 Welcome to this session of the GoDaddy Open 2020 Conference. Today we're going to be talking about how to pivot your product or service in two weeks. My name is Lauren McDonnell and I am the VP of Programs at SeedSpot. SeedSpot is a non-profit 501c3 organization fully committed to supporting entrepreneurs. And when we think about entrepreneurs, we think about change makers who are making a positive impact in the world through their business. Now here at SeedSpot, our mission is to educate, accelerate and invest in impact driven entrepreneurs. And we've had the opportunities to support over 880 alumni over the past eight years. Now when we look at these alumni, they're doing great. 88% of them are still in business today. And SeedSpot loves supporting diverse founders. And so 53% of the founders that we've worked with are women, 81% are underrepresented founders coming from diverse backgrounds. They're doing incredible things in the market. They've created over 2,300 jobs, raised almost 60 million in capital, and impacted over 8 million lives. When we talk about impact, SeedSpot likes to align our impact metrics with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. And we've bucketed those 17 initiatives into these five impact areas where most of our entrepreneurs are operating. We've got entrepreneurs making impact in civic engagement, equality and economic opportunity, education, environmental sustainability and so important right now, health and wellness. For all of the work that our alumni have done, SeedSpot's had the honor to be ranked a top five private business accelerator and a most promising social innovation by UBI Global. Again, my name is Lauren McDaniel, VP of programs, and it's my pleasure today to walk you through this hands-on workshop where you're going to start building and start pivoting. So let's talk about pivoting toward opportunity. We know right now we are in the midst of an upturn with the market, upheaval of a lot of different factors that people have been creating patterns around for the past decades are now being upturned. And this is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to pivot and meet those needs through business. Let's take a look at how some entrepreneurs from around the world have responded when opportunity arose due to struggles or issues that their communities were facing. So let's go down to Brazil first and talk about EcoVac. Now this is a start-up that responded to the Zika virus by providing virus tracing and outbreak prediction. Seems pretty relevant in today's world. Now let's go up to Canada and look at terrestrial energy. This is an entrepreneur that responded to climate change by building advanced new nuclear reactors. And let's go down to Trinidad and Tobago and talk about Hello Green who responded to climate change by creating 100% compostable packaging. These are examples of business solutions responding to needs in their communities. And even in today's current environment, we know that growth is happening. Economists tell us that we're seeing big market gains in markets like e-commerce, delivery and distribution services, cleaning and paper sanitary products, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, the e-learning industry, groceries and food products, and at home entertainment and fitness. But I do want to mention that some industries are seeing a downturn. So if you're operating in one of these, you know the struggle well. Electric and mortar storefronts have experienced a big loss over the past six months as well as the automotive industry, leather products, textiles and clothing, anything related to the travel industry as well as entertainment and dining. If your business is operating in one of these industries, you've probably been actively looking for opportunities to pivot your products and services, meet new customer demand and keep that revenue flowing. And that's where pivoting comes in. Pivoting is the act of changing course to respond to consumer needs and market opportunities. Not sure if you're up for the challenge of pivoting, well you've already been doing it from day one of your business. That's because entrepreneurs are professional pivoters. There's no one more equipped than you to make these changes and meet these new user demands. So this isn't going to be a session where I talk at you for 30 or 45 minutes. This is going to be a session where you get to roll up your sleeves and start to work. And let me tell you, it feels so good to make progress on these pivots, to think about new opportunity and take steps toward it. So today you're going to have the chance during this workshop to make progress and get your pivot to market within two weeks of today. And I think what's a great example here is how when we pivot and we try new things, sometimes they don't work out. And so it's a great example of what it's like to just go forth, do your mission, do your business and figure it out with wonderful customers like y'all and wonderful audience members. I wanted to let you know I can see your questions that are coming in the chat and my team, I've got a team of colleagues here who are all here helping me sort through those questions. We're going to be answering those questions. We're going to be hearing from you today. There's no way for us, unfortunately, to write you back. So it's a one-way question Q&A form. And then I'm going to be responding back to you here today. But I wanted to let you know we see you. We can hear you through your comments. And we're going to dive back in here. So we talked about some of the examples of global businesses that are responding to challenge. And now I want to talk about some industries that are experiencing growth even right now during this market. So here's some gains that economists are telling us markets are seeing. Number one, e-commerce. This is not a surprise. So many things that we're all buying online today that we probably even six months ago never thought we would. And this is an opportunity for businesses that may not have seen themselves as e-commerce to find themselves online. Some others I'll read through delivery and distribution services. That markets up cleaning and paper sanitary products, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, of course. E-learning. Who's created a home academy just in the past couple of weeks at home? Maybe you've got some e-learning happening in your household. Either yourself or potentially family members. Groceries and food products. Folks are cooking more at home. And then they still want to be entertained. They might be stuck at home. But at home entertainment and fitness, Peloton, anyone, is on the rise as well. So I don't want to skip over. We do have some industries that have experienced some big losses. And I know there's folks on the line right now who are part of these industries who are feeling this personally. Brick and mortar storefronts. We know that y'all are facing some big losses right now, as well as the automotive industry, leather products, textiles and clothing, travel, entertainment and dining. And these are just the top declining industries right now. I know there's lots of others that are also facing an economic downturn. So if you belong to these or you sell within these, I know you've been thinking recently, how do I pivot? How do I respond? And I'm going to go through a workshop with you today where you are going to start to be able to do that. Pivoting is the act of changing course to respond to consumer needs and market opportunities. Gosh, do we have some consumer needs and market opportunities right now? And you are the perfect people for the job. Entrepreneurs are professional pivots. You've been doing it from day one or day zero or before of your business. And there's no one more equipped than you to actually take this project on. So thank you for being an entrepreneur. Let's talk about what we have to work with. So you have values as an organization that we're going to today called assets. And we're going to map out these assets and get busy creating this pivot. So right now, you have products and services that you've built, created, based on different value drivers in your organization that you possess, that you've built, that you've purchased, that you've created. And I like to think of these assets almost like puzzle pieces. So let's say you have some tools over here. You put them together with some partnerships, a supply chain, a customer base. And voila, you have a sellable product or service that you've been selling for the past months and years. Now we've got a new market. And that configuration of those assets may not be working right now. But you still have those components or those puzzle pieces. And what is really a quick way to think about getting up in market with your pivot is to take apart those assets and think about your tools separately from your equipment, separately from your partnerships, your supply chain, and think, how about a rearrange this? So I've got a supply chain. How might I think about that differently and put that together maybe with some other expertise that I have? And all of a sudden, we get new products and services utilizing things that you already have that you can go to market with very, very quickly. So here's a list of some things I want you to think about. Please take a screenshot of this. Take a photo with your phone because this is going to help you as you continue to think through these assets in the coming hours, days, and weeks. So tools is the first set of assets that you already have. These are ways you solve problems. These might be physical tools that you use. This could be software that you've built. These could be things that you've purchased. You have tools that you use to get your work done. You also have technology. So you have some platforms that allow you to process customer credit cards and sales. You've built some technology to measure how well your products and services are performing, maybe reservation systems. Maybe these are hardware technologies that you've invested in. Like your inventory of computers and servers and wires. You also have expertise. I know everyone on this call is an expert in probably multiple things, but you are an expert like no one else in what you do. And my guess is you have a team of experts as well. That expertise is marketable and we can apply that to tangential products and services that you can sell. Partnerships, I'm sure you've got partnership relationships. Methodology or IP. Inventory and equipment. You also have supply chains. So individuals that provide you with goods and services and also that sell your products for you. And some of you might have real estate. Do you have a warehouse like the gentleman in the photo here? Do you have a classroom? Do you have a storefront? You may not even be using that facility right now, but that could be an asset for you. Do you have a customer base or group of individuals who would recognize your brand on something or who you already have on an email list? Those are assets. The raw materials that you use to make your products, to build your services, those are assets. So these are just a few examples of some of the things that you have. These are the components that currently make up your products and services. We're going to pull those apart today and think about how we might put those together in a different way to create new value to sell. So today we're going to create an asset map. Don't worry about reading the small text on this. This is just an example to show you. We're going to list out a brainstorm of existing assets. In the middle column, you're going to come up with some ideas of things that you can create from the assets that you have. And then we're going to leave you with the next steps charge of going out there and getting others ideas and adding that to your asset board as well. So in order to get busy and get to work, I want you to open up a new tab or browser window. Now, if you're really fancy, you might be able to pull my face and our window off to one side of your screen and open up a new browser on the other side so you can see us both side by side. If you're not as fancy or don't know how to do that, just open up a new tab. And when you get to that new browser window, I want you to type in this website, note.ly, that's N-O-T-E dot L-Y. Go ahead and see if you can pull that up on a tab or a browser window, note.ly. You don't need to log in. You don't need to create an account. We're going to use this platform today for our workshop. So when you get there, at the very top left, you should see a little plus sign. So you can go ahead and click that. So again, we are at note.ly, N-O-T-E dot L-Y. And we have clicked the plus button. And at this point, you should see a little post-it note pop up. So if you see that, you are in the right spot. Now, what I want you to do is in that post-it note, type in one asset, any asset that comes to mind from what we talked about previous. So this might be a tool. This might be a customer base. This could be a partnership. I've put together an example. So if you're able to see my screen, I've put together an example here for you of a textile manufacturer. And they've created a different post-it note for each asset. And on those post-its, one asset that they had was their real estate, so their warehouse. So they typed that in, and they moved that post-it note to the left side of their board. They also have some raw materials. So they have fabric. They have equipment and sewing machines. They have seamstress or seamstress talent. That's their expertise that they've added on there. So they've added as many assets as they can think about. Now, of course, currently they're using these assets to create the textiles that they currently sell. But we're going to talk about some new sellable opportunities that they can make utilizing these building blocks or these puzzle pieces. So take a minute, add in a couple of assets. And if you can, and you would like to share, I'm looking here at the question board. If you would like to pop in an asset, maybe that comes to mind for your business, share it with us on the Q&A, and we will go ahead and read it out. All right, so we've got people who are putting together their asset board. We are on note.ly, and I'm just checking here to see if anybody has put in their business asset. All right, it looks like we have someone who said their vehicles, their business vehicles. Absolutely, that's an asset. You can use that for delivery. You can use that for marketing. So I love that you've added that as an asset. It looks like someone here has said curriculum is an asset. So that's absolutely right. That is your expertise, your intellectual property. So that's a great example of an asset. All right, so we've got on the left side of our board, at least hopefully a handful of assets. And I want to now start taking the next step and talking about pivoting. So utilizing the assets that you've put down on the left side of your board, we're gonna fill out the middle column of this virtual sticky board with four new ways that you can make impact, that you can make something that's sellable, a new product or service. For example, this could be a brand new solution. This could be taking that solution and targeting a new audience. This could even just be delivering your solution differently. So let's go back to the example we were talking about the textile manufacturer. And here's some examples that that company decided to put on their board. So because we talked about the medical industry, medical supplies and equipment, as a growing industry that we've learned from economists, this company said, hey, why don't I take my raw materials, my expertise and actually make medical gowns, sheets and masks. So they didn't have to invest in new equipment. They didn't have to invest in new talent. They could simply take the assets that they have and find a new market opportunity. So that's a pretty straightforward and simple new idea they added to their board. Now, here's one that I think is interesting. So they have been a hard products company, right? They're creating these physical clothes but they know that e-learning is big and they know that at home entertainment is big. So what they did is they thought, you know what, we've got expertise. Why don't we put together online sewing classes and sell the sewing classes? Now they didn't use any of their equipment. They didn't need to use any of their raw materials. They didn't need to use their real estate but they use their expertise and they use their customer base and they emailed out to their customer base and said, hey, we're offering sewing classes and they put those online and now that's new revenue stream for them. Okay, so their third idea was taking what they sell, normally in person and selling it in an online store. So they invested in an online platform where they started to do e-commerce. So that's an example of selling what you have in a different way. And they also noticed the trend of at home cooking and groceries on the rise and they decided to open up a line of kitchen accessories utilizing their equipment, their talent, all of the distribution channels that they had and they're now making aprons, hot pads, towels, et cetera for the kitchen. So hopefully this is just a pretend company but hopefully this gives you an example of how you can take the assets that you have and you can create new pivot ideas and they can be wacky at this point, they're just ideas, they're just posted notes and you can put those in the middle column. All right, so now let's go on to the third and final column of our workshop here today. Now, this is where I want you to take your asset board after today's session and I want you to show it to a family member, a teammate, a customer, an advisor and share the assets, share your ideas and then add their ideas and don't worry about filtering their ideas right now, just write them down and you're gonna add those on the far right side of your asset board. Going back to our example of the textile manufacturer, when they shared their assets with a friend, this person said, you know what, you've got that really great warehouse space, you're not really utilizing all of it right now, why don't you think about selling, renting access to part of your warehouse space? So that could be another income stream for that company that's not related to textile manufacturing but leverages an asset that they already have. Another individual that they share this with said, my child right now is in school and they're looking for different projects that these kids can be doing at home, what about selling these sewing kits or these raw materials to schools so that they can do these projects as part of their curriculum? So this business was able to then just sell their raw materials and make a profit. So I want to see if we can get some participation going in the Q&A, we don't have a chat so you can use the Q&A as our chat. And what are some new pivot ideas that maybe you've been thinking about or today came to mind as you were going through your asset map on Notely. So I'm looking here in the chat and it looks like someone is thinking about video tutorials, absolutely. There are so many individuals at home right now who are looking for e-learning opportunities and are looking for entertainment and you can provide that to them by doing video tutorials and they can be tutorials on any and everything. So I love that idea from Tamika. Kimberly writes in to say that their main two assets are expertise and relationships. Those are wonderful assets because it's so difficult for another competitor to come in and duplicate that. Those are assets that you really can own, that take time to, that you've spent time investing in, that you can now leverage. So I'll be interested to know, Kimberly, how you think about applying those new assets or those assets for new opportunities. It looks like we have some folks who have hardware and software, so computers, laptops, Office 365, and then website knowledge and skills. Wow, what a combination. So you've got the hardware, you've got the expertise and the software. There's so many individuals like Tamika who said that they were gonna start doing video tutorials who may need some expertise when it comes to web support and getting those video tutorials up there. So very good ideas. So this asset board is yours. It's really a start for you to think about going to market in two weeks. And this is actually curriculum that SeedSpot uses with our entrepreneurs every single day. This workshop was excerpted from one of our longer courses. And I know this process works. It absolutely works. It helps you get organized. And we're gonna talk now about a few next steps that I wanna recommend as you take this and you go forth with your pivot. By the way, if you wanna save your Notely board, right up on the upper right corner, you can create an account. You can also just take a screenshot if you don't wanna create another account right now and you're feeling good about your asset board. You can just take a screenshot and have that for your records. Okay, so now let's take action. We've got a lot of great ideas but ideas are kind of a dime a dozen. So what do we do now? Well, first, we wanna go back to our asset map, make sure we've got everything captured and think what kind of effort, development, investment in time is it gonna take me to go from what I'm selling now to one of my new ideas. For some of the examples we looked at for the TuxTel manufacturer, it was as simple as taking what I already sell and getting it up online. But for other things like the sewing courses that we talked about, those classes, they may need to invest in a new website, a learning management system. They may need to write a script, come up with those projects. And so while those things may not be huge monetary investments, those are time investments. And so it's important to go through each of your new ideas and say really realistically, how do I get from where I am now to a sellable product or service? Once you have those ideas, the sense of how much effort is going to be required, I like to use what's called a quadrant map. And that's where you can just do this on post-it notes on a big sticky pad or your kitchen table. You basically prioritize your different ideas or opportunities based on the effort that it's going to require. So is this gonna take a lot of investment or is this fairly simple to do? And cross that with the amount of impact that this is going to make on your business. Is this a big revenue opportunity for you? Is there a big market for this? Maybe you already have relationships. Someone talked about their relationships in the chat earlier. So maybe that's a high impact opportunity for you. But maybe this new revenue is only gonna be marginal for your business. And it's really important to think about the cost benefit of trying to spin up these new pivots and how much really income that's going to give you or impact that's going to make. Of course, the items that are the least amount of effort with the highest amount of impact are those that you wanna prioritize right now. And this is where I wanna give you a tool. So as I mentioned, Seatspot uses this curriculum with our entrepreneurs every single day. This workshop was excerpted from a full course that goes all the way from creating these ideas to finding business models, revenue models of how you're gonna sell this to a whole course on marketing with 75 free and very inexpensive tools that you can use to actually market this and get this up and market within two weeks. So I want to invite you, I put together a free worksheet from that course that you can access. You can access that in two ways. So you can either take your phone and put the camera up to this QR code and go to the site there and download that free worksheet or you can just type in Seatspot.org slash more. And this is just available for GoDaddy participants. What you're going to get is a guide for taking these top priority ideas to potential customers and a little hint, a new pivot may mean that you have new customers and your existing customers. So keep that in mind. And this guide is gonna walk you through how to come up with the right customers to talk to, what type of invitation you can send to have these conversations, the questions that you wanna ask these customers and then the insights that you'll get from these conversations that will help you prioritize the pivots that you're thinking about based on what people say they'll actually purchase from you. So please visit Seatspot.org slash more to get that free tool. You can also find out more information about the full course if you're interested in learning a little bit more about pivoting and getting up in market. Again, my name is Lauren McDaniel. I am the VP of Programs at Seatspot and we hope to work with you in the future. Best of luck.