Bold moves: How sometimes new beginnings need revolution, not evolution

In a world where incremental changes can only take you so far, bold moves are the key to unlocking new levels of growth and innovation. Richard Muscat Azzopardi shares insights from Switch's revolutionary shift, exploring the courage, strategy, and lessons behind making bold decisions that redefine success.

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I'm not an engineer or a mathematician, but I appreciate that if you make several minor improvements to your system, the cumulative benefits can be monumental, given enough time and progress.

For years, we focused on tweaking parts of the engine to squeeze out some profitability here and there, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. We looked at every aspect of our business until we reached a stage of diminishing returns.

As we made progress, the market changed. There was more competition, and budgets were squeezed from clients constantly going through a cost-cutting exercise. The tiny incremental moves we made were just about helping us keep afloat. These changes became necessary to keep us in business, not to thrive.

And there's very little you can do to squeeze out more when you've been improving incrementally yearly and have examined every aspect of the business.

Evolution is essential, but from time to time, you need a revolution. Sometimes, you must strip your business down to its core and make bold moves to get yourself out of a rut. As someone once said, the definition of insanity is trying the same thing twice and hoping for a different outcome.

Over the following few paragraphs, I want to share some lessons I learned from one of our boldest moves as an agency. It was one of the boldest moves I've ever made in my career, and seeing it pay off has been extremely satisfying. It's also been a good lesson on the importance of bold moves, the pitfalls around them, and the benefits you can reap. Looking back, there are a few lessons that I wish I had known before.

Should we make bold moves? How should we make bold moves? What are they, and how can we know if we're prepared for them? Let's start at the beginning.

The bold move at Switch

Our bold move was pretty radical and multifaceted; we had to make multiple moves simultaneously to make sense together. First, we decided to reduce the number of services we offer to just two, and then we also chose to focus only on one type of business to offer it to: B2B clients. The benefits we saw were significant, but they would take great courage because to get to our destination, we had to accept that we'd be refusing business from our traditional client base.

It's been a couple of years, and it's not always been easy, but we can confidently say that we've moved past the hardest thresholds of the bold move. We're now only onboarding clients in the two areas we've chosen to focus on, and it's put us in a position where we've effectively moved away from being seen as a commoditised service provider. There are far fewer potential clients for us locally, but we've built a reputation that allows us to go after our ideal clients no matter where they are in the world.

Triggers for bold moves

Triggers for bold moves can be both internal and external. On a macro level, external triggers that might signal the need for a bold move include geopolitical ones and larger events outside your control (wars, pandemics). These can be easy enough to spot when they're as dramatic as a war or a pandemic, but other signals creep up on you much slower (a country's ethnic mix changing gradually). Other external factors include market changes or new technological shifts (generative AI, anyone?). On a smaller scale, you can have opportunities opening up more directly, such as a competitor going out of business or, on the other extreme, buying out another of your competitors and consolidating.

Internally, you can have several catalysts that require bold moves. An employee (or a whole department) resigning can be devastating, especially if they have a skill that is unique to your business. You could have too much cash in the bank or not enough (this is always riskier but potentially a better catalyst for change), or you could have simply witnessed a plateau for a few years and want to jolt the company out of it.

Each of these motivators has a different effect on us as business leaders, yet in most cases, each can be equally terrifying and exciting. Most of us are never naturally inclined to rock the boat, so we'll make all the excuses to keep things as is, improving ever so slightly wherever we can.

Building the courage to act

This can be the hardest part. The fear of pain is often even worse than the pain itself. Think about all the time you spent thinking about your next dentist's appointment. I'm pretty sure you spent far more time anticipating and fearing the pain than the time you spent in pain. And I'm also pretty sure you felt much better once you were done, too (or at least I hope so, for your sake).

Bold moves with business are pretty much the same. We tend to spend too much time overthinking them and fearing failure rather than taking decisive action. This is not to say that you should rush into major decisions without giving them the proper consideration, but you should not postpone the move indefinitely.

Prepare yourself psychologically and implement proper risk management strategies. In some cases, if you're lucky enough, you can run a test or a series of tests and mitigate the risk. On our end, for example, we effectively ran a small separate agency within Switch that specialised in our new areas before actually shifting all our business externally.

The benefit of breaking the move into smaller pieces is obvious. It makes it easier to test out your hypothesis. However, this has a major drawback: it can potentially slow down how well you can judge your changes. Once again, looking back at our bold move, the longer we took to make the shift, the harder it was to serve both kinds of clients, attract both types of clients, and, crucially, work on both sets of services at once.

Types of bold moves

I can't possibly list every kind of bold move for every possible business. Still, in general, some of the bold moves I've seen when working with businesses across all walks of life include mergers and acquisitions, shifting products or services sold (or, as in our case, reducing the number of products or services to specialise), exploring new distribution channels or simply deciding to hire someone new to start on your journey to expansion.

And in the end...

Bold moves aren't about reckless risk-taking but calculated actions that can transform your business. You must have the courage to implement something that might feel out of your comfort zone, but if you do, you'll succeed.

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