Five Entrepreneurs Who Pivoted Their Way To Success

Alison Coleman

(FORBES) Having to admit that you got your original business model or product wrong can be a humbling experience for any entrepreneur, but the ability to respond by pivoting and making radical changes mid-stream could be crucial factor to their future success.

In 2015 Lenka Lutonska, a leading business strategist for female entrepreneurs, pivoted her business from solely offering in-person NLP training and business coaching, to taking it completely online.

She says: "My offline business brought me a regular income, but I could never scale it because I was trading time for money. When I first took my business online, I had a short period with no income. It was worrying, but I knew

I needed to give it my best shot.”

Within a couple of months Lutonska had signed her first client, and shortly afterwards had her first £20,000 month. Growth has been positive ever since.

"I completely shut down the offline side of my business, the source of a regular income, but the risk of not doing it meant remaining small, unknown," she says. "I couldn't bear to carry on living like that; I knew I wanted to serve on a bigger level."

Lutonska's key lesson: “If you have a burning passion you have to follow it, however risky it may seem, and you have to adapt.

Entrepreneur Daniel Murray started out building Grabble, a leading ecommerce app, before pivoting to Mobula, a B2B SaaS. He says: “Grabble was wildly successful and viral, which led us to focus on what prospective investors asked us to optimise towards; growth. And so we did."

However, the product was flawed in the sense that the business model struggled to keep up. By the time they had nearly 500,000 monthly active users it was costing them money to service customers at a point they were happy with.

“It was frustrating given that we'd built something consumers wanted but ultimately, wasn't scalable unless we bought products ourselves and became an actual retailer, which we didn't want to do,” he says.

Murray and his co founder Joel Freeman went back to the drawing board and came up with their pivot, Mobula, a ‘native commerce’ product that helps brands exploit the commercial opportunities emerging from the consumer shift from web to mobile. In the process they went without salaries for several months to keep the business alive whilst finding new investors, eventually securing £1 million in early 2017.

Murray's key lesson: Go with your gut. The people telling us we could solve Grabble’s business model challenge were the same people pushing us to spend on growth without helping us address this problem.

When Joseph Valente, winner of 'The Apprentice', founded ImpraGas the business model was a service repair and maintenance organisation for multiple property management companies. Initially it was successful.

“I ran that model for three years, but as we expanded it could no longer provide the opportunity or growth we needed alongside cut throat margins more suited to one man bands with lower overheads,” he says.

The solution was to pivot. They gave up all of their contracts, brought in a sales team, changed their marketing and went solely into the domestic install market. The resulted has been a tripling of turnover, and expansion to cover more than 50% of the UK.

“The risk of pivoting was all out failure,” says Valente. “The risk of not pivoting was stagnating and not growing, which for me, is worse than all out failure. It worked for us and we went from a £450,000 a year turnover to £4 million in the 1st 16 months.

Valente's key lesson: If it doesn’t work change it. Don’t be afraid to fail.

A year ago Alex Blakoe helped to launch JimJam, to provide access to physiotherapists via video call. The premise was that most musculoskeletal problems could be diagnosed and treated remotely as effectively as in-person. However, the B2C model didn't pick up as quickly as they'd hoped.

They had customers, but without a substantial budget, they struggled to scale up their marketing. The solution was to pivot from B2C to mostly B2B, and provide their technology as a white-labelled platform. “To be successful at B2C, we'd have to convince hundreds of people that online physio is great," says Blakoe. "With our B2B model, we just had to convince a few people at each company about the benefits.”

The risk of pivoting was the need for further R&D resources to adapt the product for B2B. However this was alleviated by a growing interest in their platform, which boosted confidence in securing B2B customers.

Blakoe's key lesson: Be realistic about what can be achieved without a huge marketing budget. Changing the way in which people think about a whole medical sector is quite a big undertaking.

Burstimo started out as simply a Music PR company, helping artists to get press and radio play, and was initially successful, until market research revealed that this service alone was no longer enough.

Head of digital Alex Mckendrick says: “With falling readerships of print publications and the rise of digital services such as Spotify, we needed to change the company focus to include new promotional services, such as Spotify playlist promotion and music placement in Youtube videos.

As founders, he says, they knew that the music industry itself had changed, but underestimated how much they needed to change the way they promoted music.
Musicians can be very precious with their latest release because they only get one shot at it. The risk for Burstimo was that they were creating a service that potential clients were unfamiliar with, and may be more inclined to spend on traditional music PR firm than something unique and advanced.
McKendrick's key lesson: “As we pivoted to a Spotify promotion company, we didn’t get any enquiries, so we learned to slowly educate our customers on why our new service was better than the services other music promotion companies were currently offering.