20 Dec PIVOT!
Like so many Americans my age, I used to watch Friends every Thursday night on NBC. The show debuted in the fall of 1994, my junior year in high school. By the time the show wrapped up ten years later, I had graduated from college, gotten married, and my wife was expecting our first born. Life comes at you fast. My daughter is now getting ready to leave for college.
One of my favorite episodes included a storyline where Ross, Chandler and Rachel were moving a couch up the winding stairs of their apartment. With every turn Ross would yell out, “PIVOT! PIVOT!”
Perhaps it was my season of life, but I related to the scene. In college you spend a great deal of your time helping a friend move into a new apartment.
The word “pivot” is a funny sounding word. According to the Oxford definition, pivot is the central point, pin or shaft on which a mechanism turns or oscillates. It is the action of turning around a point: the action of pivoting. But it can also be a person or thing that is central or important to someone or something else.
I have had a lot of “pivot” moments in my life. Moments that altered the course of my career. Losing my job when my daughter was only one year old and we had a mortgage to pay was a pivotal moment. I lost my job because of budget cuts, and the company felt they could live without my position. I decided at that moment that I would do everything in my power to always make myself valuable to whoever hired me by bringing in more revenue than they paid me. That pivot moment drove my career and I have never been without work since.
These last two years have been one giant pivot moment for all of us. Going through a pandemic has disrupted every area of our lives.
These last two years have been one giant pivot moment for all of us. Going through a pandemic has disrupted every area of our lives. In business it has caused us to rethink how we sell our products, manage our staff, and service our customers. We have had to “pivot” a lot to survive.
Pivots can be painful, but they can also be helpful. It was painful to be without work for six months, wondering how I was going to feed my family and pay for the mortgage. But out of the pain came a new attitude and determined spirit. My calling in media was also renewed when I tried to land a job doing just about anything but media, with no luck. When I finally gave up fighting, the media job of a lifetime reached out to me. Programming a national radio channel for SIRIUS Satellite Radio. That job led to a bigger job programming TV, which eventually led me to meeting Ed Frazier, the founder of our company who last year named me CEO.
Had I never experienced the pivot, who knows where my career would have led me. But I would not change my story, for my story has molded me to be the man I am today.
We don’t know where our current pivot will lead us, but I feel confident that we will all be stronger having weathered the virus, economic shutdown, the Great Resignation, and now the global supply chain issues. Next year is going to be a great year, even if we have to “PIVOT, PIVOT!”
Scott Miller is the CEO of Centerpost Media, host of the Create. Build. Manage. Show (seen on BizTV, heard on BizTalkRadio, and available wherever you listen to podcasts,) and a member of the Forbes Agency Council, Entrepreneur Leadership Network, and Dallas Business Journal Leadership Trust. You can find Scott on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter via “@scottmillerceo” or on LinkedIn via “@scottmillermedia.” Centerpost Media is a content marketing agency with a vision to help every business they encounter with their media needs by providing outstanding quality, service and value. Centerpost Media is the parent company to BizTV, BizTalkRadio, BizTalkPodcasts and Bizvod.