How to pivot your small business online like an entrepreneur

In 2020, “pivoting” has been used as a mechanism for small businesses to not just survive during COVID-19 but to thrive. For some businesses, it meant turning pubs into local stores or distilleries into hand sanitizer producers. For A Team Tuition and SCOUTS New Zealand it meant moving their business models online.

Despite being very different businesses – A Team Tuition has been operating for eight years and SCOUTS New Zealand is a 110 year old legacy NFP – they both had to think like entrepreneurs  in order to innovate and pivot their business. Here they share practical tips and how they successfully adapted and innovated.

“One of the biggest fears we had was that the pandemic would shut down tutoring,” says Hayden McEvoy, Founder and CEO of A Team Tuition.

When it was announced schools were going to close, A Team Tuition started talking with the Australian Boarding School Association, who they’re the official tutoring body for, on a framework to get students and tutors across the country online and working from home.

“We had only four days to move 250 tutors and 2,000 students digital,” says Hayden. “Because we already had a system like Salesforce implemented we were able to look at the details of every student and tutor and scale very rapidly.”

This quick thinking not only catered to a need to keep students learning during lockdown, it accelerated the expansion of A Team Tuition. They are now operating out of 18 cities and connecting more closely with the schools that recommended them. At the start of the pandemic, A Team Tuition only had five percent of their 200 staff working online, now 100% of them are – and it’s proving to be a sustainable and successful pivot.

When your organisation has internal politics over money, resourcing and software, the ability to innovate is limited. If you want to learn how to shift old school organisational thinking to a growth entrepreneurial mindset, Josh Tabor, Chief Executive of SCOUTS New Zealand has some learnings.

“When you stop fighting about internal resources and start aligning around growth, it changes what is possible,” says Josh. “It did take a lot of energy to get to that place and be ready to implement a CRM system like  Salesforce, but it meant that when COVID-19 hit in March we were able to get serious about what our absolutes were to sustain the core of the organisation and act quickly.”

Like many not-for-profit organisations who have introduced new technology and processes, SCOUTS New Zealand has had to manage slow adaptation and change adverse boards.

“Screen time wasn’t initially seen as a way forward when the possibility of lockdown was announced. So we flipped the model and asked people to think differently around what our value proposition was for young people,” explains Josh. “In the pandemic that’s community, connection and consistency.”

With 5,000 volunteers to upskill, SCOUTS New Zealand worked with Salesforce to deliver training webinars to help their volunteers understand how to use the system and address any challenges.

“When you have builders and tradie volunteers who want to be out camping and showing kids how to tie knots, that change management and enablement piece is crucial to being able to pivot your business,” says Josh.

For Hayden, as a commercial business, being successful during this time is as much about giving back as it is keeping his business going.

“With Salesforce, we were able to see why people left the program. For 17 of the families it was because of financial hardship,” says Hayden. “We decided to reach out to them and offer to fund their tutoring for this term.”

Hayden’s new online business model has also allowed A Team Tuition to bring city tutors to country kids – a problem that until COVID-19 had never been solved.

“Thanks to the help of Zoom and Salesforce, we’re able to bring the same level of quality academic tutoring that city schools receive.”

If you’re a business that is doing well think about ways that you can give back. Service is a great way to lead and to help those who need it the most.

 

Want to learn more about pivoting and growing your business? Download our Small Business Growth Toolkit – it’s packed with tips from Trailblazers who have successfully grown their businesses.