COLUMBUS, Ohio —Every entrepreneur knows about pivots.
If your business fails, it needs to fail fast and then pivot in a new direction. But is the P-word the right term for this critical shift? Does pivot truly describe the dramatic move so many startups must execute to succeed?
Those questions surfaced during a session at Columbus Startup Week on Wednesday.
Brian Zuercher, the CEO of SEEN Digital Media, said the word pivot misses the mark in many ways. To illustrate his point, the former collegiate lacrosse player made an analogy to sports.
In basketball, Zuercher said, a player pivots by keeping one foot on the floor while moving the other one. But most early-stage startups can’t afford to do the same when they shift the focus of their businesses; they must jump into the new area with both feet. “There is a fundamental redefinition of what the problem is,” Zuercher said.
Indeed, Zuercher went all in when he shifted SEEN from a consumer travel company to a marketing platform that uses visual channels like Instagram. “We may have traveled in the basketball word,” he said with a laugh.
Pam Springer also pulled off some similar fancy footwork in 2006.
That year, while running the Columbus e-commerce company ECNext, she decided to abandon the company’s legacy business to focus on a new area—creating free online profiles for small businesses. It was a risky move. She was phasing out about $3 million in annual revenue. But the new business—called Manta—offered more opportunity for growth.
“We were all looking at each other in the boardroom: ‘If we are going to commit to this Manta thing, we have to pull the plug and put our precious few resources on our future,” Springer recalled. “And so we did.”
Two years later, Manta become profitable, and is now an online resources dedicated to small businesses. “It became clear that we can’t be in two businesses,” said Springer, who left Manta in 2013. “It’s really hard to be great at one, let alone two.”
