A Deep Dive into SWOT Analysis and Its Role in Strategic Planning

Welcome to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. My name is Angela Mondor, also known as the Geeky Girl. In this podcast, we’re going to be talking about some amazing things to help you get over overgiving.

Hi and welcome to this episode of the Overgiver’s Anonymous podcast. My name is Angela Mondor. I’m also known as the Geeky Girl. And today I want to talk to you about a SWOT analysis. Chill, chill, relax. Wait, don’t go. This is a great way to look at your business, yourself even and let me make it fun.

I know that a SWOT analysis can feel really strange or it can feel corporate y or restrictive, but we’re going to have some fun. We’re going to deep dive into it. Yes, we’re going to talk a little bit about how it works with your strategic planning or planning parties as we like to call them. But the SWOT analysis, I want to take this in a different direction than maybe you’ve heard of before.

Okay. It is important. To look at yourself and your business and see what are your strengths where are the weaknesses, where are opportunities and threats, which is all a SWOT analysis is. Being able to see what needs to happen in order for you to be successful is valuable and so it’s crucial to us as neurodivergent human beings.

Sometimes we need somebody to do the SWOT analysis with us. Maybe there’s some things you can’t see but you’ve had other people mention things to you or You’ve heard other people talk about stuff and you’re like, what does that really mean to me and my business? So sometimes going through it with a mastermind group or a community or even with your coach, this can be a valuable tool for you to be able to see what you would like to change, what you need to work on, all those kinds of things.

And we’re going to focus on strengths, promise. Okay, so that’s, that SWOT analysis is literally a bird’s eye view of What is awesome and what needs work and where might we go and how might we get there? That’s all it is. Okay. So this can be, like I said, you can do this on yourself. If you’re a solopreneur you can do this on the business, even as a solopreneur there’s different ways to look at it.

Okay, so let’s break down these components. We’re going to do first on the first component we’re going to talk about is our strengths. So you think about a SWOT analysis, literally take your piece of paper divide it into four, Like a crisscross top left hand corner is your strengths.

This is where we’re going to talk about what you’re really good at or what the business is great at. The attributes that contribute to your success or the success of your business. So unique your unique skills or your brand recognition, maybe your loyal customer base. It could even be some systems that you’ve built, right?

Those kinds of things like what is successful about you and your business or you or your business. And reflect on your own strengths. Think about all the things that are great about you and what you do. And like I said, sometimes it’s difficult for us to see that. And you might need to ask help. You might need to ask somebody, Hey, what are some of my strengths?

Or what do you think is awesome about my business? And get some help to get those information pieces together. And the more you do this, the better it’s going to get for you. So the next one on the top left hand corner is. Weaknesses. Let’s be really careful about this. Okay. Weaknesses are things that hinder your performance or things like, for example, maybe you have resource limitations.

You’re trying to get these things done, but you don’t have enough man hours, whether that’s, you don’t have enough hours. Your team doesn’t have enough hours. I mean, you don’t have a team yet and you need to be able to do that or skill gaps or processes that are maybe inefficient or things that need to change in that way.

So you’re going to address those by identifying them in that site as well. Okay, stick with me. I know weaknesses suck. I really hate filling out the weakness part. Just saying, but I’ve got some really cool stuff around the corner for you. Bottom left is your opportunities. Now, opportunities show up in our business all the time.

They show up in our lives. We get to choose what opportunities we get to partake in. But it’s great to write down all those opportunities in one place so that you can look which ones do I want to partake in? Opportunities could be an emerging market or a new place that you could market yourself, or maybe it’s a technological advancement in a software that you use for your clients, or maybe it’s a trend, an industry trend, or a trend with your clients.

It could also be a coaching programs or a group program or something that you thought has been an opportunity for some growth and change inside there. There’s lots of different ways that we see opportunities. It could even be an opportunity to change or tweak what you’re doing inside your business to allow you to offer something a little different inside your business for your client.

So there’s lots of different kinds of things we put into that opportunity square. Now on the bottom right hand corner is where we see our threats. Now, threats and weaknesses, they’re both on the right side, and they’re both kind of bleh, in terms of how they feel. However, really, really important, a threat could be an external challenge that shows up.

Maybe you are you know, an affiliate for a specific company, and you’ve been doing really great as an affiliate, or you’ve really enjoyed being an affiliate, but they’ve now put into some barriers where you can’t be an affiliate anymore because you don’t fit their model of what they want. That is a threat to perhaps even income, different things that are impacting your business.

It could be an economic downturn. It could be competition or maybe some regulatory changes that have happened inside your business model. But then you can put the threats down over on that side. Now, here’s what’s really important when you get this all filled out. I want you to focus on your strengths.

How can you be better at your strengths? The weaknesses literally turn into opportunities, but in a different way, because now these are the things that maybe you need to outsource. Maybe you need to delegate to somebody on your team, or maybe there’s some automations you can run that can clear up some of those weakness pieces.

If all you did was spend time getting better at your weaknesses, then you wouldn’t be getting stronger on your strengths. Straight up. And you wouldn’t enjoy things very much. Think about the last time you were in a position where you thought, Oh, I just have to get better at this. Maybe you were at school.

It was where it was for me. And there was something I just couldn’t do. And so, for example when I was in, oh gosh, I think I was in junior high at the time. Might have been high school, but anyway I was at the school and I had to do a book report. First of all, I had a hard time reading back then.

You’d be surprised because I read hundreds of books now. But back then I had a really hard time reading. I was great at participating in class discussions. And I wasn’t really good at writing. Still not awesome at writing, to be honest. Although that’s not 100 percent true. I’m working on it. I’m certainly way better than I was then.

But we had to do book reports. And so I sucked at all of the things to do with book reports. And I have no idea where this idea came from because I was young, but I had said to my teacher, Hey, would it be okay if I did a verbal book report instead? Okay. So my weaknesses obviously are laid out in there that I, you know, didn’t do a good job writing.

I wasn’t great at reading the entire book, but my strengths were paying attention in class, being part of. the class communication pieces, and I like talking in front of a group of people. So I have no idea how I did this, but I did go to the teacher and say, Hey, can I give an oral presentation instead?

They were flipping excited because none of the kids wanted to stand in front of their classmates and give an oral presentation. Like no, everybody was terrified of doing that, but I was able to do that. Got me through some really tough years because I had a hard time with writing and with reading and There were no services back then when I was in school I mean, I didn’t find out I had ADHD until I was in my 30s So I’ll tell you a little bit we didn’t have those kinds of things But so take that model and look at it focus on your strengths What are you really good at?

How can you mitigate those weaknesses? Not how can you get better at it? I didn’t go, how can I become a better reader? How can I become a better writer? It was, how can I mitigate those weaknesses? And the same thing can happen for you in your business today, in your, in your life even. How can you mitigate those weaknesses?

And the threats, how can I use that information about the threats in order to change what I’m doing so that I can create some opportunities? Geeky girl, when I first started, I was fixing computers, clearly not doing it now. And that’s because I saw opportunities to change what I was offering to my clients and provided them with something different, which then allowed me to become successful in that way and apply my strengths.

Okay. So this isn’t about being Down on yourself about your weaknesses or the threats. It’s about taking those things and turning them around. How can I mitigate these things? How can I use this knowledge, this information, to create a much better world for me to live in, for my clients, for my business and specifically those weaknesses.

A lot of times when you are able to delegate them, to offload them, to create automations, it frees up a lot of brain space so that you can be way more creative, you build your strengths in those strengths. You become stronger in all of those strengths. So how does this fit with strategic planning, might you ask?

It’s because you can take all this data and create a plan for yourself. Part of that planning is, of those weaknesses, what am I going to do with them? Am I going to offload them? Am I going to delegate? Am I going to create automations? That goes into, okay, in this next year of strategic planning, how am I going to offload?

How am I going to delegate? What automations am I going to create? That becomes part of the plan on how you’re going to strategically make your business better. Same as your strengths. How can I get better at my strengths? What opportunities are available to me and the business, and how am I going to vet those opportunities?

How am I going to see whether or not they’re the right choices for me? Those threats that are coming, they’re over there, they’re coming. How am I going to change what I’m doing so that I can avoid being knocked down by them? And instead, I can make some strategic plans so that I can have a much better, exciting business and avoid having to deal, maybe not having to deal with, but maybe we can avoid them all together, those threats or lessen the impact on your business with those threats.

So, the difference in goal planning. The purpose of the SWOT analysis is to identify the areas of focus. And then you can use that information to create the goals inside your business and make specific objectives inside there to add to your strategic plan. Okay. So this is valuable as a neurodivergent person, because it helps you to really take out some of the noise.

And really look, here’s where we can make some changes. Here’s where things can happen. And like I said, if you have trouble figuring out what your strengths are, which is something that a lot of people struggle with, don’t, don’t be worried about that. I literally was having trouble with that quite a few years ago, figuring out what my strengths were.

And what I decided to do at the time was I took A legal size piece of paper and I stuck it to my wall using like sticky tack. And then every time somebody said something about me in terms of my strengths, like things that I was good at or the things that they thought were amazing that I did, I wrote them on a sticky note and I stuck them to my wall.

That is still there these years later because it’s a good reminder of being mindful of what your strengths are. And it’s nice to see the nice things that people have said about me in the past. So I would keep a collection and I would just keep posting them there. And that helped me to build up my strengths.

Other things that can be helpful and have been helpful to me in the past is actually asking somebody what do you see as a strength in my business? Or what do you see as a strength in how I handle my clients or how I work with clients?

You can ask your clients. How did I best serve you? You know, what did you like about your experience with me? Would you like to work with me in the future if possible? Those kinds of things. You can ask your clients and they’ll tell you. Just have to listen. That’s the thing. We have to listen, take it in, and use it to your benefit.

Because when you rely on those strengths and you build those strengths, Oh, there’s no stopping you. Whatever success you’re looking for, you can make happen. So I hope that you take something out of this. Maybe you even take some of the fear out of the SWOT analysis and allow yourself to breathe and say, Hey, you know what, there’s some cool stuff I can make happen inside my business.

And this is a great tool that’ll allow you to be able to see these things more of a bird’s eye view way and can really drive your strategic plan. Give you an amazing plan to build your business. Hope you have a fantastic week. I look forward to talking to you next week.