Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive into the wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, you could hit that subscribe button and do a review on your favorite podcast app. Helps more people learn how to have positive impact through values based business. Thank you so much. It's a little bit crazy out there, folks, if you haven't noticed.

And so today, it's time for our solo episode. Our title is Beyond the Budget Cuts, Staying Profitable When Everything Changes. And that's with myself, Paul Zellizer, the founder of this podcast now, the longest running social entrepreneur podcast in the world. Thank you for your many years of support. I wanna start with acknowledging these current economic conditions. We are seeing historic government cuts. We're seeing financial uncertainty, a lot of questions about tariffs and renegotiating world trade agreements, and that's leading to some very significant shifts in market conditions. In this context, many social entrepreneurs are looking at needing to do or thinking about doing major pivots, whether that's in the customers they're serving, their offerings, or their business model.

So my goal in this episode is to give you three proven strategies so that if you decide to pivot or you need to pivot, that you can do so successfully. I'd like to start with a story for my own business. One of the things I've really enjoyed doing the past two years, that is in 2023 and 2024, I was the business coach for an SBA funded Small Business Administration, a US government economic development arm, funded accelerator called Thrive. It was a program that in 2024 was in 71 cities throughout The US, and I was the business coach for the Albuquerque cohort. We had 21 or 20 graduate in 2023, and we had 17 people in the cohort in 2024. Just such an opportunity after doing lots of work online to be engaged in our local community and really helping bricks and mortar businesses who had big vision for making Albuquerque a better place by growing the economy come together. It was fabulous. And in February, we found out just as we were starting to get ready to recruit for the 2025 cohort that the funding had been cut.

It was a significant, like, it was 13 or 15% of my revenue in 2024. So, you know, it wasn't a catastrophic change, but it certainly was a dent. And more than that, it's just something I had come to love doing. I'm still in touch with many of the entrepreneurs who went through those cohorts and just fabulous humans. And I was both on a revenue perspective, but also in a purpose and meaning perspective was feeling that hit. Within two weeks, somebody reached out via LinkedIn and somebody who had been familiar with my work through the podcast and recruited me, and I am now signed the paperwork to be an adviser and a mentor for another accelerator called the Four Corners Clean Tech Accelerator. The Four Corners refers to where Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico all come together in this, like, plus sign shaped configuration. And I'm incredibly excited to be part of this accelerator and to pour some of that energy and that excitement into something that feels also very values aligned.