Episode 72: Are You Pivoting Toward Something or Away From Something? The Question Every Entrepreneur Needs to Answer

Are you pivoting toward something or away from something? 

In this episode, Jennifer Kok breaks down what she calls "the art of pivoting" and why the best pivots she's made and witnessed didn't come from desperation. They came from clarity and intention.

Jennifer gets honest about the pivots that aren't really pivots at all, the ones driven by avoidance, boredom, or impatience.She shares her own story of owning a cookie business for 20 years, including how the 2008 recession forced a strategic shift into gourmet cupcakes that ultimately led to a franchise, and how knowing when to eventually walk away was its own kind of pivot.

What You'll Learn:

• The difference between a strategic pivot and a reactive one (and how to tell which one you're making)

• Why pivoting too soon is just as costly as waiting too long

• 4 legitimate signs it's time to pivot your business

• How to audit before you act and what data to pull

• Why you should test a pivot before going all in

• How Jennifer's latest pivot led to the creation of the Focus Growth Collective

Key Takeaway:

Pivoting toward something is leadership. Pivoting away from something is avoidance. Both can look the same from the outside, but only you know what's really driving the decision.

Resources + Next Steps:

Focus Growth Collective, Jennifer's strategic advisory group and monthly mastermind for service-based women entrepreneurs. If you're in decision fatigue, analysis paralysis, or just tired of making big calls alone, this is built for you. 

Order Jennifer's New Book:  Make Waves, How Women Entrepreneurs Stop Reacting. Start Profiting. and Build a Business that Lasts.
http://makewavesjenkok.com

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a fellow entrepreneur

Stop Reacting. Start Profiting. Go Make Waves. 

My name is Jennifer Kok, and I’m a profit and growth advisor for service-based women entrepreneurs. I help women business owners make smarter, more strategic decisions so they can grow profitably, pay themselves consistently, and avoid burnout.

Because the truth is, business owners make decisions all day long, but the ones that really matter are often the hardest ones. Should I hire? Raise my prices? Invest in marketing? Let go of a draining client? Expand, or simplify?

Those decisions carry weight, and they can impact your time, your profit, your energy, and your long-term growth.

That’s why I created the Focused Growth Collective, a virtual mastermind for women business owners who want support making the kinds of decisions that move a business forward. Yes, we talk strategy, but we also look at the bigger picture like mental load, health, profit, and long-term sustainability.

My goal is to help women build businesses that pay them well, support their lives, and still feel worth leading 10 years from now.

Connect with me:
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Transcript

Jennifer Kok (00:02.466)

Most people talk about pivoting like it's a rescue operation. Okay, the business is struggling, the numbers aren't moving, the market isn't responding, so you pivot, start fresh, rebrand, reposition, whoo, crisis averted. You know, there's a word pivot that gets thrown around a lot with entrepreneurs and it always makes me think of the Friends episode. How many of you grew up watching Friends, Ross, Rachel, Chandler trying to get that couch?

up the stairwell to the new apartment. And it got jammed and Ross is just yelling, pivot, pivot, pivot. And it makes me think of what we do as entrepreneurs, as leaders of our business. But the most strategic pivots that I've seen and the ones that I've made myself in my course of entrepreneurship didn't come from desperation. They came from clarity. From a leader who's paying attention

asking the hard questions and making a deliberate choice to move towards something better rather than away from something broken. So it's not always meant to happen during a crisis. So how do we know when to pivot? What I call the art of pivoting. You know, throughout...

My journey, I've pivoted a few times. Some pivots were internal, you know, such as, how do I make decisions? How do I manage cashflow? How do I hire and lead people? That's pivoting. That's growing and pivoting, changing the way I was operating. Others were maybe a little more visible, such as a new location. I moved my bakery twice. That's pivoting.

and also adding new product lines. That can be pivoting. And so there's internal and external ways that we pivot. But every single time we go about pivoting, it requires us to go through the hard questions.

Jennifer Kok (02:04.568)

You know, if you've ever felt stuck in your business, you know exactly what I mean. It's never really about should I pivot, it's more about why and whether that's really what is necessary right now in this season. But one thing I see often is that there's a pivot that isn't a pivot. And let's just kind of air that out and talk about the elephant in the room that nobody really wants to talk about.

There's a version of pivoting that has nothing to do with strategy, has nothing to do with being stuck in your business from an external. It's really more about avoidance.

or lack of patience. How many times have you seen somebody quit, pivot before the breakthrough? my gosh, this offer isn't selling, so I'm going to go do something else. So instead of doing the hard work of looking at it and saying, OK, do I need to refine my marketing messaging? Do I need to refine the pitch? Is there something broken in my sales conversation?

Or am I just being impatient and the market hasn't caught up to what I'm selling? We pivot. We pull the plug, we pivot, and we build something else. And I think a lot of times that happens because we're just bored. You know, you've got to remember, you've been working on this for maybe years, months before it even goes to market. And so by the time we even get it to market, we feel like all we've done is talked about this offer, talked about this program, talked about this product. And then we can't figure out why everybody's not jumping

up and down and saying yes instantly. And so we think, okay, that's not gonna work and we pivot. So we spend all this time creating new offers, creating new marketing, maybe even updating our website when really what we potentially could be doing is just avoiding, avoiding the sales process, avoiding the follow-up process, because we don't wanna bother somebody.

Jennifer Kok (04:02.374)

and just not giving it enough time for the market to catch up to where we are. Your audience is starting from zero, remember? But pivoting is also something that has to happen. And there are seasons of our business that if we stay the course and don't pivot, might be detrimental to our business.

So I remember back in 2008, the recession had happened where the housing market had burst.

and the layoffs were higher than ever. And we had done a really good job for the 10 years that I owned the cookie business of creating corporate business. These were reoccurring revenue, companies that would order from us on a regular basis to take care of their clients, to say thank you to people, to market themselves.

Well, of a sudden, that business started drying up because companies were laying off. The last thing they could do at that time was justify a goodwill expense such as a gift of cookies. Well, at the time,

Cupcake Wars was becoming a popular TV show on Food Network, and cupcakes were becoming really popular. And I'm not talking the chocolate and vanilla kind that you get at your grocery store. I'm talking about gourmet, unique flavors such as chocolate chip cookie dough and red velvet and all these decadent peanut butter, salted peanut butter cup and things like that.

Jennifer Kok (05:32.513)

So as I was watching our business slow down and start to dry up, I looked at my manager and I said, you know what? We have to do something. We have to pivot. Because if we stay the course and just keep doing what we're doing, we are going to be in trouble.

So we did, we started testing out recipes, we started building recipes, and we went to market with these recipes. Was it an instant success? No, it took time for the market to catch on, but I can tell you that the recession of 2008 was one of the best things that ever happened to my business. Because from there, we gained new customers, our sales improved, we ended up turning it into a franchise, we ended up adding another brand to our mix. So pivoting to add cupcakes.

was the right time and the right decision. It wasn't done, it was done out of desperation. Let me clarify that. Yes, it was done out of desperation, but it was done strategically and it was done paying attention to what was going on in the marketplace. Not just head down, bury your head in the sand, push through this recession and hope that everything's gonna be okay.

So there are some times when it's really legitimate for you to pivot. And let's talk about what some of those signs might be for your own business. The market has moved and you haven't. So industries evolve faster than most business owners update anything in their lives. Right now, we are moving at the fastest pace ever, especially with AI. And so if you're meeting consistent resistance where you used to find open doors, something has shifted. So if you're

product or service isn't getting the excitement it used to, it's time for you to evaluate has the industry moved forward and I haven't.

Jennifer Kok (07:28.352)

Another legitimate sign could be the model that you are building just can't scale anymore without sacrificing everything else. You know, I hear this a lot from women's service-based businesses who are trying to figure out how to scale without burning out.

You know, when your revenue is entirely tied to your personal hours or a one-on-one offer, you've built a demanding job. And so sometimes a pivot towards leveraging, maybe a group model or bringing in other people to help you can help you actually grow your business without sacrificing you as the owner. Another reason to pivot could be you've just found a more urgent problem to solve.

Sometimes a pivot doesn't mean something in your business is broken. It just means there's a new opportunity. You've identified a gap, a need, an underserved community, and you're uniquely positioned to fill it. It's not going to take a ton of extra capacity, expense, hours from you and your team. So you're not running away from failure. You're running towards something of purpose, something that can grow your business.

Or sometimes we just need to pivot as owners because our energy is flatlined. Now I want to be careful here because earlier I said don't do this, don't pivot just to avoid something because you don't like the sales process or because you're getting a few no's before you get that yes. But maybe you're just feeling like, oh, I just don't have the.

the enthusiasm anymore for this. You I sold my business after owning it for 20 years, and I knew the time was right. It was time for me to pivot out of my business because I was lacking the gusto and the excitement and the new creative ideas. It was time for someone else to take what I had built and take it to the next level. So you know, there's a gap between being reactive and strategic.

Jennifer Kok (09:26.048)

And it usually comes down to one word, and that is intention. know, reactive pivots happen because of fear or avoidance, mindset. Strategic pivots happen because the data is telling us we need to do something different.

So before you jump in and pivot everything, I really want you to take a pause. I want you to think, and I want you to step back and audit before you act. Get honest about what's really happening. Maybe bring in somebody from an outside consultant that can help you see what you can't see.

Don't use emotion. Don't be afraid of what's happening. Pull the data. Track the patterns. Where is revenue flowing in? Profit flowing in. Where is revenue flowing out? Profit flowing out. What is draining you? You can't navigate these kind of decisions based on just gut feeling. You need some data. So now is the time to pull that data.

And then, of course, get support. One of the most common mistakes I see of high-performing entrepreneurs is we try to make all these decisions in isolation. We feel that asking for help is a sign of weakness, or that we know it better than somebody else. We should have it all figured out. This is a crucial time to bring in advisors, peers, consultants, to really help you see what you're navigating and help you to analyze that data that's in front of you.

And then I think one thing we have to think about is pivot doesn't mean you have to blow the whole thing up and start over from scratch. Test it. You can go to market with something new without rebranding your whole entire website. Create a little pilot. Talk to an existing audience, your current customers. Beta test it with some trusted clients. But I'm going to caution you here. Give it enough time.

Jennifer Kok (11:18.23)

A week is not enough time to see if it's going to work. You're going to have to give it some time. So that's the next step, is define what success looks like and give it a deadline. We have to really say, OK, I'm going to stick to this for the next 90 days, the next 120 days, whatever it looks like for your industry and your market. And then what are the measurables to see if adding cupcakes to your brand

are the right answer. If adding a group program versus just one-on-one is the time for it. Create some metrics around it so once again you're not just leaning on your gut to help you propel forward. So recently I pivoted again and here's why. In my coaching business that I started six years ago, I've been working with service-based women. I help them

get more profitable clients, grow profitably, pay themselves consistently. But I was noticing a shift in the marketplace, and a lot of that is due to AI.

We are in a season now where we have more information at our fingertips. We have podcasts like this. We have blogs. We have AI that we can just talk to. But what I've noticed about tools like AI is it always tells you what you want to hear. And it also gives you more ideas that you can act on. And sometimes all that does is create more confusion, more overwhelm, more squirrel-like, what do I do next?

and

Jennifer Kok (12:48.564)

lack of knowing when to move forward. And so I created a group to help people make strategic decisions because I've been seeing it. I've been witnessing it with my own clients. We're just feeling stuck. We're in analysis paralysis. We're in decision fatigue. And so that is the Focus Growth Collective. It's a group for service-based women entrepreneurs. It's made to help you build a business that not only will be profitable, but also sustainable in your life.

is helping people build to last. Well, it's hard to do when all these ideas are thrown at you. So I bring in advisors that help you with financial clarity going forward, such as Cash Flow. I bring in advisors that help you with money mindset, advisors that help you with health and wellness so you don't burn out. And that is all because what I have seen in our world in the last year or so, not only has it been externally, all the news is negative, higher.

cost of goods, tariffs, our political climate, all those things are creating fear in a lot of entrepreneurs, but also just the sheer lack of information at our fingertips. So I knew that I had to pivot because people didn't need me anymore.

to help them come up with ideas, they need me to teach them discernment, to come alongside them, to look at it from a objective point of view and teach them how to use the numbers. So that's what I do. I teach my five-step framework on how to make the best decisions. So if you're sitting here listening to this episode today and you're feeling pulled in all sorts of directions and wondering, do I need to pivot or am I just avoiding something?

Is what I'm doing working? Do I just need to give it more time? You know, I'm going to ask you, are you pivoting towards something or away from something?

Jennifer Kok (14:44.024)

When you pivot towards something that's strategic, that's leadership, towards says, I see an opportunity and I understand the need and I have a plan or I'm going to create a plan. Away from it is reactive. Away is avoidance. Away says, I'm uncomfortable. This is hard. I want to feel different. I want to stay busy feeling like I'm going to build something.

even though I'm not getting the results. Both can look interesting from the outside, but only you know which one is driving the right decision.

So final thoughts here, you know, to stay relevant and innovative over the long term, pivoting isn't optional. It's inevitable. You cannot build a business and not continue to stay curious and not continue to grow. The leaders I respect aren't the ones who never change direction. They're the ones who change direction well. They move with intention. We don't pivot too soon. We don't wait too long. And that's why I call it the art of pivoting.

And that's why sometimes you just need to bring in seasoned entrepreneurs who can help you see what they have been through. Build something worth building takes time. And when the moment comes for you to shift, make sure you know exactly where you're headed. So I hope this helps you.

think about your pivoting and what's to come in your business. And I invite you to reach out and let's have a conversation about the decision that's sitting on your desk right now. And I'm happy to share my five-step framework to making a decision and just to talk through it with you. Thanks for listening. I encourage you to keep pivoting when it makes sense and when it's strategic.