To Evolve, Don't Stay In Your Lane
To Evolve, Don't Stay In Your Lane
What Startups Can Learn About Evolution From A Global Shutdown
It has been hard to watch a lot of businesses in the restaurant, bar, gym, and retail industries crumble because they cannot keep their physical storefronts open.
On the flip side, it has been fantastic to see said businesses get creative about how to keep cash flow going despite the circumstances.
I’ve seen bars roll out a line of to-go cocktail products within a matter of days, gyms do fun at-home classes for their members, and restaurants run crowdfunding campaigns to support their employees financially in exchange for future meal credits.
Hardships are what pushes businesses to innovate and fortify their revenue models. Survival instincts kick in and we start getting pushed to think outside the box.
If you find yourself during this time of uprooting with curiosity for how to evolve your business, here are some tips.
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Passive Income Streams
When I say passive income streams, I’m talking about something as easy as posting a blog or sending out a few emails and making money off of it. No intense marketing and sales funnels involved.
Do you post a weekly blog on your website for your business? If so, why not repost that blog post on a platform like Medium where you can make money off of blog post reads? I make a few hundred bucks of passive income every month by just reposting what I’m already writing for my business’ blog and throwing it up on Medium. ⠀
If your business doesn’t have a blog, why not post on Medium as yourself? If you’re a business owner, you likely have helpful content to share for others in your industry or for the startup industry at large.
If you’ve never sent out a series of sales emails to your email list to sell a product of yours, test it out. There are a lot of businesses that are sitting on a lot of great digital products, but they don’t continuously promote these products (aka evergreen-ing the product), resulting in 0 recurring monthly sales from it.
Create a series of emails selling your digital product and test it out. If it works and results with some sales, turn that into an automated email drip and evergreen it so that your emails can sell your products for you at all hours of the day. You will literally make money while you sleep.
Medium Extension
There are a lot of industries right now that are suffering because their revenue solely relied on physical presence.
It is a great time to experiment with different mediums and revenue streams if your business’ physical locations are shut down.
If you thought outside the traditions of your industry and merged it with another industry, what kind of additional mediums would your business be able to sell on?
If you think creatively enough, the opportunity is there. For example, every business that has something to sell also has something to teach. What if you were to merge your business with the education industry?
If you’re a restaurant, can you sell seats for a digital cooking class so that your customers can cook your favorite dishes at home?
If you’re a coworking space, can you have some of your members teach classes with proceeds going to support the space during this off-season? ⠀⠀
We're not living in a world anymore where a restaurant should only sell in-person meals or a gym should only sell in-person classes. We’re living in a world now that warrants more imagination.
If you truly want to walk away from this pandemic with a tip on how to evolve your business, you should take the task of medium extension and revenue diversification pretty seriously.
The only way to truly protect your business is by diversifying your revenue streams so aggressively that one external event can’t take it down again.
Businesses are being called to evolve and innovate. You can evolve too by choosing to not stay in your lane — break out of your mold and get creative.
Need to revisit your business plan? Grab my free Business Plan Outline to help you map it all out.