If you’re even a tiny bit uneasy about where your small business is heading, you’re not alone – and you’re in the right place.
I’m Kay Peacey from Slick Business, and after four years running a super-niched business I’ve taken the leap to make a big pivot (and survived!).
This post is for you as a small business owner or marketer, feeling the need to change as the world (and you – and your customers!) shifts direction, needs and wants.
We’ll break down why business pivots matter, why you need to listen to your gut and your audience, and how to make the changes without chaos, fear and panic.
These are the Five Big Pivot Tips I wish I’d had at the start – each tested in real life and explained with real stories from our own business shift.
Let’s get you confident and ready, so you can adapt with the times to pivot your business safely.
Follow these steps to pivot your business with confidence
Watch Kay Peacey on how to pivot your business – BTS of our 2026 pivot (15 mins)
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Understand why you may need to pivot your business (and why it’s so hard)
Lots of businesses fail because they keep doing what worked before, long after it stopped working.
But change is everywhere, always – and we need to pay attention to it and respond as a business. Otherwise we fail ourselves, and our customers.
In the area of the market we serve (providing education for small business email marketersand automation pros) there’s new tech, new pricing, new customer needs, and an AI tidal wave to contend with.
Ignoring the shift in the market would leave our business high and dry – but crikey it’s hard to move things in a new direction.
From the first noticing things aren’t working so well, through getting solid information, making decisions, then editing pretty much everything your business does, change is tough.
So I’m here to help you when you need to pivot – because we’ve lived it as a business, and we’re here to tell the tale!
Learn more about our Slick Business Academy
Fast effective Email & Automation training & support from Kay Peacey
Understand the Slick Business pivot – from super-niched to serving more of our audience
Slick Business started life helping small businesses get more value from email tech – and we specialised heavily into supporting ActiveCampaign users. With the world’s leading ActiveCampaign consultant and teacher Kay Peacey at the helm, this made total sense.
But over time, the audience that followed Slick Business started to include users on a whole range of tech platforms… following for the educational content on email marketing strategy, business growth, and working with tech tools.
By 2026 a quarter of the Slick Business audience were using other email & automation platforms – not just ActiveCampaign.
MailerLite, HighLevel, Kit, Klaviyo, FloDesk, MailChimp, Keap… oh, and GroundHogg, FluentCRM and some others too.
So from January 2026, Slick Business made a pivot to serve users on all those platforms. They followed the market shift, and the demand of their audience and followers for platform-agnostic help to get more value from email & automation tech tools, for strategic business growth.
This blog tells the part of the story that leads up to the pivot, and follows Slick Business through the major changes made when the pivot was announced.
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Business Pivot Tip 1 – Watch the market and trust your instincts
Start by watching the world around you….
Before you pivot, take stock of what’s happening.
Notice the new players, changing tools, and evolving customer trends. Are events in your industry starting to feel different?
Are your ideal customers asking about services, platforms, integrations, or tools that you don’t specialise in?
- Spot new trends
Be aware of tech, tools, and customer preferences shifting - Trust your knowledge
If you’re thinking “hmm, something’s different here,” don’t ignore it
Three things to watch for when considering a business pivot
Discomfort in your audience
People feeling restless or looking elsewhere
New platforms or tech tools
Something new popping up regularly in your niche
Customer questions changing
People asking for things you don’t currently offer
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Business Pivot Tip 2 – Ask trusted advisors and reflect carefully
You can mess up a pivot by leaping into change too soon, when that change might not stick around.
But you can also mess up by waiting so long you miss your chance.
The trick is to listen and reflect. Stay curious and thoughtful, and ask the people you trust what they’re seeing and thinking.
Two business pivot pitfalls to avoid
- Jumping on every new thing
Being too hasty can land you in a dead end – just ask the people who went for BetaMax video - Refusing to budge
Being too stubborn means missing the moment, and if you leave it too long when revenue is falling, trouble can come fast and be unrecoverable
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Business Pivot Tip 3 – Ask your customers (and prospects) what they want
Don’t rely on just what you think people want. Human’s are notoriously bad for confirmation bias – aka interpreting what you see in a way that supports what you already think you know.
But you don’t know for real until you collect some data.
Slick Business ran a survey and discovered a huge chunk of our people wanted services we weren’t offering before our pivot.
Game changer! Having concrete information on what the people who already know, like and trust you actually want is GOLD for making better decisions about pivoting your business
How to get answers
- Survey your audience
Find out what they really want – and what they are willing to pay for. Spoiler – these are not always the same thing! - Ask open questions
Leave space for people to share what they really want in their own words – this content is marketing treasure - Spot the overlap
Look for the sweet spot between their needs and what you do well – taking time to analyse and reflect on the survey answers is super-important
Inside the Slick Business Academy, we can walk you step by step how to do a good survey of your audience, from the questions to ask, to the tech you use to collect responses (and how to get people to respond!) all the way to analysis and decisions.
We used ActiveCampaign to send emails asking our audience to respond, Fillout Forms to create the survey (love love love this tech!) and AirTable to analyse the results.
Learn more about our Slick Business Academy
Fast effective Email & Automation training & support from Kay Peacey
Business Pivot Tip 4 – Communicate changes
Once you’ve decided to pivot, don’t spring it on your people out of nowhere.
Bringing them along for the ride is super important – if they’re not comfortable and willing to pivot with you, that makes the risk of changing things really a lot bigger!
For the Slick Business pivot, we planned 6 weeks of content to go out before making the announcement that things were changing. This prepared the ground, and made sure everyone was ready to hear the news, and get excited about it with us.
Tips for smooth change
- Get ahead on change
Think of it like the foreshadowing you see in a movie, when the music shifts tone, and you know something’s coming over that hill. In real life, people aren’t fond of being shocked or surprised, especially when they’re paying money for services. - Respect current customers
Go out of your way to communicate first with existing customers, especially if there will be any change to their services. Make sure there’s space for them to ask questions. - Keep talking
Repeat your new message in emails, posts, calls – people need to hear it more than once - Keep messaging simple, and fun
Complicated or dense messaging will make it harder for your audience – keep it short!
We focussed on two main messaging points:
- ActiveCampaign Academy will be renamed to Slick Business Academy
- Opening the doors to users of all email platforms, not just ActiveCampaign
And the best asset we used was a super-simple gif made using felt tip pens, coloured paper and Canva:
Check out our blog on using gifs here – it’s a brilliant way to catch attention in emails and on socials
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Business Pivot Tip 5 – Share the load by delegating and involving supporters
Making the changes needed to pivot a business is best approached as a team sport.
The biggest thing you can do to make this easier is to keep really good records of assets in your business – like a sort of catalogue of your world. That way, you can carve out bits and ask someone to get that job done.
Editing the name of our academy across all our website pages would have been a horrible time consuming job – except it wasn’t because we have a database that lists every page, with quick links to get to the edit screen, and a record of when updates were last made. Phew!
Document everything
List your assets so you know what needs updating
Ask for help
Partners, team, and your network make the work lighter – they can help share news, send you support, and even get jobs done
Learn more about our Slick Business Academy
Fast effective Email & Automation training & support from Kay Peacey
FAQs as you prepare to pivot your business
How risky is it to pivot my business?
- Change is risky – but may be necessary
But staying stuck doing things that aren’t working is not so much a risk as a definite fail – sometimes you do need to take the risk - Clear customer feedback helps to mitigate risk
Listening to your audience and customer base makes your next steps much safer – don’t skip this step
How do I know when it’s time to pivot my business?
- Watch for changes in the industry
New platforms, shifting prices, and big trends like AI are strong signals - Listen to your customer discomfort
If you’re getting new questions or requests, don’t ignore them – notice the changes and be ready to respond
Won’t changing my messaging wreck years of strong branding?
- Yes, pivoting does mean lots of work – but it’s more tweaking than wrecking
Ironically, the better your old messaging, the more you need to update – but it’s worth it to stay relevant - Document every business asset to make change easier to manage
Catalogue your web pages, assets, partners, so you can update methodically
What if I get the messaging wrong as we pivot the business?
- Expect tweaks
Stay open to feedback from your audience, peers and community, and adjust as you go.
Learn more about our Slick Business Academy
Fast effective Email & Automation training & support from Kay Peacey
Get more help to safely pivot your small business
In the Slick Business Academy we can show you behind the scenes of all the steps we took and lessons we learned from pivoting our own business – and we’ll support you every step of the way to grow your business safely and strategically.
So come on in to the Academy, and you’ll have Kay Peacey and the Slick Business team, and all your lovely fellow members, to guide you every step of the way to fabulousness with ActiveCampaign.
Learn more about our Slick Business Academy
Fast effective Email & Automation training & support from Kay Peacey