The Art of the Pivot

The headlines today can be alarming.

One of the first things I do every morning is scan the headlines to see what transpired overnight and what the day is about to bring.

“Damn.”

With each reading of the headlines, that word has been my response with increasing frequency for about the past three years now. We are living in alarming times. On the calamity bingo card this week is bank failure, which in 2008 was one harbinger of the worse economic crisis since 1929. Here we go again?

My reaction was a little different this morning. Instead of feeling fear, or dread, I reflected on the past few years of my own life and business, and thought to myself, “I wonder what new opportunities these calamities will bring and how I can seize those opportunities for my advantage?”

Over the past weekend I binge watched my favorite docuseries, The Men Who Built America. I own the DVD set and have watched it probably a dozen times. As ruthless and cutthroat as they were, I’ve always admired men like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Edison, and Ford, not for the darker sides of their characters and business ethics, but because of their visionary acumen, courage, determination to win, and their ability to pivot to survive each time calamity presented itself.

Vanderbilt pivoted radically from riverboat shipping to a railroad empire as the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad threatened to deal a significant blow to the more constrained river transportation industry. River transportation required, well, a river. Rail transportation required a track, that could be laid anywhere, even through mountain ranges.

Rockefeller pivoted from oil to kerosene, and then to gasoline for a whole new industry when Edison’s electricity threatened his kerosene business. And after the calamitous forced breakup of his company, Standard Oil, into over 30 separate companies, he became the wealthiest man in history as a shareholder in each of those companies, topped only by Andrew Carnegie later.

Morgan didn’t necessarily pivot, but always managed to see over the horizon as the next opportunity presented itself, and then inserted himself into those opportunities such as electricity, and later steel by purchasing Carnegie Steel and creating the largest steel company in history, U.S. Steel, which built cities and infrastructure from coast to coast and around the world.

In more modern times, Apple barely survived until pivoting from funky, expensive desktop computers to music to mobile phones.

Netflix pivoted from direct mail DVD rental subscriptions to streaming to their own movie and series production. They are again facing calamity as their market share erodes, and need to make another pivot, soon.

And Amazon pivoted from selling books to, well hell, everything, including privatized commercial space travel.

Your business has a short shelf life.

In the days of the great 19th and 20th century industrialists, pivots took years, even decades before becoming necessary. In the days of instantaneous information and artificial intelligence, pivots are becoming necessary every few months, and at times, every few weeks.

While typing this I’m thinking about my own business journey since leaving the corporate world to build my own businesses, in an industry I previously knew nothing about or had any experience with. In five short years my business life has pivoted from hands-on operations to coaching & business development to the formation of logistics and risk management companies to serve those business owners I’ve coached and trained. And today I am the president of Quantum Franchise Group, representing over 800 companies across 39 industries, helping aspiring business owners make the dream of business ownership a reality. My pivots have been driven by both calamity, and opportunity, and every pivot has allowed me to level up, in terms of both happiness and income.

The business you start, or manage today, will look different a year from now, even more different two years from now, and completely different five years from now, provided you learn the art of the pivot and are able to find the opportunity hidden inside every calamity, and survive that long.

There are three inevitable truths.

In business, calamity and evolution are as certain as death and taxes. Evolution is constant, and calamities, however you choose to define them, do, and will continue to happen in faster and faster succession as we hurtle into the future. Calamity doesn’t always present itself through tragedies such as pandemics, wars, or economic collapse. A calamity for you may present itself simply through your chief competition finding a way to do what you do better, cheaper, or faster, or by creating something new that renders your product or service obsolete. I haven’t taken a Polaroid since the the Reagan administration.

Within every calamity there is opportunity. Calamity clears the path of old, outdated ideas and methodologies. And calamity sets the stage for, and positions the spotlight on, new ideas, new methodologies, and new creations from the human mind that nobody could have foreseen before the calamity made us stop in our tracks, say “damn,” and begin imagining the unimaginable.

The art of the pivot begins with your mind and emotions. Disruption is frightening. Change is scary. Stepping out of the known and into the unknown is intimidating. But when you can accept that, as a business owner, you’re going to spend more time in the unknown than in the known, when you can embrace every calamity as the womb of opportunity, and you can calm your mind to focus on the next, exhilarating phase of your professional evolution, you will not only survive, but you will find yourself standing head and shoulders above all of the others who could not tame their own heart and minds.

Here are three threes for you today.

Find for yourself three articles about your industry, written within the past three weeks, and as you read them, make a list of the current strengths, weaknesses, and threats present in your business today.

Think of three successful and tenured business people that you either know casually, or have heard of but have never met. Ask each of them for 30 minutes of their time, either over coffee, drinks, lunch, or Zoom, to share their story, and how they have not only survived, but thrived, through adversity and change.

And finally, make a list of three things your current business can do to meet needs, solve problems, and generate revenue, that you haven’t previously considered. You may just find your next pivot in that list!