Speaker 1: Hi everyone, I'm Erica Olson with OnStrategy. Today's whiteboard session is putting your SWOT to use. So one of my biggest pet peeves in any strategic planning process is going through the whole exercise of research, internal, external sessions, and sticky notes to build a great SWOT. Your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities, and your threats. And then you get done with that and then you don't use it to build your plan because nobody knows what to do with it. So this video is going to rescue that problem. A SWOT is an awesome tool. Let's learn how to use it. So tip number one is if you have a SWOT that's massive, meaning just maybe 20, 25, 30 points under each of your four quadrants, a really awesome suggestion is to take it apart and organize it under your strategic objectives. So that means you're almost putting together like a mini little SWOT for each of your strategic objectives or your strategic objective themes, if you will. So that's a really great way to just make sense of your SWOT. So would recommend that. If your SWOT's not massive, don't do that. You don't need to do it. The rest of the discussion will pertain no matter which path you take. So then what we're going to do is we're going to go goal and initiative hunting in our SWOT. So by that, I mean, what are goals and how are initiatives? Might we move our organization forward? What are we going to learn in our SWOT that we want to turn into goals and initiatives? That's really the ultimate goal. So here's how we're going to go about this. It's a little bit different than your standard Google search when you say, oh, match strengths and opportunities and weaknesses and all of that. We're not going to do that. We're going to do something different. We're going to use each quadrant very specifically. So to go goal and initiative hunting. People love that, by the way. So for our strengths, a couple of examples here, strong brand, high staff retention, repeatable processes, those all might be strengths. Remember, our strengths and weaknesses are internal and they're controllable, meaning if you want to bump up your strengths, you can. You have control to do so, resources notwithstanding. Same thing with weaknesses. You can solve these things if you choose to do so. That kind of keeps this side of your SWOT working for you and this side of your SWOT working for you. So internal, external, great. So strengths, what do we do with the strengths quadrant? Those are really good sources for competitive advantages. Some of them may actually be current competitive advantages. Others might be those that you need to develop, in which case those are great candidates for initiatives. So that's what you do with your strengths. Now with your weaknesses, what do you do with your weaknesses? Normally there's a lot here. Remember, we said you could control them or change them or turn them into strengths if you wanted to and need to. So a suggestion would be you need to pick the urgent and important. So a simple way to do that is a lot of times you just know those that you absolutely need to tackle. If there's really too many of them and you need a better process, use an effort impact grid to determine which of these you absolutely need to move forward. So just Google effort impact, effort impact them, and you'll know which weaknesses you need to turn into goals or initiatives. This side of your SWOT is your external. It's what you can influence. So remember, opportunities are how we're going to grow normally. There's more opportunities than any organization can tackle. So what do we do with that? We need to prioritize them. We prioritize them using a market attractiveness grid. We have a whole video on that, so just Google that and learn how to put together a market attractiveness grid. I know it sounds like a lot, but it's really not. It's super smart specifically to really, you know, when you've got new geographies, new products and services, stuff you could do with your current customers, there's always way too much. Great tool to help you prioritize and focus. And then threats. Honestly, most SWOTs don't have a ton of threats. We don't love threats, but they're super important to be aware of and watch. The global economy, of course, maybe there's industry and consolidation, maybe there's new regulations. You know, you can't really do anything about those, but you certainly can be prepared for them. Let's agree that you're going to watch those that are important and you would bring those into your quarterly refreshes to determine whether or not you need to turn them into initiatives. So your initiatives come from those competitive advantages that you need to create, those weaknesses that are urgent and important, and those opportunities that you're prioritizing. And with that, you have put your SWOT to work. Thanks for tuning in. Subscribe to our social channels. Happy strategizing.