Do you need to pivot or start again with your business?

Do you need to pivot or start again in your business? You’ve decided your business has gone off course. It isn’t panning out how you expected and you’ve ended up creating another job for yourself. One you don’t particularly love. But making changes to bring your business back into alignment with you isn’t always straightforward. It’s not always easy to identify what those changes should be.

Is it changes to how you are running your business? Hiring some support, establishing better boundaries or setting up a system to manage client onboarding? Or is it something more fundamental that needs to change. Ask yourself these questions to decide if you need to make fundamental changes in your business.

1: Do you like the industry you are working in?

Often when you are first starting out in business you do what you know. What you did in your corporate role. You were a marketing manager so you set up a business offering marketing services. Or you were a lawyer and have set up a legal firm or you were a web designer and now you design websites for your clients.

For many of us, it makes sense to leverage the skills we developed in the corporate sector in setting up our businesses. If you loved the work but not the office work culture then doing this makes perfect sense. But if you don’t enjoy the work then doing the same work in your own business won’t deliver all you were hoping for.

Running your own business can be better than working for someone else. Removing those office politics. Hopefully giving you more flexibility over not just your hours but also the types of clients you work with.

But it can also come with downsides. There are going to be elements of running a business that you don’t enjoy — we all have them. I don’t particularly enjoying marketing, others I know hate doing their accounts. To make marketing my business worth my while, I’ve got to enjoy the work.

If you decide that you aren’t doing the work you want to be doing, then this is going to require a major change and probably a new business. It may even mean going back to work for someone else while you develop new skills or to earn money to fund that new idea. Something I’ve personally done and not regretted.

2. Are you working with clients you love?

If you like the industry you are in then the problem could be who you are working with. Who you work with is such an important piece of running your own business. Especially if you are a micro business and your clients are the main people you spend time with.

It could be the niche you’ve chosen, in which case finding a new niche is the obvious solution. But it could also be that you’re attracting the wrong clients in that niche. At least wrong for you. In that case your marketing needs work and you need to get more specific on who your niche is. For example if you are a web designer who designs ecommerce websites, you may want to be more specific. For example you could specialise in the outdoor industry, because you love outdoor activities and couldn’t care less about the latest makeup trends. Or vice versa.

3. Are you enjoying how you work with these clients?

You’ve worked out you like the industry you are in and the clients you work with. The next step is to look at how you are working with your clients. Think about how you most enjoy working with clients. Do you like working with them one on one, in a group or through a self-directed course? Would you like to work long term with a few clients or do you prefer to do short time limited projects? Or a combination? If you are working with people one on one does that need to be synchronously? Or could you work with them asynchronously eg through email and voxer, if you would prefer that.

Or do you need to change the types of services you are offering to clients? If you are a copywriter do you want to offer a wide range of services? or would you be much happier if you specialised in writing blog posts and never had to write a sales page again? Are there people you could partner with to ensure your clients still had the services they need without you having to provide everything?

There are no right or wrong answers here. And don’t hold yourself back by saying that in your industry the standard is to offer services in a particular way. Think about how you want to work with people and what best works for your current stage in life. Remembering you can always change things later. There is nothing saying you can’t change things down the track if your circumstances change. Or you want to experiment with another way of offering services.

I recommend making some time to sit in a quiet space and journal about these questions to decide if you need to make a fundamental change in your business. It can feel daunting to make these changes. But the longer you leave it the harder and more challenging it can become.

If you would like support in considering what needs to change in your business then book in for a Thoughtful Business Pause. Together we will review what is and isn’t working in your business and plot a way forward for you.

Originally published at https://quietlyextraordinary.com on May 7, 2023.