Leading a start-up requires resilience, vision, and an entrepreneurial spirit. You’re responsible for branding your new business, acquiring stock for sale, and raising funds from would-be investors.

You’ll also need to adopt the role of CEO, CFO, and COO in the early days of your new startup. Keeping track of every detail in a startup can be a real challenge if you’re not used to making such big calls on a day-to-day basis.

Rather than relying on your intuition, adopt a data-driven approach to decision-making. Doing so will aid your efforts to grow your business and will ensure that you pivot away from unprofitable ventures before incurring hefty losses. A data-decision approach can help you stay calm in a crisis, too, as you’ll have an accurate understanding of your assets, income streams, and stock levels.

Adopting AI Collecting and crunching data can feel like a tall order when working alone on your new startup. If, like most entrepreneurs, you hardly have time to make lunch between order fulfillment and paperwork, manually analyzing large data sets may be beyond your scope. **

However, that doesn’t mean you need to forgo data analytics altogether. Rather, you need to adopt AI to do the heavy lifting for you. You can find the right AI program for your business by:

• Preparing for AI: Ensure your data is ready for AI analytics by cleaning and organizing your data sets before you install a new AI program. You’ll also want to ensure that your data is stored in a program that grants permission to your AI tools.
• Choosing the Right Program: Selecting a program that suits the size of your business can be tricky. Some AI software is better suited to large-scale enterprises, while other tools are built with startups in mind. Choose a platform with an established track record in your industry and do your due diligence before signing up for lengthy contracts.
• Exercise Caution: Avoid the temptation to use every AI tool on the market. Over-relying on publicly available tools like ChatGPT and Gemini can land you in hot water, as consumers will spot AI-generated content marketing. This mistake can undermine your credibility and detract from your efforts to build your brand.

Finding the right tool for you can aid your efforts to lead a data-driven business. AI tools can deepen your understanding of industry trends, help you identify your most profitable niches, and boost your productivity. Data-driven AI tools can aid your efforts to pitch your idea to new investors, too. This is crucial if you wish to expand on your current success but need to raise some capital first.

Leveraging data analytics can also reduce your business risk. Making accurate decisions quickly is key, as you haven’t yet built a large emergency fund and need to pivot away from unsustainable operations quickly when profitability takes a downward turn. AI can help you make informed decisions by using data to instantly assess your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.

When to Pivot Your Startup Almost every established business has been forced to pivot towards a new business strategy in the face of industry-wide headwinds. Starbucks used to sell coffee machines and beans rather than hot ready-made brews, YouTube launched as a video-based dating app, and Play-Doh was originally a wall-cleaning product.

However, knowing when, how, and why to pivot can be tricky. You don’t want to overreact to a dip in sales and shouldn’t tear up your business plan when a single client goes missing. Instead, maximize your chances of making a great decision by using data to pivot properly. You can use data sets to identify:

• Long-term profitability patterns
• Market trends that impact your company’s ability to succeed
• Competitors performance
• The elements of your business that are the most profitable

Sometimes, pivoting means that you must abandon a venture producing conservative gains in favor of a stand-out product that is drawing in cash. Doing so can feel like a gamble if you’re new to entrepreneurship and want to minimize risk. However, failing to pivot towards your most profitable product, service, or industry niche will only cost you in the long run.

When planning a pivot, be sure to create a data-driven project timeline. Creating a project timeline gives your pivot a clear scope and reduces the risk of bottlenecks forming during your transition. If you utilize AI, consider creating a dynamic project timeline. Dynamic project timelines give you a deeper understanding of your progress and help you keep track of data related to key milestones, task ownership, and upcoming start/end dates.

If you’re considering a major pivot, consider hiring the services of a trusted mentor or joining a Fellowship program. Fellowship programs give you instant access to a network of experienced peers and can boost your overall business IQ. Tapping into a mentorship network can improve your data analytics skills, as you’re sure to find plenty of support from mentors with more business analytics experience. This can be a real boon in a crisis when you may find that the pressure of running a startup undermines your ability to think clearly.

Reacting to a Crisis No business leader wants their firm to experience a crisis. However, as a startup leader, you will likely experience an unexpected event. Supply chains have been notoriously unreliable in recent years, inflation has caused costs to spiral, and the rise of e-commerce has changed the way people shop.

Making data-driven decisions can help you respond properly during a crisis. Data-driven thinking will ensure that you have a complete list of all your assets and that you can accurately assess the scale of the problem you face.

Collecting and analyzing data during a crisis will make your startup more resilient in the long run, too. Leveraging data helps you embrace a “Build-Measure-Learn” approach to help you budget for future crises and increase your chances of surviving industry-wide headwinds. This approach can also help you stay calm during a crisis, as you’ll have plenty of historical data to reflect on.

Conclusion Data-driven decision-making is crucial when considering an operational pivot. You shouldn’t make big decisions based on gut feelings and should avoid the temptation to ignore broader market trends. Get the ball rolling by using an AI assistant to aid your analytic efforts. This will reduce the time you spend manually sorting through data sets and ensure you’re making decisions based on accurate, up-to-date information.