How I Navigated My First Pivot In My Business
Happy New Year!
This past December, just 6 months after launching, I made the bold decision to make a pivot in my business.
Rewind: I launched Hype & Harvest in May 2023 as an eCommerce consultancy, providing advisory and fractional services for ambitious CPG brands ready to sell their first $1 million online. My services were grounded in my expertise from leading 9-figure businesses for Fortune 100 companies. I wanted to take what I learned at the top companies and bring that knowledge to women and BIPOC founded brands to help unlock latent potential within my clients' businesses.
I thoroughly enjoyed the work, and had a chance to collaborate with some pretty cool brands and even cooler women and BIPOC leaders who appreciated and valued my expertise on their business.
I also quickly recognized that my clients needed more than just a strategic plan.
Strategies - good ones, anyway - are living ideas that are nimble and responsive to the ever-changing business conditions around them. It's great to build a 12-month strategic plan, but if you don't know how to pivot and adjust to unexpected market changes, it's not going to do you much good.
Just ask every CEO who managed a business in March 2020.
I wanted a solution that delivered a strategic plan for my clients and also empowered them with business and leadership skills to lead, execute, and innovate the strategy along the way.
"Give a woman a fish and she'll eat for a day; teach her to fish, and she'll eat for a lifetime - and feed her tribe, too." - Me.
With this awareness, I gave myself permission to begin again and design something new. I reflected on my own career story, and the events and knowledge that transformed me into a strategic leader and ultimately the head of eCommerce & DTC for one of the largest CPG companies in the world. I thought about all of my knowledge of navigating the cultures and politics of large companies, and how I could dust that wisdom off the shelf and integrate it into the value that I create for my clients.
I also signed up for training classes to discover what it means to be a coach. I learned instructional design and how to develop frameworks that could help my clients learn the necessary profit, people, and purpose skills to be a strategic leader at their startup or within a multi-national company - like the ones I worked at for my entire corporate career.
In December, I made the pivot. Hype & Harvest would now exist to transform founders and managers into whole-hearted, strategic executives who prioritize both people and profits.
I am excited for this next chapter in my journey and to share with you more of my expertise as both a P&L owner and a people leader. In every newsletter, I'll send you one impactful action you can take to be a better executive, delivered to your inbox on Wednesday.
This week's action - give yourself permission to begin again in 3 simple steps:
Become aware. What is one thing not working in your business today?
Create vision. What would be different if this thing was working optimally? How would your life improve?
Identify first action. What is the first action you would need to take to begin the shift? (You don't have to take the action, just identify it.)