Early last year, we witnessed our revenue as a successful offline event management company begin to plummet as the pandemic took hold. It was clear we needed to pivot to survive. So, we gave ourselves just 30 days to build an entirely new platform from the ground up to answer the customer demand driven by the pandemic.
We emerged as one of the leading platforms for experiential virtual events, growing our month-over-month revenue consistently by 50% ever since enrolling our first paid virtual event customer in April 2020. In the same period, we have seen a growth rate of 10,000% and also raised £3.2m seed funding and £17m in Series ‘A’ funding. In this increasingly unpredictable business landscape, many other companies will be considering opportunities to pivot and scale.
When should you pivot?
It’s critical to have an awareness of where your business is and the moves you need to make. You need to take a humble view of your business and take stock of things. Your business might be doing bad, or it might be doing ok, but if you want to be doing even better, then it may be time to pivot. If your business is doing really well, it is difficult to make the decision to pivot as you might risk losing all that you have worked on so far. When you’ve reached this realisation and understanding, you need to be willing to take a risk, whether that’s stepping into a new market or redefining the market you’re already in the way Hubilo has with the events space.
You need to be aware of the opportunities that are presenting themselves. For us, the pandemic was an opportunity to redefine events, and there was already growing demand for these as physical events weren’t possible. Business leaders need to feel extremely confident about the pivot the company is going to make. It needs to be an area where they see exponential growth opportunity; otherwise, the business can just end up struggling again. For this, ensure that you have done your research, gained the required validation and select a space that is only going to expand further, where you will also grow along with it.
How to prepare towards raising funds?
It is important to understand investors and the criteria they will base their investment decisions on. If they’re looking at investing in businesses in your space, they already know why that space is worth investing in. They’ll be looking at which of the companies in that space is the best investment. They’ll be continually asking for data from your business to help guide their decision-making, and they’ll probably keep coming back and asking for different bits of data, so it pays to be patient and ensure you can readily supply them with the information they need. But it’s also important to remember these investors will become partners at the end of the day, so while they are choosing you, you are also choosing them, and you can be firm. You can make a list of the prospective investors that you want to meet and you can set an aggressive deadline for when you want the funding round to be completed, it is important for the entrepreneurs to not get held up in the process of raising funds, as that will take up a lot of their important time away from the business, hence all the more important to have a deadline.
Preparing for rapid growth plan towards the scale-up
It’s difficult to know when rapid growth might happen. For example, we couldn’t predict the pandemic which became our catalyst for scaling up. But when you find yourself growing rapidly it’s important to prioritize as the business still needs to run efficiently while you also put your efforts into managing the growth. Getting the culture right is also key, so when your teams are scaling up, it’s crucial to hire people who have worked in a rapid growth company before and have the right set of values to support your business on its own growth journey.
There will always be challenges when running a business, but sometimes those challenges can be viewed as opportunities. Keeping these points in mind could help you recognise when the time is right to pivot and grow your business to its full potential.
~Business Game Changer Special Promotion~
By Vaibhav Jain, CEO and Founder, Hubilo
About Hubilo:
Virtual and Hybrid Event Technology Company Hubilo is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies, today, globally. Hubilo has witnessed a growth rate of over 10,000% in less than a year and has raised a seed round of $4.5 million and a Series ‘A’ round of $23.5 million from leading Venture Capital firms like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital along with several renowned angel investors; Hubilo is headquartered out of San Francisco in the US with offices in London in the UK, and Bengaluru in India with clients in Europe, the United States, APAC, Middle East and Africa. Hubilo’s extensive clientele includes names like United Nations, Roche, Informa Markets, Tech in Asia, Fortune, AWS, Siemens, Cognizant, Veritas Technologies, GITEX and several others. Led by Founders, Vaibhav Jain and Mayank Agarwal, Hubilo is building out the world’s most comprehensive digital platform to help businesses strengthen their relationships with their customers and partners through virtual and hybrid events.
