Over the past 17 days, we’ve been discussing strategy:

We defined strategy as choosing to do activities that your rivals are not doing to get a competitive advantage.

Not just any activities will do. Choose activities that you believe will add greater value to your customers.

In our last post, we said that if you’re beginning to think about strategy, it may make sense to pick areas of your business that you perceive as problem areas – processes that are not working well. 

The point here is that your competition may be executing on their processes more efficiently than you, so executing well is just “table stakes.” They are the bare minimum if you expect to compete.

One way you can determine which areas need work is by performing a SWOT analysis

SWOT

Here is an easy template you can use. 

The SWOT analysis highlights your business’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

Take some time with your team to perform a SWOT analysis and rank order the issues. This tool can help your team get a consensus on what is most important.

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