A Pivot Is Not a Failure. In fact, It Might Be the Whole Point.

We want to talk about the moment your business stops looking like what you thought it would. Because it happens a lot…. And almost everyone reads it as bad news. If that's where you're sitting right now, we hope you find some comfort and encouragement here, because it is NOT bad news. And here is why…..

You had a clear plan. And now the offer you were so sure about is just sitting there while people keep asking for something else. Or the client you built the whole business around turns out not to be the one who books. You may feel defeated… but it is important to know, you didn’t mess it up.

Your client is giving you a clear message of what they want, and you need to listen and pivot. Your client is giving you a gift.

We know that sounds strange when it feels like the exact opposite is happening. When it feels like the plan is slipping right through your fingers. But stay with us, because some of the biggest companies you can name only exist because their founders got this same gift and were brave enough to open it.

Your first plan was never meant to be the final answer. It was there to get you out the door, it was your starting point, not your finish line. You cannot see what people want until you have put something in front of them and watched them reach for it.

Nobody starts with the finished version

We’ve spent almost 2 years now sitting at coffees and kitchen tables with women who are building businesses. And the pattern that keeps showing up is that the business that ends up working is almost never the one she described the first time we met her.

Not because her first idea was bad. It is because, once she started, the people around her handed her better information than her imagination ever could.

This isn’t just a small-business thing. Some of the companies you’d name off the top of your head did the same exact thing. And we want to gives these to you as examples so that you know its not just you and to encourage you to kept going, because the WORST thing you can do at this point in your business would be to give up. Again, you clients are telling you what they want, what could be better, they want something you have to offer.

Shopify sold snowboards first…..

You’ve probably bought something through Shopify this week without realizing it. AND GUESS WHAT…..Shopify started in 2004 as a snowboard shop. A little online store called Snowdevil, selling snowboards, nothing else. Its true, read about it here.

And the snowboards sold fine! That part matters, because it means nothing was failing. But the founder, Tobias Lütke, had built his own software to run the store, since everything else on the market drove him up a wall. And other shop owners kept emailing him about that. Not the boards. The thing underneath, the thing selling the boards.

That was the message. And he almost ran right past it. Instead he did the thing most of us can’t make ourselves do. He shut down a working snowboard business and turned the software into the whole company.

That software is Shopify. Millions of stores run on it now. He thought he was in the snowboard business. He was never in the snowboard business.

Pretty cool.

Instagram was a mess before it worked…..

Instagram is a weirder one. Before it was Instagram it was an app called Burbn, and it tried to do everything. Check in at a bar, make plans with friends, collect points for going out, and, sort of off in the corner, share a photo.

Almost nobody used it. But the founders paid attention to the handful of people who did stick around, and looked at what those people kept reaching for. Photos. Only ever the photos.

So they tore it down. The check-ins, the points, all of it, gone. They kept photos and renamed the whole thing Instagram. The first day it was live, 25,000 people signed up.

The people told them what they wanted. They just had to be willing to hear it and let the rest go. And if you’re sitting there feeling like your business is doing too much and running in nine directions, sit with that one a second.

Their fix wasn’t more. It was less.

The genius behind Glossier….

Because it starts exactly where a lot of you are sitting right now.

2010. Emily Weiss is working at Vogue and running a beauty blog on the side called, Into the Gloss. She interviews people about their routines, she asks her readers what they wish existed, and she listens. Into the Gloss ran like that for four years.

So Emily had four years of paying attention to the people who kept showing up. And what did she do with that? She took everything those readers told her and turned it into products. That becomes Glossier. A few years later it’s valued at over a billion dollars.

What gets us about this one is that she didn’t build a product and then go hunting for an audience. She had the audience first, from the blog. And they told her, gift after gift, what to make.

This tells us that showing up consistently until the people around you start telling you what they need from you is hugely beneficial.

There they are three different companies that I am sure you have heard of. Not one of them got where it was going by gripping the first plan tighter. They got there by noticing what people were showing them and being brave enough to walk toward it, even when it wasn’t the thing they’d been telling everyone they did.

And from the inside, none of it felt like a bold, dramatic pivot. It felt like paying attention and adjusting course.

What we want you to take from this….First we want to encourage you to keep going, we see so many entrepreneur “give up” after the first year. Second, you don’t have to have the whole thing figured out on day one. You get to start with the information you have at that time and let the work, and your people, correct you.

Sometimes they correct you straight toward what you pictured, and that feels wonderful. And sometimes they hand you something you never would have dreamed up on your own. That version is usually the better one. It just doesn’t feel better while it’s happening. While it’s happening it feels like your plan coming apart.

Speaking from personal experience, our own business doesn’t look like the sketch we started with. We watched what clients kept circling back and asking us for, and we followed it there. It was the best decision we made and guess what? Even after we branched out in directions we never expected our clients to push us, two years later they started coming back around, asking for the very thing we thought we’d offer at the very beginning. Turns out the first idea wasn’t wrong. It was just early.

And calling it a “pivot” makes it sound clean and strategic, like a chess move. From where you’re standing it mostly just feels like doubt. But choosing to build the business that’s working, instead of white-knuckling the one you imagined, takes more nerve than staying put. Not less. Nobody hands you credit for that, so we will.

We know it’s genuinely hard to see your own pivot while you’re inside it. When you’re that close, the drift doesn’t read as direction. It reads as something breaking. It usually takes someone who isn’t in your business every single day to look at the whole messy picture and say, wait, that corner right there, that’s the business, go do way more of that.

A lot of what keeps you from seeing it comes down to ego, and that’s human. But hear us loud and clear on this one. It is not failure. Your clients are reaching for something they want FROM YOU.

That’s a lot of what we do for the women we work with. Not because we understand your business better than you do. Because we’re standing outside of it, so we can see a shape you’re too close to see. So if you’re in the middle of one of these right now, watching the plan slip and quietly bracing for it to mean something bad about you, come talk to us.

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We’re Ashley and Claire, co-founders of Collab Collective. We’re brand photographers and marketing strategists in Washington DC. If your business is turning into something you didn’t plan and you want another set of eyes on it, write us at letscollab@collabcollectivedc.com, or just reply to this. We read every message.

And if someone you know is in the messy middle of a pivot right now, send this her way. She needs to hear it isn’t failure.