Your Pivot Plan

This is the Momentum Podcast.

100% of businesses need to pivot right now. In the previous episode of the Momentum Podcast, Alex went through a framework to determine whether your business needs a minor, a major, or an absolute pivot. In this episode, he's going to show you how to create your pivot plan. This plan is going to help create certainty and clarity for you, your family, and your business. I hope you enjoy.

I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future and instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real.

We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be. Here's what I shared yesterday, whether you should be doing a minor, major, or absolute pivot in your company, and the way that you determine that, whether it's minor, which is usually just that your avatar [inaudible 00:01:50] and this is how you determine it. If the person you're helping and how you help them has stayed the same in this crisis, then you're probably doing a minor pivot. If the person you're helping and the way you're helping them is no longer valid in this crisis, you're going to have to change how you're doing that, you're probably making a somewhat major pivot to a very major pivot. If the how you're helping them and who you're helping is going to be permanently affected by this crisis or affected so long that you don't know that your business is going to continue, you could be planning or creating an absolute pivot which is changing everything.

And so yesterday I explained that in detail and then the way that you understand that is by looking at your client centric mission, which is a four-part framework for us. It's, who are you going to help? How are you going to help them? What's the change you're going to make? And how will you know you're successful? So, for us, that sounds like we help visionary entrepreneurs who can't turn it off and want to make a contribution as much as they want to make a living and we help them by showing them the tools, the frameworks, the systems, the structures they need to grow their business in any market. And the change we want to make is that they stop trying to manage, they step into leadership, get into a passenger seat, and grow their companies as fast as they've wanted to and we will know we're successful when visionary entrepreneurs come to us and we help them build empires.

And, for us, the challenge we had is that the entrepreneurs we were serving originally had shifted significantly from we were working with successful entrepreneurs and we ended up having just entrepreneurs who are now challenged by the market, who are having a really hard time with what was going on. And that was all that was coming towards us. So in our business we had to make a pivot and we had to make a somewhat major pivot. And so here's how we decided to do that. We looked at our client centric mission. Who are you going to help? How are you going to help them? What's the change we want to make? And how do we know you're successful? And that's also that's what guided the degree of pivot. Now here's how you create your plan.

See, once you understand how you're going to change your business, and I'll share a few with you, so we work with an ad agency with Emily Hershey, she barely had to change a lot. She did make a pivot. She adjusted her messaging because now ads are less expensive, but a lot of the people she worked with, she's still working with the same people. Not a big change there. Our market had shifted significantly from we were working with entrepreneurs that were growing the business, now they're challenged, we had to make a major pivot in our business. And then we know some people like Molly Kaiser, where she felt like her business Boudoir Photography Training was going to be effective for so long that she should just make an absolute pivot, try doing something else.

Now, how you build that next part of the pivot, once you've decided whether it's going to be minor, major, or absolute, we use a framework called the Five Core Functions of Your Business. The five core functions are lead generation, lead nurture, conversion, the act of conversion, delivery, retention, resell and upsell. And here's why I always tell people that all of our systems are crisis ready systems because everything we do is minimum effective dose. It's about figuring out the answers fast, it's about understanding what to do next that's going to give you the highest probability of success, and it's about being able to do it on the fly like we need to as entrepreneurs. One of the big challenges out there today is that there's a lot of people coaching entrepreneurs that the only way you can make decisions is in a two day offsite meeting every 90 days, and you have to have an entrepreneur in the room.

We would never create that type of co-dependence or that type of vulnerability in a planning system. See, ours are lightweight, on the fly. If you need to make changes in a crisis like this, we take people right back to the same planning systems we always use. The client centric mission is what guides our entire planning system, who are you going to help? How are you going to help them? What's the change you're going to make and how will you know you're successful? And then the way we have people decide what they're going to adjust in their company is always the five core functions. Whether you're in a crisis or not, whether it's a month like every other month or a month where there's a lot of things that are changing, we've always use this same model, this same framework of looking at lead generation, lead nurture, conversion, delivery, retention, resell and upsell. Here's how we use it.

We have our clients score from one to five, one not being the best and five being the best, where are they in each of the categories. And in our program there's actually frameworks and there's more details to this, but doing this even on the back of a napkin is an extraordinarily easy way to say, "This is how I should create my pivot plan." You ask, "How much do I need to shift lead generation? How much do I need to shift my nurture strategies? How much do I need to shift how I'm converting? How much do I need to shift delivery, and how much do I need to shift how I retain my clients, how I resell my clients, or how I retain my clients, how I resell, and then how I upsell?" And so if you're in a situation where you're making a minor change like Emily did, where she noticed that she actually had more people coming towards her, this is an opportunity for her. So the pivot for her is she's increasing how much she's reaching out. She's actually ...