MBA1426 How To Perform a SWOT Analysis & Stay Ahead of Challenges

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Business tips and strategies you can actually use every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how to perform a SWOT analysis and stay ahead of challenges. Part of being the leader of your business is being aware of what lies ahead in your business. What to look out for, what to take advantage of, what to double down on. And that's what a SWOT analysis does. I recommend doing a SWOT analysis every quarter in your business, so every three months. SWOT is an acronym that stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. I want to walk you through step by step how to do your own SWOT analysis for your business, how to make sure you actually get it done every quarter, and what to do with the analysis once you have done it. We've been doing SWOT analysis in our business for some time now and it's a great tool. This allows you to step away from working in your business and on your business instead. It gives you a chance to really take advantage of what's around you in your business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So to get started, I want you to grab a piece of paper. Yes. We're going to be interactive today. We want to make sure that you get this down. Now, if you're driving while you're listening to this podcast, make sure you go back to this part of the episode and re listen to it so you can do this exercise. Now, with your piece of paper, I want you to divide your piece of paper in half with a line going across the from the top to the bottom vertically. And then I want you to divide the paper as well horizontally with a line so you'll have four quadrants. You're dividing the paper into four bot and you're going to write strength in the top left hand corner and you're going to write weaknesses in the top right hand corner, opportunities in the bottom left hand corner and threats in the bottom right hand corner. This breakdown, this technique I learned from my own coach, Dan Martell, and I want to pass it on to you. And what I want you to do is in each quadrant, I want you to write four or five things. Four or five strengths in your business. What are you guys good at? What are you doing well? What are some of the things that you're really kicking butt on? Is it your customer service? Is it the product itself? Is it the teamwork? Maybe you're doing a great job hiring great talent. What are your strengths as a company, as a business? Write five of them down. These are the things that you're doing right. They really kind of hitting it out of the park and that you're proud of. The next box over with weaknesses, write down five things that you feel you're falling short. Is it communication in your company? Is it churning? Maybe it's growth? Maybe you feel you're not producing enough content. What are your five weaknesses, biggest weaknesses in your business right now? Next, bottom left hand corner, opportunities. What are some opportunities in your market, in your genre, in your niche that you're not exposing, that you're not doubling down on? I'll give you an example. Recently at Webinar Ninja, we decided to seek out an opportunity. And that opportunity was we just launched our all new automated webinars and we take a firm stance at Webinar Ninja that you should not lie to your customers. You shouldn't have what's quote unquote, simulated live webinars where you have these fake chats and these fake messages. Oh, this person just bought right now, when really it's all automated and it's not live. You should have a live webinar or you should do an automated webinar. You should not try to hoodwink your customers. The whole point of running a webinar is to build trust. And this is something that we've been doing and kind of having a stance on for some time, but we haven't really publicly said anything about that. We would just tell our customers, no, we don't do simulated webinars. We do automated, we do live, we do series, we do summits. And we're not the software for you. But we realized there's an opportunity here for us to talk about something in our space that no one else is talking about. The danger of running simulated live webinars is in our space. So we got in front of it and we actually wrote a really popular blog post on our blog, if you want to check it out, webinarnesia.com blog and it's gotten a lot of buzz because it's a controversial topic and no one is addressing it. So we decided to be the first people to talk about it. So that's an opportunity. Are there some opportunities for some partnerships that you're not exposing? Are there some new pieces of technology that you're not taking advantage of that you can use to leverage your business? What are some opportunities? Write five of them in this box. And then lastly, you have your fourth box, which is in the bottom right hand corner, which is threats. What are some potential threats that can happen to your business? Maybe a technology might change. Do you have coverage in your team? Does one person hold the keys to everything? Or if that person's sick or unfortunately has to leave the company, will your team be able to pick up where that person left off? And there's transparency. Is there a competitor out there that's gobbling up your market share? Is a recession around the corner and is it going to affect your business or your customer's spending power? These are some threats as examples. So write down five potential threats. I know this might sound a little negative or doom and gloom, but it's important to know what could happen to kind of think what if, so you can be prepared. What's great about a SWOT analysis is that one you're writing down your five biggest strengths. Why? So you're like, hey, you're identifying. You're giving your chance time to think. We get so busy at work in our business, and we're go, go, go, and we don't really get a chance to pause and say, hey, what's working? What are we doing? Well, and the reason why we want to stop and think about that is, hey, we ought to double down on that. Let's not stop doing those things. Those things are really helping us out. When it comes to the weaknesses, you're realizing, hey, we need some help here. We need some training, we need some hires, we need some help. This is something we're not happy about. You're really trying to identify that. When it comes to opportunities, you're realizing, hey, there's some money on the table here that we can really take advantage of. We can take off the table. Here are some things that we can explore that we haven't explored yet. This is how we can grow. And then with the threats, it really allows you to say, what if? What if this happens? And you have a plan accordingly. It's not just worrying, right? We're not just there writing threats so we could worry. We're writing threats so we could say, hey, if this happens, wow, we gotta be ready. Let's change things around. So just in case it does happen, we're prepared. It's not a threat anymore. We're addressing the threats now by doing a SWOT analysis every three months. You're staying at the head of the game. You're getting the sense of confidence that you're doing everything you can to compete in a competitive market. So what we like to do is we like to do a SWOT analysis with the management team of our company the last Friday of every quarter. So the last Friday in March, the last Friday in June, the last Friday in September, and of course, the last Friday in December, and we revisit our SWOT from the last quarter. Did we actually double down on those strengths? Did we actually work on our weaknesses? Did we do something about those opportunities? Did we address those threats? Because sometimes we forget, sometimes it goes in the back burner, but sometimes we do it. So we want to cross those things off and make sure we're doing things now. You have a production schedule. You have work to do, you have things to sell, you have products to create. It's busy. I know, I know. This sounds like I'm putting more things on your plate. Not only the exercise itself, but the things you're going to have to work on off this exercise. So what's been recommended to me by my coach and what I recommend to you is especially the weaknesses and the threats. Your goal should be to at least cover 20% of these every year. So if you have five, that means one of each, right? One weakness, one threat. And you want to make sure before the end of the year, you're taking care of these. So by the end of the next five years, you're covering most of your weaknesses and most of your threats. Now, of course, other weaknesses might surface, other threats might come up, but let's be realistic about our time and just have that as a goal to take care of 20% of our weaknesses and threats before the end of the year. And of course, when it comes to strengths, we're just doubling down on that and opportunities. This is all about growth, how fast you want to grow. The more you do in this box, in the opportunity box, the more you're going to grow, the more you're going to put more fuel on the fire. So make sure you put it in the calendar. Whatever you use, a Google Calendar, ical, Yahoo, whatever it is, pop it in right now, what day? Every quarter, you're going to do your SWOT analysis at the start, at the end. But if you put in the calendar, it's real, you get a reminder you have to do it and you block out some time. It doesn't have to be too long. It could be an hour, it could be two hours. And it's just a time to stop and have a discussion about the state of the business. This is not a huge commitment. This is an hour or two every three months and it's going to be well worth it.

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As entrepreneurs, sometimes we don't know how important working on our business is compared to in. We want to make sales calls, we want to build our website, want to build a product, we want to answer emails. We feel like that's work. But the SWOT analysis type of work, this is really what builds your business for the future. This is what makes it really differentiate and it's the strategy that really makes the difference. Making the time to do this is time well spent. It's an investment. I used to kind of belittle these things and say, oh, you know, just get the work done. Well, it's important to know what to work on. What's important? Work smarter, not harder all the time. Right? And this is what a SWOT analysis allows you to do. Thanks so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Spotify or Stitcher or Overcast or Apple Podcast, we're on them all. Just hit subscribe right now. By hitting subscribe, you make sure when the next episode's available, it's ready for you right on your player. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I like using paper and pen to do these types of things. It's just easier to kind of scribble ideas down. And that's just my personal preference. But I do recommend if you're going to do that, take a photo of your SWOT analysis and save it somewhere so you can refer to it the next time you do it. So you can, you know, review your last month's or last quarter. I should say SWOT analysis. Keep it in a drive a folder and that way you have a soft copy of it. So just in case you lose that paper or maybe you have a remote team and you're not all in the same room, you can always refer back to it. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Freeride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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