She’d been a business consultant — in-person work, speaking engagements, the kind of career where your website is a business card. Something people glance at before they book you for a room.
We’d just finished the first part of the design. And then the call came. She wasn’t doing in-person anymore. She was selling a course. Totally different concept. Totally different everything. The question went from finishing a build to figuring out how to change a website after a business pivot that rewrote the entire playbook.
The Moment It Hit
The first thing she said was something like — we can just change this or that, right?
No.
I had to explain: this is a completely different website. And that’s such an important thing to understand. If you’re selling courses, that’s different than trying to convince someone you should come in and do a speaking engagement. It’s a different vibe. You’re selling a different product. A course is an online commodity — someone’s sitting at their desk at eleven o’clock at night worried about how to do business. A speaking engagement is someone inviting you into their location to talk. Those two things don’t live on the same site.
Once I broke it down like that, it made sense.
What It Cost
This has only happened once in the entire time we’ve been doing this. And it’s not a great thing for anybody — because it costs money. The client can’t just change direction and think we’re going to start over like it’s no problem, like my time isn’t worth a thing.
But we’d just finished the first part of the design, so the cost wasn’t crazy. It was a couple hundred dollars. The client accepted it, and we moved forward.
It was a bummer, because I really loved the original design. But that design was built for a person who walked into rooms. The new business needed something built for a person who sat behind a screen. So we started over.
And it turned out great.
What a Pivot Means for the Site
The truth about a pivot is that it is starting completely over. That’s not the nightmare — that’s just what it is. The nightmare is pretending you can patch the old version into something it was never built to be. When a business changes direction, the site changes direction. Full stop.
If your business just pivoted and you’re staring at a website that doesn’t match anymore — whether it’s a rebrand, a merger, or something nobody saw coming — the answer is the same. Work with what you’ve got. And if you need more, let us know.
Yeetish Question
Does a business pivot always mean starting the website from scratch?
If the business model changed — new audience, new offer, new direction — then yes, it’s a different website. You can’t take a site built to book speaking gigs and turn it into a course platform by swapping a few headlines. The vibe is different, the product is different, the person on the other end is different. That’s not a tweak. That’s a rebuild.