Using SWOT for your Small Business

Business brain, episode 518 for Wednesday, January 24, 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where you sometimes send in stuff. Sometimes we come up with stuff. We take the stuff. Concepts, ideas, actions that other people have taken, actions that we have taken. We dissect them, we analyze them, we go through them together. Me, him, you. So that each of us can tune our business brains every single episode. Sponsors for this episode include gosquaredaway.com highly educated military spouses to be your remote executive assistants, and gusto.com businessbrain, where you get three months of payroll, benefits, admin, and more. Totally free. We'll talk more in depth about each of those in a little bit. For now, here in slightly warmer Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out here in wet California, I'm Shannon Jean.

That's atypical for you to be.

It is. It's been great. Yeah, we've get pounded. We've had a lot of rain out here, which is fantastic, which means a lot of snow, which we. You know, California relies on the snowpack. Right. To. To get through. Because a big part of the state is desert.

Right, people? Snowpack keeps your water, keeps your, like, keeps you hydrated. I got it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's good. It's good. Hey, before we get into our main topic today, which is, we're going to talk about SWAT S wot I did this exercise that I wanted to talk about. Just throw it out there. And it is. We. We did a show about. What do we call it? Your. Your cause, your grand cause. Something like that. Yep. A while back from a post from a guy on X named Girdley. Yep. And we talked about how that added to your business and got everybody on board. And I started thinking about it, and.

Then your noble cause. That would be your noble cause, business brain508.

Yeah. Yeah, that's great. And I listened to a. A great podcast called how to Take over the World, which is just tremendous. I can't recommend it enough. Okay. Talks about leaders, historical leaders, and then it kind of brings in a business aspect. And they did a couple episodes on the Rothschilds. Oh, that was fascinating.

Oh, I bet. Yeah.

Really good. And I learned a lot. And one of the things that they had was a very strong family motto. And I thought, hey, there you go. Yeah. And I said, you know what? Um, we. We should have a family motto. My daughter. Our family's growing. My daughter's getting married this year. My son is. Graduated from college. I don't know where he's going to wind up. Sure. But the things that are really important to this small core group, we want to keep together and educate this next group.

Right.

People that eventually come along. And plus, you're bringing in outsiders. Right. That are going to marry into your awesome family.

Yes.

And so over the holidays, we did an exercise. I got the whiteboard out. I actually got the quartet. Big, giant whiteboard that they sent. That they sent me, which is terrific.

Yeah.

And I posted a picture of it up on the. Up on Twitter. But anyway, we. We picked out, like, the top 20 words that represented our family, and I thought it was pretty cool and you could do it with your business. And I, I. We got a great. A great response out of it. And. Yeah, I thought. I thought it was great, so I just thought I'd throw it out.

I like that idea. Do you. Do you. Have you solidified your family and do you mind sharing it?

No, I don't mind at all. Let me go. I have to go into my Google Drive, which I do right now. Okay. And right here. So I shared it with Everybody. We had 20 words, and then everybody got the vote.

Okay.

And. And I was kind of looking for three or four words that were really.

Nailed it, that resonated with everybody.

And I also learned during this exercise is that with Google Sheets, it has a calculation that converts to whatever language you want. And in this case, I wanted this to convert to Latin because I want to put this on a family crest and have it Latin. It'd be kind of cool. Yeah. So the winners were. The top fours were Ambition, which is Ambitio. Courage. Okay. Which is Animus. Authenticity, which is Veritas. And Creativity, which is great. I don't think I have it. Whatever reason I don't have Latin on here. But I thought those four words because. And those were the. Those got the most votes. And some of us didn't vote at all for certain ones, of course. Other ones. Yeah. And there were five of us voting. So now. So now I'm going to put those together. We're going to build a crest, and on we're going to. Every new child born into the family gets that tattoo. And. No, but we're gonna do, you know, do some. Some.

No, you can't. You can't tattoo a child, but you can brand a child.

Yeah, we'll take that route. Just brand. Awesome. It's fine. We'll just brand up. It's cool. Because now I. I feel. Yes. Quick. They won't remember. It's it's something that we can discuss and keep discussing as a family grows out grandkids and all this kind of stuff. So. Yeah, that'd be kind of cool. And I just wanted to share it with our audience.

I think it's great. I love it. I, I. There is power in, in this. My, My great grandfather did really well for himself. He actually helped kind of build the railroads throughout New England. He helped save a bunch of companies and stuff. I met him a few times, but I was very, very young. Never. Never really got to know him, but he actually, he and, and his wife wrote a book about their lives. It's, it's. We call it the Red book in our family, and it's cool. It has persisted and every, Every, you know, grandkid up through my generation, everyone was given a copy of, of the Red book, and there are, there are still some extra copies around, but he, he did, you know, he, he prioritized family over all else, and the book was a part of that. I mean, it was his story, but it was for his family and really told the story of how he built his. His family. And his legacy is that the family remains connected, you know, decades after his, his passing. And it's amazing. He had bought a bunch of land in, in Booth Bay Harbor, Maine. And his idea was that this would become like, family compound. Ish.

Kind of.

Yeah, yeah. And, and it would be a place that the family could always go. And some of the land had to be sold off because there, the house he lived in wound up being sold off because at the time it needed to be liquidated, no one person could. Nobody could pick it up.

Right.

It was, it was worth millions. And so it was. Yeah, but so that, and that unfortunately remains outside of the family, and at least at, at the moment. But, you know, there's, there's always talk of bringing it back in, but, yeah.

I think it's a good exercise.

But yeah, he, he succeeded in that. Like, the f. Most of the family lives, like, has retired and lives up there, which is amazing to me.

Amazing.

Most of the time it's, you know, the siblings fight about the land and it gets, they, they sell it for the cash and that's the end of it. But.

That's.

Right, but you start doing things like this, and it helps cement that family first kind of, you know, remember that there is, there's value here. I think it's great, man.

I love it. It's a good, great exercise, and I was happy that everybody was excited about doing it.

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Okay, sure.

You know where you're, you're looking at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Right.

You got it.

Okay.

Weakness, opportunities and threats. And it's also, I mean, it's used in the corporate world a lot. And matter of fact, this idea came from a great follow on Twitter called the Management Consultant. And we'll put a link in the show notes. You can find them up. I'll repost it as well. And he talked about how it's a great time of the year to be sitting down and considering these things. Your strengths, your weaknesses, what opportunities that you've got and what the threats are to your, to your business.

And so looking at, like, it's not just swatting a given project or thing. This is zooming out and doing it for, for your entire business.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I thought it was great and I'd love to, you know, I wanted to talk about it from a small business perspective because I think it's, I just, I mean, I, I know what it is as well, and we've done it in planning, but I love this. There's some great, he's got a great chart up here to help you break down, you know, what these strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats may be. And it's, I think it'd be great to share with your team to sit and discuss it so you can focus on, you know, okay, here's our strength. What's working great that maybe we want to lean into. What are we the best at, you know, what is it? And if you can't identify something, that's a problem.

No, this is why these are good things to do. I. Yeah, I never thought about doing it for just the entire business, but. Yeah, I mean, like. Like you said, what are we. What are we great at?

Yeah. What are we good at?

You know, the second question he puts up there is, what unique resources do we possess? What. Which I call, what are our unfair competitive advantages?

Exactly.

What do we have that someone else can't have? And it's good to know if you don't have an answer to that question too. Like you said.

Yeah. You want to. You know, all businesses want to rise above mediocrity.

Right, Right.

And even if you didn't invent a new widget or come up with some fantastic new thing, if you're, you know, a contractor, H vac person, I mean, I was in the, you know, tech repair business. It wasn't, you know, rocket science, but the way we did it was our strength. And the way we learned how to manage our customers and to deliver a level of service that they weren't used to and to thrill our customers, that was our strength. And we. We leaned into that as much as we possibly could because that was our unfair advantage.

That's it.

That. Right. That we could do it so quickly and we knew, you know, how to handle people and the sense of urgency. All things that I've talked about on the show over the years. But we also had a lot of weaknesses. Right.

And of course, every business does, folks.

And I'm happy to be out of that tech space now, because one of the biggest weaknesses is the commoditization of the. Not even just the products, but the.

Services, the service, the business in and of itself.

In and of itself, over time, just got driven, driven, driven. And there's so many competitors came into the market that were solely focused on price that it just became like, why are we here? And that's the customer. If you're solely focused on price all the time, you're just gonna attract the worst type of customer. And, you know, we always wanted to be on the high end and offer another level of service, but it became more and more difficult. So that was the weaknesses. That was our tough love. I mean, I wound up eventually selling the business and getting out of that because of that reason, because I don't. Quite frankly, I didn't know how to innovate past it, and I'm not sure that it does when. When. When you would go to every single store, you know, whether it was a. I mean, when stap. Getting into the repair business, I thought, oh, wow, this is bad news.

Yeah.

Right. Because these folks want you to come in and buy paper, for crying out loud.

Yep.

And that's. They're going to make crazy margins on paper and do this repair for nothing. So what things don't work. Really, really important. And then what your opportunities are.

Yes.

What is the next thing you know, when I got into the repair business, it was crazy. You know, big monitors, desktops. I mean, it wasn't. The technology wasn't even good enough that. Where you could solely run your life or your business on a laptop.

Oh, yeah, I remember. Yeah. Laptops were too slow.

The process, because the battery life and all this kind of stuff. So the things we could work on were great, but over time, it just got less and less and less. And so you constantly had to innovate. And that's. What are the opportunities and how do you take the next step? You know, from working on Apple color laser printers to realizing that laptops are now the most important business tool.

Yep.

And trying to get, you know, working to get a laptop pickup box in every DHL van in the country. Sure. Yeah. That's. Those were our opportunities. And you have to identify them and try it. Experiment and see if it. See if it works. And luckily it did work. And we were able to stay in that business for, you know, 20 years before it just became, you know, ridiculous.

Yeah, right. No, that. Yeah. I. I want to do this for my business. I am not necessarily eager to see all of the results.

I'm never. I hate bad news.

Right, right.

Exactly. Yeah. It's the optimist dilemma is that I don't want to sit down and talk about the, like this last thing, the threats. I don't want to do it. I don't want to know what my competitors are doing. It's just my human nature. I just want to focus on what we're good at. But you need to know.

You have to know it is good. Like, it is good to carve out moments where you make yourself aware of these things and you. And you give yourself opportunity to think about these things in time. You don't want them. You don't want to be preoccupied with the threats all of the time because. Yeah, you.

That's right.

You have to. You have to believe that there is a reason to go and. And, like, do the work each day.

Yes. Yeah.

And if you're obsessed about the threats all the time, that will paralyze you.

But I do believe in. If you can't do it, somebody in your organization needs to be the designated downer.

Yes.

Because they need to want the. Okay, great. All these optimistic things are great and we're going to achieve all these great things. But here's the immediate threat that we need to address competitive issues which, like I just talked about price, regulatory issues. You know, Apple hated companies like us because we, quote, didn't follow the rules and we sourced parts in the gray market and they didn't like it. They don't. They just, yeah, just hated it. So it was constant battle that you have to go through. So it's important to sit down. I love this framework because it walks you through it and you can sit down and just kind of lay things out and develop a roadmap and maybe it's for six months, three months, maybe it's for your entire year. And now's a great time to do it. We're still in January and I'd love to hear how you have used this before. You know, feedbackusinessbrain Show. Share your concept. This SWAT or whatever fancy acronym you may have, help us learn more and share to the business brain as a whole.

Yeah, swat also feedbackusbrain show. Just like he said. Make sure you check out our sponsors, gusto.com businessbrain and go squared away and go to businessbrain show and sign up for our mailing list so you get all the show notes in your inbox and keep living that charmed life. We'll see you next time.