Michael Jordan was a mediocre baseball player.  He was a fabulous basketball player, easily among the greatest of all time.  But baseball just wasn’t his game.  Many people have probably forgotten his one season in professional baseball and I imagine Michael would like to forget it as well.

Michael learned a hard lesson that year.  He learned that loving something does not guarentee you will be great at it.  For business owners, this realization is a “pivot moment.” It is the moment in which you adjust your business direction and go forward.

Many successful businesses have come from pivot moments.  Here are a list of just a few you many have heard of:

  • PayPal – It wasn’t always an online payment system.  It started out as a product created to “beam” sums of money between PDAs (the smartphones of the day).
  • YouTube – Was a video dating service before it became the largest video search engine and collection site on the web
  • Roundpeg – We were a team building and strategy firm before we found our niche in small business marketing

In each case, the companies realized they couldn’t play baseball, but had successful alternatives ahead of them.  What about your business?  As the year winds down, are you ready for a course correction or a pivot? What game will you play this spring?