need to ask before you do away with that entirely. 

Another key thing here is that if you do not have time for doing a service, then first of all, creating an online course and teaching an online course takes a lot of time so that's not going to solve that problem. And second of all, a lack of time is something that you can do something about! You can actually manage that. So in fact, solopreneurs who take my Productivity Powerhouse e-course easily save five to 10 hours a week, every week, with what they learn in that program.

So really think about that. What can you accomplish with 20 to 40 extra hours every single month? Would that change your decision about what you want to do with your business? 

And if you want to learn more about Productivity Powerhouse, you can get started on saving those five to 10 hours a week today.