Pivot like a Lehman Brother: A pivot can be a savvy growth tactic
Few businesses become insanely successful exactly as they first envisioned. There are so many facets involved in creating a successful brand – market shifts, customer needs, technology changes. If you can’t get traction or sales with your product or service, and you are doing everything right when it comes to marketing, that’s a pretty clear sign that you may need to pivot.
BRANDING BEFORE BREAKFAST EP 50 Pivot like a Lehman Brother: A pivot can be a savvy growth tactic
Hi everyone. Recently I saw an amazing play at London’s National Theatre called The Lehman Trilogy. It’s the first time I’ve seen a play about business and it was so fascinating. It’s about the story of the Lehman Brothers and how they became one of the most successful companies in the US. So Henry Lehman arrived in New York in 1844 from Bavaria, and he moved down to Montgomery, Alabama where he opened a general goods store. His two brothers soon joined him and they serviced the local community with general goods. But these guys were really smart and they were really successful at looking for opportunity and pivoting accordingly. So they recognised that there was a great opportunity in cotton at the time. So they became a distributor for cotton. Then they also tried their hand at coffee and then they started to actually loan money to local businesses to help them get off the ground. They also started to invest in infrastructure projects within the community. So they kind of shifted to becoming an investment bank and as their success grew, they continued to look for great opportunities. Eventually, they moved their Alabama office to New York City because that was the center of where everything was happening. And I don’t know if you realise but Lehman Brothers ended up being the fourth biggest bank in the world before it collapsed. It was 2006. So why am I telling you this story? Well, we can all learn from that the interesting learning here, is around pivoting. So when we launch our business we often think we’ve got the greatest product or service in the world, but sometimes things just don’t work. For some reason, we’re not selling. This is the time when you really need to look at what your key feature is and make sure that it’s the right thing for the market. Make sure that your customer actually wants what you’re offering. And if it’s not, don’t be scared to pivot. So take a look at YouTube. It’s now one of the most successful video streaming platforms in the world, but it didn’t begin that way. It actually started as a video dating service, where people would upload their videos about themselves and then the platform would suggest matches for them. So somewhere along the way YouTube recognised that actually the piece of gold was around the video streaming. So that made it a more generalised platform for education and video streaming. So don’t wait to pivot, don’t wait for a crisis. Find what that key feature is for your business that’s going to get traction and shift. Pivoting is not failure. It’s actually a savvy business tactic. That’s it for me. Time for breakfast.
Written by: Emma Scott
Published: July 10, 2020