A time to pivot
Most of us sit in our bubble, working away, doing the same thing every day because it works. We push the needle forward ever so slightly year over year and it looks like progress. We make minor adjustments to our days, our products, our approach. That’s fine if it makes you happy, and you’ve never been hit in the face by global economic changes.
About 8 years ago I was running my little agency just like that. Micro adjustments, make a little more money than last year and called it good. Then 2009 hit me in the face. We went from doing well, to making barely enough money to cover office rent, let alone paychecks.
So we had to pivot. And I never stopped. This isn’t about my 2009 changes. This is about my constant drive to look for new ways of doing things. See, we are a digital agency with a focus on the web, and the web is always changing. But the business around us was not. We would look for the same kinds of clients, write the same proposals, win the same kinds of contracts, and try to improve year over year. I realized this last year that we had fallen into a different rut.
In December 2019, I was at a small 30 person workshop with Blair Eins. You may know his books, Win Without Pitching, and Pricing Creativity. It was in a side conversation that he and I had, where we talked about the constraints we place on our approach, And what if we could look at it with different constraints. We landed on a new question: What if the output isn’t the deliverable, but the results instead? I immediately pivoted to selling results-based work. We bill for a job description and output of results. It doesn’t matter what technical aspect of the code, the design, the approach that goes into the work, its output. Similar to a general manager of a professional sports team, the ingredients don’t matter, as long as the output has the desired results. In the movie Moneyball, the focus of the GM was all on the parts, the stats of the players individually. Maybe, just maybe the right combo of the team would give the right output. And this is true for us too. The right people, the right balance of tools and tech, with the right outputs.
When you only sell the outputs, the ingredients start to matter less. I can plug and play different options to get the ideal results. The project scope isn’t breached because the scope was written on a job description with outputs. While this is new, the pivot here has been monumental. Probably the biggest shift in my business and one not really embraced by a traditionally time and materials based industry.
Maybe you can make a pivot too? OpenDoor is a crazy way to sell a house, one that was completely counter-intuitive to the real estate industry. These stories are common, Carvana, Netflix, Turo, etc. These are all ideas that had never been heard of and if they were tried, it wasn’t done right the first time.
Try something new. The world is already a bit crazy, what can go wrong?
