How to Pivot Your Business Without Starting Over: Lessons from Becky on Failure, Visibility, and the Creative Alchemy Cycle
Dear Creator,
Did you know you can pivot your business without completely starting over? I talked to Becky Symes in this episode all about that. She’s a vision strategist and brand designer working with women building personal brands in the wellness, self-development and creative industries.
After 12+ years designing brands for herself and others, she is now in the middle of her own pivot: away from design as her main offering and towards vision strategy, group programmes and a bigger body of work built on the belief that ideas are an initiation.
Beyond design and strategy, she draws on a decade of circle-work and astrology studies, weaving ceremonial cacao and flower essences throughout her client practice.
Becky’s in the middle of a pivot. We talked about what that actually feels like, and what she’s learned about failure, fear, and finding the path that fits.
Key Highlights
A squiggly path to design
Becky’s first brand was a niche men’s accessories business, started with an ex-boyfriend. Her second was a skincare line she loved. Neither exists today, but she says each taught her something. She dropped out of a degree, taught herself design while building those brands, and spent her first two years of client work Googling everything and worrying she’d be found out. Eventually people started asking her for design work, which nudged her somewhere she says she never would have had the confidence to go on her own.
Why her first two businesses ended
She was candid about both. With the accessories brand, she had stock but couldn’t push past her discomfort with selling. With skincare, she was bootstrapping on thin margins while working 70-hour weeks in hospitality and living with her mom, and a reformulation setback drained her passion. Still, she noticed a thread… the skincare brand was about changing your relationship with yourself, which is what she helps clients do now.
From design work to vision strategy
Over the years of building brands and websites, Becky found that much of her client work was coaching founders through their own resistance. Now she offers one-to-one vision strategy, brand and web design, and a group program. She explained why group work matters too. When you’re the only one in your friend group building something, seeing yourself in other people’s experiences can land differently than advice from one coach.
The real fear isn’t failing, it’s being watched
One of the most useful ideas in the episode is that after you deal with the practical consequences of failure, the fear that remains is usually what will people think? Becky described how we engineer our actions around other people’s gaze, and how women in particular can feel pressure to downplay their success to avoid envy or rejection.
Success in the UK vs. the US
Becky has lived in both, so I asked how success is perceived. In her experience, the US cultural narrative encourages going after big dreams with a seemingly uncapped ceiling, while the UK has a stronger “tall poppy” tendency and class-based filtering that can make big visible success feel unwelcome. She was careful to say that this is her perspective, not a verdict on a whole country.
How she’s navigating her pivot
For years, Becky kept her spiritual practices (astrology, ritual, ceremonial cacao, flower remedies) separate from her business. She’s now bringing those parts together, and her approach to figuring it out was a mix of inner work and action:
Make time for ritual and examine why she feared being misunderstood.
Get people in your life who call you out when more journaling is just procrastination.
Test small. She ran beta offerings and used the feedback as data on whether she enjoyed it and whether people resonated, before building the polished version.
Compartmentalize without walls by moving her design work into a micro agency with a partner.
Her relationship with failure
Becky believes we can extract wisdom from nearly anything. Failure taught her to be more flexible and less attached to outcomes equaling her worth. Her practical advice is to grieve the thing that didn’t happen (there’s an “unlived life” with every idea), then choose a new path.
The Creative Alchemy Framework
Becky’s framework maps the six phases of bringing an idea to life. She explains them well in the full episode, though her key insight is that we don’t all move through the cycle the same way. She’s a “spark and launch, then wonder why nobody’s interested” person. Others get stuck in the void or the shape stage because launching feels like visibility. Knowing your pattern helps you decide when to bring in other people or different strategies. Becky also layers in astrology to understand how someone is creatively wired.
What she wishes she’d known before pivoting
“The gap is way bigger in your head.” We’re immersed in our own work and see every nuance of a pivot, while everyone else sees the sum of our parts. Most pivots are a small step, like one service to a slightly different service for the same client, so the shock is usually much smaller than we fear. And you’re never starting from scratch.
