What it Takes to Pivot and Scale Successfully with Amelia Wilcox, Founder and CEO of Nivati
When the world changed in 2020, so did Amelia Wilcox’s business. Learn how she was able to completely pivot her company, create a new mental health platform, and what skills business leaders need to scale from 0 to 1 million and beyond.
In life and in business, there will always be times when you have to pivot. That can be hard, and it’s not unusual to struggle while you're going through the thick of change. For Amelia Wilcox, a pivot in all of our lives led to a pivot in her business, and we dove into that on this episode of Up Next in Commerce. Wilcox had grown her company, Incorporate Massage, to more than 4,000 corporate clients across the country, but when the pandemic hit and offices shut down, the decline in the need for massage therapists meant that Wilcox’s entire revenue stream was coming to a screeching halt. But rather than fold, Wilcox decided to pivot, and find a new need in this changing world that she could fulfill. Wilcox identified the mental struggles that employees everywhere were dealing with and the fact that corporations didn’t know how to help those employees.
“The biggest themes were, one, employers didn’t know how their employees were doing,” Wilcox said. “They were adjusting to work from home. They’ve never done that before and so they had lost those touchpoints with their employees and they were just like, ‘We don’t know how they’re doing. We don’t know what they’re struggling with.’ So they had very little insight into the well-being of their employee base. And then they just knew their employees were struggling. They were stressed. They were trying to balance all these things. It was just an insane amount of change in a very short period of time, which causes any normal human stress and it was just at mass.”
In response, Wilcox created a new platform that corporations could offer to employees that included all manner of mental health resources.
“We had the opportunity to position the business in such a way that we could help serve that need and help break down those stigmas and preconceived notions about what mental health is and what is normal or okay,” Wilcox said. “And I was just like, ‘Yeah, I want to tackle this. I think I can do a lot of good for a lot of people and help them avoid those feelings of inadequacy and brokenness that come along with mental health challenges.’”
Wilcox rebranded Incorporate Massage in a matter of weeks and has now grown her new business, Nivati, in a similar manner as her previous company. But Wilcox will be the first to tell you that scaling is not easy, and every stage of growth is different.
“The skills that get you from zero to a million in revenue work against you in the next phase of growth,” Wilcox said. “So everything that I’m really good at where I could just like dig in, do the work. I’m doing marketing, I’m closing all the deals and doing the sales myself, I’m building the product. Everything that made me super successful, super with the air quotes. Being able to just do the pivot, do the work, make sure we have product-market fit, figure out how to go to market strategy, all of that, building it all myself is what got me to where we’re at right now, but if I continue to do that the company will fail. It will not be successful unless I can now transfer and delegate all of those responsibilities out to the rest of my team members. And that is really hard.”
To hear more about Wilcox’s pivot and what she is building with Nivati, tune into Up Next in Commerce.
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