22: Pivot or Pause? Diversifying Your Revenue

Today, I’m going to be giving you some examples of small shifts you can make, share some ideas with you, plus give you some examples of a couple people who I think have done some really smart pivots, because a lot of us have been impacted with Covid-19 and the current crisis with borders closed and a lot of uncertainty happening.

Here are my recommendations

1. Mind your North Star 
   Keep in mind your vision, your business model, and your general business goals. It doesn’t make sense because of something that’s affecting us all temporarily, to now completely change your entire business model. 
2.  Don’t make decisions in fear or panic
   Even if you are feeling that fear or that panic, try to take some time to process these emotions. It’s really difficult to make smart business decisions that will impact you positively when you’re making a decision from a place of fear.
3. Retention
   The easiest way of getting more clients and getting more income is through retention. It’s going back to your past clients and seeing if there’s anything else you can do to help them further.
4. Social listening
   Survey your audience and past clients. You are looking at what are people saying and what are they looking for. With social listening, the goal is getting really aware of what do your people want.
5. Repackaging with a specific outcome 
   Basically, it’s looking at your services and seeing can I change something up to have a really clear specific outcome aligned with what my people are currently looking for. A way around discounting your services is to repackage what you do into something at a lower price point, still aligned with your prices in general.
6. Referral partnerships. 
   This is an amazing way to get more clients and to automate your marketing. I think that’s a really underrepresented way that doesn’t get talked about too much. So, I strongly recommend exploring affiliates or full partnerships in this time as well.

 “Don’t make decisions in fear or panic. It’s difficult to make smart business decisions that will impact you positively when you’re making that decision from a place of fear. “

– Maggie Giele

I would like to introduce you to some people, who I think have done an amazing job at slight pivots in diversifying the revenue, as their core business has been heavily impacted. I wanted to give you these as some inspiration, so go check them out and take some inspiration from what they’re doing as well.

• Sarah Shuttle A luxury brand designer for the wedding industry, which has obviously been very heavily impacted. What she’s done is she’s created a brand boutique where she is selling one-off branding.
• Amanda Mouttaki is another one of my amazing clients. She is known as Maroc mama, she runs Food Tours of Morocco. Now again, the travel industry is very heavily impacted. She has done an amazing job with changing her or pivoting her focus on her Instagram. She’s now doing a lot of cooking videos and staying at home with your kids, so she’s still getting traffic to her website and having affiliate income. She’s also focusing on the people who are now staying home and who are still following her, who are still dreaming of visiting Morocco or who have a very great interest in food, and she’s got some amazing food recipes and tutorials as well.
• Monica Delgado. If you are into MMA or Brazilian jiu-jitsu, the name of her partner might be familiar-Ricardo Almeida. They run Jiu-Jitsu academies in New Jersey. They have pivoted so smartly-within 48 hours of the announcement in New Jersey that gyms would have to close their doors, they created an entire online platform for all their members: they have pre-recorded workouts that are now on the website, they host live classes on Zoom for their for their members and they’ve done challenges in their Facebook groups.
• Jennifer Lachs runs Digital Nomad Girls. She’s a good friend of mine and former client and her core product actually solves the current problem that a lot of people are having. She runs a very big Facebook group called Digital Nomad girls that has an amazing Instagram, but her core product is called the Inner Circle, which is a membership platform for Digital Nomad Girls to connect. The whole thing is, how do you solve loneliness as a Digital Nomad? So, she started doing a lot more virtual co-workings and virtual mixers to a bigger audience, that wasn’t so part of this membership to show here’s how this can help you. And that’s was a way she’s been pivoting her messaging marketing, which I thought was a really smart, very genuine way to still provide something for free but still showcase her core product. 
• My friend Mollie Pittman is the CEO of Smart marketer and together with her co-owners Ezra Firestone and John Grimshaw, they made a really smart pivot. They had a planned launch for a higher ticket offer. And then when the crisis hit, they ended up changing the launch into a six-week coaching package called Compass Coaching, where they helped all these entrepreneurs that are in their audience to pivot, including Facebook ads and everything in this new environment, which I think was such a smart and still sensitive move.

I hope this has given you some ideas and inspiration on how you can diversify or pivot right now. I am a very big fan of diversifying into micro launches and you will hear about that in a future episode. My own pivot was a little slight. I launched the CEO Quest, which is a 21-day audio experience with journaling prompts to move you from overwhelm to more revenue, visibility, and growth through two minutes of micro action a day. 

Love + Magic,

Maggie