016 - PIVOTING IS A FEATURE NOT A BUG

Pivoting is a feature and not a bug. So I'm sure you guys have heard this a lot of times before, right? So pivoting is a feature, not a bug. What do I mean by that? Well, anything that's a feature is something that is relevant to that business and is baked into the model, whereas a bug is obviously something you need to squash.

And remove effectively from whatever you're doing. The reason I think that pivoting is a feature and not a bug is at very early stages. You are constantly in search of a business model. So you should really, in theory, be constantly pivoting from one idea to the next. Now, a true pivot is where you keep one foot.

Firmly grounded in the sort of realm that you're in and you sort of just swivel into a new market or a new user base or a new geography or whatever it might be in order to make sure that you find the right model to fit your business. Now, back in the day I was working with a business that spent three or four years.

Trying to find a business model that worked within the restaurant industry, and it was really struggling to make any sort of money out of what they were doing. They, they had managed to kind of bring on lots of restaurants and, and had figured out how to get people to use their app and, and certainly they had a lot of volume going through, but they weren't really able to convert that into.

True revenue. They took the drastic decision back in 2017 to do a major pivot. And what I mean by that is they decided to move away from sort of the restaurant industry almost altogether whilst leaving it as part of their product. They.  ended up really transforming the business into something quite different altogether, a concierge business.

And back in 2018, they were the fastest growing business in the uk, or certainly one of the fastest growing businesses in the uk. So the reality is that when you are pursuing any kind of business model, you've gotta think about whether it's working or whether it's not. And don't be afraid to pivot because pivoting is a sign that you are paying attention.

It is a feature, not a bug.