Episode 27: Strategic Decision-Making: Knowing When to Pivot
How do you know if you need to pivot and change your strategy? What are the questions you need to ask to make sure you’re not cutting bait too early and missing the motherlode? This week’s episode of the Babies & Business Podcast explores this topic deeply with some real-life examples. Rachel and Avram share three critical questions you need to ask before changing up your strategy – whether that’s your marketing strategy, or how you handle the scheduling for your busy family – this is a must listen to and something every entrepreneurial parent can relate to.
This is the beginning of a 3-part series on Strategic Planning, kicking off with an examination of the performance of the Babies & Business Podcast in its first 26 episodes; followed by the next two episodes where we re-work in real-time, the strategic plan to grow the podcast in 2024.
Show Notes
[04:54] The evolution of the B&B Podcast in the first 26 episodes
[07:03] Your goal… or somebody else’s?
[10:17] 3 clarifying questions you need to ask before changing your strategy
[13:11] Evaluating the promotional strategy for B&B Podcast
[17:27] Real-life example of how Rachel adjusted the household budgeting strategy over time using this method
[21:06] A sneak peek of the next episode in this series about Strategic Planning
Mentions & Resources
Every Dollar – Dave Ramsey Budgeting App
Good Budget – Our Preferred Budgeting App
Episodes in this Series:
Who’s to Blame? A 6-Pound Situation Gone Sideways – B&B Podcast Episode 17
Strategic Decision-Making: Knowing When to Pivot – B&B Podcast Episode 27
How to Turn Goals into a Strategic Plan: An Inside Look – B&B Podcast Episode 28
The 5 Pillars to Support Your Strategic Plan – B&B Podcast Episode 30
Turning Your Strategic Plan into Actionable Steps – B&B Podcast Episode 31
Turning Your Strategic Plan into Actionable Steps – How to Capture Every Detail with Simple Project Management – B&B Podcast Episode 32
Episode Transcription
Below you will find a transcript of this entire podcast episode. Enjoy!
Rachel Gonzales: Yes.
Avram Gonzales: Rachel’s come along for this ride in a big way. When we first got together, it was like all board games, all strategy all the time.
You’re a little overwhelmed.
Rachel Gonzales: Oh, my gosh. Uh, To say that you’re intense. Is saying lightly. When it comes to board games. So I was definitely intimidated. But also, I think some of it was, um, I think it was. There, there was a lot of energy around board games. So strategy in general. But then also, uh, just a lot of what I grew up with. There’s a lot of baggage played into how I reacted to.
Avram Gonzales: That’s true. Eventually she came around, she likes playing a game now. And more importantly, when it comes to business, uh, we both have a mind for putting the right pieces together in the right order at the right time. And we love the puzzle that is trying to get something to be as efficient as possible or as fast as possible or whatever the outcome is that we’re looking for. We enjoy it, figuring out that path. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs have that in common. Today’s episode is all about knowing when is the right time to change your strategy. Because if you’re like most entrepreneurs, you have great ideas. You have a lot of ideas. And the urge to just charge forward and execute on them. Is very high.
And at the end of the day, we only have so much time and resources to execute on our goals, that if we don’t pick the right strategy, We will be wasting a lot of time and effort.
Rachel Gonzales: Well, and I think that, um, when it comes to you and me and our partnership, I think that, uh, and partnership being marriage and business and all those things that we really can, um, Help to bring some balance to each other. Maybe balance, isn’t the right word, but you know, my strengths, your strengths, we can come together and talk about some ideas and all these different things. And then we can, um, help each other just have different and better and new perspectives sometimes that are really, really helpful. In these kinds of situations,
Avram Gonzales: we often think of strategy in terms of business, but this totally applies to household.
We’ll have a great example for you here towards the end of the podcast today. What we want to do is we want to give you a real life example, live, in how we are looking to change up one of the strategies that we’re executing on. We’re going to look at how that matches up or doesn’t match up with our goals.
We’re also g oing to evaluate what we’re currently doing to see if you know, is that enough or are we just missing one small piece or do we have to scrap it and throw the whole thing away? That is what we’re examining and getting into today. Is really showing you and demonstrating for you real time. Some of the important questions you have to ask yourself to figure out, am I on the right path? Do I just need to tweak things a little bit or do I need to start over from scratch?
Sure. And knowing that it’s the right time is super important because you don’t want to cut. You don’t want to cut your strategy short when you’re on the winning path, but you just haven’t realized the result yet.
Rachel Gonzales: Right. And I think that, that goes back to something that I heard about, you know, Um, I was learning how to market my business.
I was seamstress at the time. And, um, the person that was teaching was saying, you know, you don’t want to change something about your business if it’s just from one customer’s feedback. And because so many of the things that you’re doing are working and even probably the thing that they’re complaining about is working.
It just wasn’t working for them. Uh, and that doesn’t mean that it’s not working as a whole in your business, but, uh, just having, so today we’re really going to talk about having that clarity about where you want to go, where you are and how to get there. And then more to come, you know?
Avram Gonzales: So the inspiration for this episode. Is the podcast itself, Babies and Business.
Okay. So in diving into this today, we want to be transparent and open and share some of our goals when we started the podcast and the purpose today is we’ve wanted to grow the podcast. We started the podcast for fun because we saw so much. The overlap between, you know, raising a family and building a business.
Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.
Avram Gonzales: And then it became, well, this is a great way to build our personal brands and share a part of ourselves with people, make a difference, make an impact. And then it’s like, well, I mean, we sure like to grow and reach more people.
Rachel Gonzales: Sure.
Avram Gonzales: And that’s where we’ve arrived today is we have published 26.
I believe this is the 27th episode. And we’re happy with what we’ve done so far. But we definitely feel like. There’s a lot better and maybe other ways of reaching more people think that’s a good summary.
Rachel Gonzales: I think so, uh, you know, I just love how, what has, uh, all over the 26 episodes that we’ve publish that. It went from this being the goal to a total different thing being the goal, but it took running it a couple of times to see, I mean, a couple 26 is not just a couple, but running it for some time so that we could. One have the experience to see the reception, the receptiveness of people about the topics, things like that, you know? You got to try something to see if it’s working, but also if it’s still feeding your soul, I think that’s part of the questions that we’re asking too.
Avram Gonzales: It really is. So the, if you know, the reason that we’re doing the podcast is that there’s something more to be desired.
Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.
Avram Gonzales: So the first step, I think in understanding and figuring out if it’s time to change, the strategy is reviewing your goals. I know that you’ve got some thoughts about this. We had some conversations about goals lately and the podcast. I mean, we even brought this up in recent episodes
Rachel Gonzales: for sure.
Avram Gonzales: Um, how do you know it’s the right goal?
Rachel Gonzales: Well, I think we just have, you have to ask some questions, like, is this my goal?
If, if things aren’t working. Are these the right bulls? I think you’re looking at a couple of different things. Like.
Is it your goal? Because if it’s not getting done, maybe it’s just not your goal. You’re not passionate about it.
Avram Gonzales: I mean, it’s not your goal.
Rachel Gonzales: Well, maybe, maybe it was given to you. It’s a belief that you don’t actually align with that you’ve been given. So, and I’m not specifically talking about the podcast in that example,
Avram Gonzales: right?
Rachel Gonzales: But. Uh, in goals when we’d create these goals, any goal?
I think we really just have to. Ask ourselves, is this our goal, but then also. Is this a goal that I actually want?
Avram Gonzales: Is it truly important to me?
Rachel Gonzales: Yeah, so.
If it’s not getting done, like when you’re evaluate, when you’re in the evaluation stage, you know, thinking. Is this the right goal? You’re really asking, is this working. Um, is this what I want? Is this getting me where I want to go is where I thought I wanted to go, where I want to go.
Avram Gonzales: Right. 26 episodes in, is it still feeding the soul?
Right. These are all important questions.
Rachel Gonzales: Yeah. So, you know, asking those questions and then those answers the answer to that question leads you to other things. And it’s it’s falling kind of the rabbit hole of is this, your goal is not, do we need to change it? And then. You make some adjustments. So that, you know, I think that’s super important when we can really just get some clarity. Around goals. Yeah. Whether we’re reaching them or not.
And why that might be
Avram Gonzales: in this particular case, we didn’t have a specific goal with, you know, we want this many subscribers or this many downloads, but I know that in other parts of business and life, sometimes we have numbers attached to it. Yeah. So in this case, it doesn’t really match up with how I would approach it and on in a regular business sense of. Well, how far away are we from where we thought we would be?
You know, We have a goal to hit this much revenue or this many team members or, you know, and then what’s the gap.
Rachel Gonzales: Sure.
Avram Gonzales: I think it’s important to understand the gap because it helps you get real with where you actually landed versus where you want it to go. And then making you ask some of those deeper questions in between.
Rachel Gonzales: Yeah, and I think too, you know, Uh, like the gap and the goal and all those things. I think that it’s also really important to look at. You know, When we started the podcast that, you know, thinking about this conversation that we’re having and why we’re, why we’re re adjusting and changing this goal possibly, um, that we. I think we just started out thinking, would this be interesting? Would this be, uh, for us to talk about and all these, all these different things that come up. Um, And then we start looking at the data. And seeing that people are downloading or they’re, uh, They’re not interacting on social media, but we’re putting a lot of time there.
Sure. You know, different things. And so we just have to ask ourselves.
Do we have a goal now? Can we have a goal now? I think because we’re seeing some data on different things and now we have kind of guideposts that we can look at them.
Avram Gonzales: So next, I think. After considering all of this. Is evaluating the actual strategy. I think that’s where you were going with it. And I think there are three different categories to evaluating what you’re currently doing and measuring it against the gap that we were talking about.
First are the actual activities that you’re doing. So the question is, am I doing the right things? Uh, that’s the first question we have to ask ourselves. The second one is, how effective are we being at those particular activities? And the third one is, have we given enough time, or done it enough times to find out if it’s actually effective?
So in looping back and going through these three items, activities. I think of. You know, one of my, my journey going to the gym, I think this might end up begin referenced a few times here. If my goal was to run a half marathon. But all I was doing with lifting weights, I’m not doing the right activities.
Rachel Gonzales: Yeah, right.
Avram Gonzales: So we have to ask ourselves with the podcast and you, the listener. Whatever you’re applying this to are the activities that I’m doing congruent with the outcome and the goal.
Rachel Gonzales: Yeah, correct.
Avram Gonzales: What are the experts saying? Have you done the research?
Have you talked to people? Did you just blindly jump into this on a whim?
Rachel Gonzales: Right?
Avram Gonzales: I’ve been there many times. But somewhere we need to find out and discover if the, if we’re doing the right activities, the wrong activities will never get you to where you want to go.
Rachel Gonzales: And I think we need to be in touch with reality too. Cause it, like you’re saying, you know, maybe it’s the wrong. Um, The wrong method. You’re getting your muscles strong, but you’re not doing anything about stamina. And running. All these different things. So, you know, the activities are super important. Uh, because that is what is going to get you what you need.
Avram Gonzales: For us with the podcast, the promotional strategy was. Sharing it through our personal contacts and connections, and then, but, uh, spending a lot of time, energy on creating social media posts.
Yeah. Right. Because a lot of people have said, this is the way to grow the business. And we’re going to talk about in more detail, one of the following podcasts, we’re going to look a little bit more closely at some of these activities. Um, but we realized that the effectiveness, our second point here, the effectiveness of the social posts that we’ve been putting together, just not really that great, not reaching people.
Um, I mean, we’re assuming that the content is good or good enough to gather listenership. Sure.
Rachel Gonzales: Right. Sure. I mean, that’s what we were seeing, like the downloads. And then we were as far as like on the podcast platform. And then we were looking at the social media stuff. And really the reason why we actually looked at that, you know, like you said, we put a lot of time into that. So is it reaping some kind of reward? And if it’s not, then what is the harm in changing that method? Like we talked about the activities, you know, could we change an activity or something that’s contributing to this?
Avram Gonzales: Correct.
Rachel Gonzales: So that we could get more effectiveness. That’s the whole point of what we’re trying to say.
Avram Gonzales: And the goal, the goal being that we want to grow, we’re not seeing the data core later in the backend. Again, we’re going to talk some more about the data in a future episode, but, uh, we’re setting the stage here today. It just didn’t seem like we’re correlating growth and things on social media to growth of the podcast.
It almost seems like they’re rowing in two different directions.
Rachel Gonzales: Correct. And there’s so much time that goes into that. So we just have to ask. Are there more effective things to be spending our time on?
Avram Gonzales: Exactly.
Rachel Gonzales: At the end we have to find that answer. If it is yes. Then we do something else.
Avram Gonzales: If not, then it’s what or
Rachel Gonzales: exactly, right?
Yeah. But we need to ask sometimes they’re hard questions because maybe he might be attached to whatever the activities are. And you’re not getting the effectiveness, but you just love the activity so much. The effectiveness doesn’t really actually matter.
Avram Gonzales: Sure.
Rachel Gonzales: So then maybe that goal changes altogether. You know, It could be different ends of the spectrum.
Avram Gonzales: Yeah.
Rachel Gonzales: At a certain point, I think
Avram Gonzales: Well this leads right into, you know, have we given the current strategy enough time?
Rachel Gonzales: Yeah,
Avram Gonzales: and I, I would say at the 26 episodes, and I think it’s over 200 something social posts now. That we don’t feel like the effort that went into that is congruent with the level of growth, the podcast experience.
So right now we’re doing like 50 to 75 downloads, an episode, which is awesome. And for the effort we’ve put in between us and the rest of our team to produce and publish this stuff uh, just doesn’t seem like it’s matching up being congruent. So it’s like, well, have I given it enough time?
Rachel Gonzales: Right.
Avram Gonzales: No, you wouldn’t go to the gym like for a week and expect huge gains.
Rachel Gonzales: Sure.
Avram Gonzales: The same thing is going to be true with your did, did you try at one time? Have you done it enough times to really know?
Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.
Avram Gonzales: We gotta be real
Rachel Gonzales: well and I think, you know, having gone through 26 episodes, I think it’s really cool. What we’ve seen, even in those 26 episodes, some things have changed about our process, about how we do things.
All sorts of things have come about from it but. We have discovered that we do know more about the process. We know more about what goes into it, what we’re seeing, what it takes, the true time, cost and commitment that it takes. And that allows us to that because we’ve tested it. We know that it works uh, as far as the process goes, Um, That gives us the opportunity to make changes because we have let it go for a long enough to well, is this working or is this not?
We can actually say yes it is. Or no, it’s not
Avram Gonzales: Well at this point, we also know that there is a lot working in that. Really, what we’re talking about is maybe changing 10% of what we do, right. 15% of what we do versus scrapping the whole thing,
Rachel Gonzales: right?
Avram Gonzales: Starting over with a totally different strategy. We’re going to blend it with some new stuff in wrapping things up here I know that we were talking about before we recorded this episode, how our personal budgeting journey has, has changed, and it gets a good metaphor for we’re talking about here. Some of the tools and methods that we’ve done have changed. Can we briefly touch on that?
Rachel Gonzales: Yeah. You know, I just, I love the, um, I love the journey that we’ve had on our financials, on our personal side, on our finances. Uh, we started. Just with questions, you know, how can this be better?
But then we started using Dave Ramsey’s, um, tools and that’s like the, Every Dollar app and how he attacks, um, credit cards or debt or things like that. You know, how you do that. So we started with Dave Ramsey and then. We, so I love the idea of an envelope system for a budget and what that is for people that don’t understand or know that, or it just doesn’t make sense. It’s where you, you literally, so it’s like your grandma.
She might’ve had an envelope for rent and she put cash money into that envelope. And she set that aside physically so that she always had rent for her. She had money for rent. So what you, what we do now is digital envelope system, where each section of your life, you might have a different thing. Like we have a fund for Zuna so that she has money for food and for different things that she needs, but we put away a certain amount each month. And. I had to go from different software to different software.
I was using spreadsheets.
Avram Gonzales: We started literally with the actual physical envelopes. Then we moved to the digital envelopes. Then we moved to this software, then moved to this software then moved to this software? Yeah. So why do we move from one software to the other?
Rachel Gonzales: Yeah. So what we were doing was like the spreadsheets weren’t working, because there was so much physical time involved, making sure that they were accurate. There was no checking system.
It was really hard to balance. So then we went to another, we went to an app and that app, it was okay. No, I do another app. And. It wasn’t great. And then we finally found Good Budget, which is awesome because it allows you to create your own envelopes. And then add money to them each time you can set it up so that it comes out every single time you get paid and yada, yada yada.
So the evolution of it though came about, because we knew where we wanted to go with our budget. And we, but we didn’t know how to get there. So we just started and starting. So like, we’ve talked about repetition. Starting gave us repetitions on her belt with whatever we started with. And that worked for a time. And then we moved on to something else we did that for a time repetition. So on and on and on, it was, it was probably over the span of, I want to say six to eight months, maybe that we went between the beginning to where we landed, where we really had it humming along.
Avram Gonzales: So check this out. The strategy itself didn’t really change. We had the methodology from Dave Ramsey. But what changed was the actual strategic plan?
The way that we were going to achieve it, the methods themselves changed over time.
Rachel Gonzales: Correct.
Avram Gonzales: And that’s what we’re trying to convey here in this episode is you know, are the goals, the right goals? Are we headed in the right direction? Are we doing the right activities or being effective at those activities?
Have we done it long enough?
Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.
Avram Gonzales: You take the answers to those questions and you realize really quickly, maybe I’m not so far off.
Rachel Gonzales: Well, and I think we, we also have to keep in mind, like with budget, of course, we knew that the, the goal was correct. We wanted to get out of debt and we wanted to have more freedom with money.
And we got there. So when you have a goal and you know that, you know, I mean, we didn’t even have to question that that goal never came up in question. It was more like, how can we get this goal to be achieved because we wanted it so badly.
Avram Gonzales: Yeah. So in the next episode, we’re going to talk about how we have shifted our strategy.
And we’re going to start turning the goals that we’ve talked about today for growth into a strategic plan. So you can take this stuff, you can apply it to anything. And we’re going to use the podcast as a real life example. There’ll be able to like report back to you in six months after we see the results and share with you, everything that we’ve learned.
Um, so we hope that you enjoy the journey. You come along with us. I’ve enjoyed the episode here today. You’re going to have to find out next episode what we’re changing up. So stay tuned for that. We’re going to break it all down and then you can take that framework copied into your business, copied into your household and just go nuts with it.
Rachel Gonzales: Yes.
Avram Gonzales: All right. So that’s it from us. Avram and Rachel here at the Babies and Business Podcast, please find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, all those places @babiesandbizpod. If y ou got questions, you can shoot them over to us. hello@babiesandbiz.com. That email does work. We do check it. So shoot us a message.
If you’ve got ideas for an upcoming podcast episode, with that, we appreciate you for being here.
Rachel Gonzales: Bye. For now.
