Entrepreneurship: The Pivot

DK Episode 7 - July 17, 2019 - Duration: 13:57

Drawk Kwast explains the entrepreneur pivot and how to become unstoppable.

Video 2 of a 3 part series on Entrepreneurship:

Entrepreneurship Part 1: Getting Started
Entrepreneurship Part 2: The Pivot
Entrepreneurship Part 3: Endgame

Transcript

0:00:10.6 Drawk Kwast: The girl, the goalie, and the lemonade stand. I'm about to teach you what it means in the entrepreneurial world to pivot. Let's say you succeeded at asking out an amazing girl out on a date, she said yes. You confirmed a couple of days before, she texted you back, "Hey, it looks like you're in. This might actually happen." You pick her up successfully from her home, get her in your car seat and you are excited, 'cause she is hot. You're off on your date, and as you pull in to the destination, you realize that dinner is apparently off because the restaurant burnt down 45 minutes ago. Son of a bitch. The bad luck. So what do you do? Turn the car around, take her back home and drop her off? No, you pivot. The basic idea here, the girl is already out with you, everybody is all dressed up, everybody is ready to go, we just have this one problem that the destination isn't there, so you pivot.

0:01:41.9 DK: You quickly think on your feet. Well, given the current situation and what we're prepared for, what would be something that we could easily go do now, based off of where we are right now? So, if it was a fancy dinner, you're probably dressed up pretty decently. So, if you ask the magical Google, what things you can do around where you are at right now, it might tell you that there is a Sky lounge around the corner or something like that, a classy place where dressed as you are ready to go, you can kinda, "Yeah, over here." That's a pivot. Now, when I explain it like that, most people get it, because in their head, they're going, "God damn it, this girl is hot, I can't even believe she said yes, but she said yes, and then I picked her up and like, This is happening, this is happening, this is happening, I gotta do everything I can to make this work. Oh my God."

0:02:45.0 DK: There's this franticness about it, that causes you to not give up and not waste, basically, the work that you've already done. Tends to make sense to most people. Let's say that this boy's name is Ian, and Ian is living in Edmonton, Canada, and his favorite hockey team is obviously the Edmonton Oilers, and he's a goalie and he dreams of one day being in the NHL and playing for his favorite team, Edmonton, as a goaltender. One problem, right as he gets into this and officially learns how to do his sport and becomes valuable to his team, his father loses his job and they are forced to move. They leave Canada for a temporary residence in Texas. Ian is heartbroken, all of his dreams have been destroyed. Now, this story, people would maybe give Ian 50-50 odds for giving up. His dream got flushed. Well, if he gives up, he gives up all of the stuff that he's worked towards, things like improving his speed, improving his flexibility, improving his fearlessness, facing the opposing team. These are the things he's worked on very, very hard.

0:04:29.6 DK: And if his father's job change wipes all that out, there's nothing left of it. It's like he never did it. He did all this work and he got nothing out of it. That would suck. What my advice would be, to someone like Ian is, I'd say, okay, let's take evaluation of your super powers. You're a goaltender, it means you've got balance, if you know how to ice skate. You're pretty fearless if you were a goaltender because everyone's flying at you and you just stand there trying to get in their way. You're definitely a fighter, and you definitely have some flexibility, if you're a goaltender, you can move your feet all over the place, right? With the big pads on. So, you could then see in Texas, what can you do with that? So those same skills, what you worked to build, if you can't use what you worked to build on what it was intended for, is there a way to take what you worked for, those assets and move them into another realm where you have a head start, an advantage because you already have that?

0:05:40.7 DK: So, maybe it's time to change sports. You wanna be a goaltender? Have you tried goaltending for soccer? Or maybe because you're fearless and you're in shape and you're okay with contact sports, you could try something else, like Taekwondo. Goaltenders are gonna have very flexible strong legs, they would be able to learn Taekwondo at a rapid pace, because they've already got the strength and the flexibility ... and the fearlessness. That's another example of a pivot. In the second example, people are probably sitting on the fence as to which way he'd go. Third example: you're eight years old, and you get the bright idea: opening up a lemonade stand on the corner of your street where you live. You do it for a couple of days, you kind of figure out how it works and how many lemons you have to squeeze in to how much water and how much sugar you need to add to it. It takes you a while to get it right, you're only eight years old, but you figure it out.

0:07:02.1 DK: Three days into your business, all of a sudden there is a tragic lemon shortage across the planet for whatever reason. What do you do? Most people would say the kid gives up. Hell, most adults in that situation would give up. Here's what I'm telling you, if you've chosen to go into a business as an entrepreneur and you work at it, you really work at it like it's something you want. Like the hot girl in the first part of the story, when you hit a challenge, you don't stop. When you hit a roadblock, you don't stop. You hit a roadblock, that means you pause momentarily. You take and evaluate the entire situation. You then decide costs and benefits. You decide what resources you already have. You decide what resources might be able to be used somewhere else in a slightly different way to possibly make you money there, getting around the roadblock. This is what it means to pivot. I could be talking about pivoting as an entrepreneur. I could be talking about pivoting as far as picking up women. I could be talking about anything and apply the idea of the pivot, and it's as simple as this.

0:08:46.7 DK: You're gonna pick a direction. You may succeed, you may fail at your goal. But on the way there, you become stronger. You learn things. You learn about the psychology of the people you're working with, the psychology of your vendors, the psychology of your customers, the psychology of your employees. You're constantly learning. You're building up a tool chest, a war chest. And when you hit a wall, you figure out what the next thing is you could apply that tool chest to that would give you the biggest benefit. Okay, so practical example, something that might actually happen right now, and I know you got it. Let's say you're going into business to start a house cleaning service. You figure you're gonna put a decal on the outside of your car. It has "I clean houses" and the phone number. That might get you some business. You're gonna do some business cards, so you hand them out to people. And you're gonna put up a website. And because you have like no money, you're gonna do this all yourself.

0:10:05.8 DK: You have no idea of what you're getting into. You hop over to somewhere, like, maybe CafePress or The Printery, and you've got your printing done for you. Takes a little time, you don't really know what you're doing with the graphics program you used, so it took a couple of samples before you figured it out, but their support team was helpful and you finally got the product you needed out of the printers. As far as the website goes, you had no idea what you were doing, but you had heard of this thing called WordPress. It was annoying, you're not a computer person, but you figured out how to kludge a website together. Yeah, you might have called Fiverr a couple of times for some help here and there, but more or less, you've figured out how to get the website up. Okay? Now you go into the house cleaning business and you find out, Oh, wrong business. Not something you're into. Why? Well, you never thought about the fact that your mom and your dad were asthmatic, and it never occurred to you that you can't get into house cleaning, because you're allergic to dust. [chuckle]

0:11:21.5 DK: So, cleaning your own home for a few minutes here and there, no big deal. But spending eight hours a day cleaning other people's houses, you literally work yourself sick. What do you do? Give up? Well, you already figured out how to make business cards for yourself, maybe you just go into the program that you used to do it, and change the business cards slightly and get them reprinted. You're no longer a cleaning person, now you're a WordPress consultant. Oh, why? Because in the process of trying that last thing, you figured out how to build a WordPress website, and that's a skill. You can sell that skill as a separate business all of its own, you become a WordPress consultant. Or you take that site that's already done, that you spent all that time on, that it would be a shame to flush and you change the colors a little bit, you put a new company name on it, the rest of the site stays the same way that it was, and you now have your website for your next business.

0:12:37.5 DK: See, when you're an entrepreneur, you're gonna fail most of the time. People I know that are fucking brilliant entrepreneurs fail most of the time. I mean, like 90% of the time. If you look at it as failure, they're insane for not giving up. But they know something. They know that as they stick at it and make these investments in themselves, learning how to do different things, whether it's handling people or building a website, they're learning how to do more. And that means that the next thing that they do, whatever it is, they're gonna have a head-start on everybody else. That's what it means to pivot. You hit a wall, you stop just for a second. As you spin around, evaluate the resources, evaluate the opportunities, and pick the next best target with the skills and resources you already have. There's no failure, as long as there's no giving up.

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