The Main Reason You Shouldn’t Pivot Your Floral Business

How can you evolve your small business while staying true to you? I’ve been hearing a lot about “pivoting” during this season for small business owners. While that could be wise for some, I’m one who tends to make “unreasonable” choices in life. I started in horticulture thinking I was going to be some kind of nouveau Victorian explorer eternally misting orchids in the conservatory at Denver Botanic Gardens. I lasted one season there.

So then I took up work at a flower shop for a year. We were connected to a mortuary. They brought the bodies into the same garage where we had our wholesale flowers delivered. It was endless production and very little room for creative control. And, needless to say, the environment was a bit bleak. I switched gears and decided to go back to school for a second degree in Fine Art. I did a lot of shows, but none of them progressed beyond the borders of public spaces in Salt Lake City. So I sold everything in my studio to a fellow artist and picked up floral design. (That was quite a pivot!)

Somewhere in the midst of all that, I discovered a secret talent: I am incredibly gifted at business. Who knew.

I spent ten years working for a variety of small local businesses to pay the bills so I could then spend my weekends in the studio, making paintings, sculptures, and performance art pieces. I’d start out by luring the client in with my visual skills. They thought they were just getting a nice logo or a pretty website. Some would stop there. Others quickly realized I had some good ideas about branding, messaging, and evolving as a business.

In 2008, a number of my friends lost their businesses, their jobs, their homes. It was a devastating time. I also lost my job at that time. I remember spending an entire day with my face permanently attached to the couch cushion watching, but not watching, heartwarming movies with strong female leads because my vision was obscured by my white-hot fear of destitution.

The next morning (or probably several days later, I can’t remember), I got up, washed the junk food off my face, and sent several emails to a handful of folks I’d been freelancing for. I wasn’t selling logos or a pretty website anymore. I was speaking plainly and telling small-business owners what was important for them to hear when the whole economy was crumbling, which was this: You as an individual can survive this, so let’s get to the bottom of how to stay true to why you started this business in the first place and make decisions about how to move forward from there.

Within a few weeks, I had enough freelance work to keep me in house and home. And I understood what made me unique. I know small business at its core.

While I have seen a lot of messaging lately about how to pivot, honestly, the term makes me a little queasy—though really, it is a matter of definition. You often see it in bombastic business articles right along with terms like “scalable” and “market research.”

The truth is, most small businesses are not a multi-million-dollar startups in silicon valley. Very few of us went to business school. Many of us can’t even get a business loan. We’re bootstrapping this thing out of financial scraps, endless cups of coffee, and sheer willpower. We might low-key borrow money from parents or grandparents or our partners or our retirement account to keep it moving forward. Most of us never get rich; we just get by. But those of us who do get by understand what keeps us moving forward when our friends with corporate jobs are lightyears ahead of us in vacations and home improvements: It’s that feeling of creative freedom.

Creative freedom has kept me picking up and setting down random adventures my entire life. Creative freedom that once had me collecting fingerprints and embroidering images of them into a Vietnam-era parachute for two straight hours. Creative freedom that allowed me to help plant oversized waterlilies that just yesterday had been living in the jungle. Creative freedom that helped get me off the couch when all seemed lost and come up with another brilliant way to survive and to keep moving forward.

There are a lot of things I could say in a practical sense about what it means to evolve rather than pivot as a business. But that’s for another article. Or a series of articles.

So for this moment, I want to say this: Don’t pivot if pivoting means switching out of a truly authentic business model into something that isn’t you at all.

Don’t pivot just because somebody told you that’s the way to survive right now.

Don’t pivot at all if it means you get so caught up in throwing ideas into the air and seeing what lands that you forget why you started your business in the first place.

Through the latest shenanigans of this planet and this utterly schizophrenic economy, I have seen local businesses close up all but one location to focus on efforts to support and bolster other local businesses. Their core values have always been altruistic. I have seen local businesses dip into savings to stay open so they can keep their staff paid long before any funding was available. Their core values have always been in treating their team like family. I have seen other businesses close their books to events for the next two years to focus on interactive online courses. Their core values have always been in generously and lovingly sharing knowledge.

I truly believe none of these moves that I have observed came out of any outside inspiration other than deep within the heart and soul of the owner. And I believe when all this has ended, and the dust has settled, the individual and collective human beings behind these businesses will come to what they needed out of their business in the first place, which isn’t money, it’s meaning.

Small business is a marathon, not a race. Small business is a philosophy, not a bottom line. Small business is personal.

So what I would suggest is this. Turn off the social media, the news, your cell phone, the online meetings, the articles (even this one), your brain (if you can), and get quiet and try to remember what’s really important to you.

Remember the feeling you are chasing. Be honest with yourself about whether or not you have genuinely found that feeling in the course of this business. Recognize that even closing is not a failure, even closing is evolving if it brings you as an individual closer to what you value in life.

And from there, you will know what to do.