Cyber Week Sale! 50% Off All Access

When Should You Change Your Business Model? If the company morale seems to be sinking, it's time to take action.

By Anand Sinha

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

Shutterstock

Do you need to revisit, tweak, or overhaul your business model? After all, no business, product portfolio, or business model remains the same throughout. But what are the key indicators that it's time to do so?

Here are four of them:

#1. Growth pangs

One of the earliest indicators to have relook at your business plan is if you are having trouble scaling up. Despite the fact that you have a good product-market fit, are you finding it tough to make it go viral? If that is the case, there is a problem. Expanding your user base is crucial to growth, and if that is not happening at the pace you think it should be, go back to the drawing board and see what can be changed.

#2. Feeling the blues

If the company morale seems to be sinking, it's time to take action. At PressPlay, we could palpably sense the excitement at workplace going down, and it was a big sign for us. And this is despite the fact that there was no shortcoming in the kind of work that we were putting in day in, day out.

#3. Market reaction

Banking too much on market reaction can be misleading. Initially, we tried to launch our product in 15 cities, thinking something will work somewhere. We learned not to do something like that again -- ever. You can pick up on key indicators in the beginning; your first 10,000 users will give you an idea if it is working or not. Also, if the market isn't responding, just going by hope and gut is a wrong call.

#4. Emotional attachment

You should not be too attached to your ideas, and this is something we learned the hard way. Of course, it isn't easy to do it. But working on the same idea in the hope that it will work if you keep at it, is naïve. There is a psychological barrier that you have to overcome here, and also ensure that the team's confidence doesn't dip.

Note: It is advisable you don't bring about the change all of a sudden, and in its entirety. Ideally, you should start moving towards the new solution, but not get into it 100 per cent from day one itself.

You can't shut something down and tell the team, "We are starting fresh." It will have an adverse impact on the team morale. When we realized we had to consider newer solutions, we invested only 20 per cent of our efforts into it. Gradually, we increased this percentage and gradually phased out the older business plan.

(As told to Prerna Raturi)

Anand Sinha

Co-founder & CEO, PressPlay

Anand Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of PressPlay, a leading technology-based video content delivery company. It is one of the fastest-growing startups in India and is backed by Sequoia Capital. Sinha is responsible for product, tech, content strategy, marketing, strategic alliances and hiring. He quit Zomato as a country head to form PressPlay. Sinha has also co-founded the Robin Hood Army, a voluntary group that works to get surplus food from restaurants to the less fortunate. 

Marketing

The End-of-the-Year Marketing Checklist That Helped Triple Our Annual Revenue Growth

List your marketing metrics and check them twice if you want bigger returns. Here are seven strategies I used to triple our annual revenue growth.

Leadership

How to Master the Art of Delegation — Lessons From Andrew Carnegie's Legacy

Here's what Andrew Carnegie can teach today's entrepreneurs about leadership, teamwork and effective delegation.

Side Hustle

'I Just Hustled': She Earned More Than $300,000 Wrapping Gifts Last Year — and It All Started With a Side Hustle

When Michelle Hensley lost her husband to cancer, she needed to figure out how to earn an income for her family.

Starting a Business

Small Businesses Are Struggling in This Densely Populated U.S. State — and Thriving in These Others

The U.S. is averaging 430,000 new business applications per month in 2024.

Business News

Would You Pay $200 for ChatGPT? OpenAI's New Reasoning Model Has a Hefty Price Tag.

At $200 per month, ChatGPT Pro is 10 times more expensive than the popular ChatGPT Plus plan.