SWOT, Strategy & Success: The Simple System to Make Smarter Moves

What if the difference between spinning your wheels and building real momentum came down to how you make decisions? 

In this powerful episode, Jim Krigbaum breaks down two of the most proven yet underutilized tools in business and life: the SWOT Analysis and the Boston Consulting Group Box. 

But this isn’t just theory—this is real-world strategy. Jim shows you how to identify your true strengths, uncover hidden weaknesses, maximize opportunities, and protect yourself from threats before they cost you time, money, and growth. You’ll also learn how to categorize your business (or even your life) into “cash cows,” “stars,” “question marks,” and “dogs”—so you can stop wasting energy on what’s not working and double down on what actually drives results.

If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure of your next move, this episode gives you a clear, practical framework to think smarter, act faster, and win bigger. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, leader, or someone ready to level up, this is your blueprint to making better decisions—and creating momentum that lasts.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Today we're going to talk about decision making and two models that we'll use, which is a SWOT analysis and the Boston Consulting Group's box decision process. We'll talk about those and how you can apply those to yourself, your business, and your products, your life, and just about anything that you want to compare and contrast and try and figure out what you want to do and help really get a real focus on what you're doing. Stay with us till the end, and you'll be able to use these tools in your business and in your life.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

With the 10 Keys to Thrive Podcast, it's your masterclass in momentum by International Business Strategist and your host, Jim Krigbaum.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Hi, I'm Jim Krigbaum, your host and mentor of 10 Keys to Thrive in Business in Life. Today we're talking about the SWOT analysis and the Boston Consulting Group's box analysis. These are two tools which I've used throughout the course of my career, and you will learn to use effectively if you practice the charm dance principles, and you'll learn to use them and understand how they apply to yourself and your business. Let's start with the SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis is a tool that is taught in most business schools, and it stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And a lot of times companies will do this on a product. I like to do it on a product, on your staff, on your resources, and the market. So you really want to do it across the spectrum. If you just do an analysis of the product, you're missing how your teams may fit into it. You're missing how you can maximize your resources and maximize your staff to achieve their greatest success and the greatest potential. So strengths. We take a look at strengths. So you look at your product, you look at the market, and you figure out why in the world would anybody buy your product? That's a question we all have to ask on anything we're selling, whether it's you're selling a product or you're selling yourself. On selling a product, why would anybody buy this? In today's world, you can source product from anywhere. Applications and AI, you can search the internet, you can search the markets and identify where the cheapest place to buy something is. You can search reviews. You can find out all you need to find out about a product by looking and searching on the internet. Use the tools, use artificial intelligence, use your chat GPT or Perplexity or whatever it is you use to analyze things. Ask it the right questions. Ask it what are the strengths of your product. Upload details on your product, upload designs, upload marketing material, and let the analysis, let the product, let the AI review those, and then it'll take a look at the market in a broader spectrum. It'll take a look at the internet, it will take a look at a competitor's documents. If you have a specific competitor or specific product that you want to compete against, upload that as well. Let's use the Ford Motor Company example. If I'm selling Ford F-150 pickups, I want to compare those with the RAM pickup. So I'll upload marketing details, I'll upload marketing sheets, analysis of those things into my AI and say, compare and contrast these two and tell me why in the world would anybody buy the Ford? What is its strengths? What makes it different? What sets it apart? And we do that a lot with commodities. How do you separate your product from a commodity to find a niche? What makes it different? What are its strengths? Then you look at weaknesses. What are the disadvantages? After you know the strengths, you can learn the disadvantages. If you don't know the strengths, you don't know what the disadvantages are. If you don't know the strengths of your competition, you don't want to know what the disadvantages are. That's why I say you need to become a student of the market, the M and Charm Dance. You need to understand the market. You need to understand it from top to bottom. You need to understand your product strengths, your product's weaknesses, your competitors' strengths. The best way for me to know that my product has strengths is to know that my competition has weaknesses. The best way to know that I have weaknesses is to know that my competitors have strengths. So you need to take the time to understand the markets. You can use AI to help you do that, but it also helps if you're a Ford dealer. You can just walk down the street to the Chevy dealer and act like you're buying a car. Ask them why would you buy the car? And they'll give you their sales pitch. By knowing their sales pitch, you then know how to counter it. You then know how to address it. So if you know your strengths and your weaknesses, weaknesses can also sometimes be strengths, and you have to look at that. Some things are a strength. For example, my ability to focus is a strength, but it's also a weakness because a lot of times I can focus on something too much and I miss all the other details. So sometimes a strength can be a weakness, and you have to understand the two. And you have to understand how to build the strengths and overcome the weaknesses. How do I downplay the weaknesses? You can't sweep them under the rug. You can't lie about them, but you need to understand what they are. You need to go back to your manufacturing and production or strategy and determine is there a way to get rid of that weakness? Is there a way to change that weakness, either neutralize it or change it into a strength? Opportunities. This is a broad perspective. You take a look at the 30,000-foot perspective and you say, what are the opportunities? What is the potential of this? Where can it go? You don't want to spend your time developing a product in a market that is a very small market. It may be a great product, it may be the best product in the world, but if the market is too small, if the opportunities aren't there, then there's no sense in spending your time, effort, and resources in developing it. Now, we talk about products where we can't identify the exact quantities of the product moving. The Sachiinchi was one, quinoa was another. On quinoa, we couldn't go in and say the market for red quinoa is X because we see what is moving. But we knew what the consumers wanted. We knew what the demand was because we took a look at the market. We studied the strengths and weaknesses of the product and said, hey, based on these strengths, this is an opportunity. It's an opportunity we need to develop. So you look at the opportunities and threats. What is going to stop you from achieving success? What is going to stop you from reaching your greatest potential? Is it economics? Is it tariffs? You know, we had a stainless steel import business and we thought we were sound and solid on that until all of a sudden tariffs hit us. We got hit with from going from zero tariffs to 50%. So all of a sudden our product became 50% more expensive. That was a threat. It was an unforeseen threat. If we had taken the time to look at it in detail, we might have seen that as a threat and we might have been able to address it. If we knew that when Trump came in, they were going to be hit with 50% tariffs, we could have built up our inventory and had products sitting here so that anything else new coming in would have been at a higher price and our product could move underneath it. Now we did have some inventory that we had sitting in the United States at the time the tariffs came on, and that inventory gained 50% value overnight just because of the tariffs. So that was a good situation for what we had in inventory, but bad for bringing anything else in. So threats can also be from our resources. What are the threats from the resources? I had a situation where I was working for a company and I had a contract. It negotiated a contract. It was fairly complex. We had three parties involved. We had to just diversify the risk so that it was shared appropriately between the parties. And we had this contract that we had signed. The company I was working for put press release in the Wall Street Journal and in the Forbes magazine and said, you know, our company did a contract with Kraft. It was great news. The threat was the company didn't have the resources to finance what we'd oversold. And I always had a problem when my banker said, you sell too much. It's like, wait a minute, I'm a salesman. How can I sell too much? But you can sell too much because you don't have the resources, the capital to finance it. So that is a threat. So you do strength, opportunities, and weaknesses and threats on a market. You do it on a specific product. You do it on your individuals. So in my organization, you can look and say, where is my organization weak? What are my strengths? What are my opportunities, my weaknesses, and threats? A strength in when I had my export business is that I had somebody that was fluent in Japanese and somebody that was fluent in Chinese. Those were two key languages for the markets we're going after. Those were strengths. Weaknesses were that we were a small company. We were a minority company, minority in size compared to the market. Our competitors were multi-billion dollar companies, and we hit$30 million at our peak. So we were a drop in the bucket compared to them. So that was a weakness. We weren't as big, weren't as strong. In fact, one time I was sitting in a good customer's office, customer bought about$3 million from us. So that was about 10% of our business. I said, Well, how do my prices compare? And the customer says, Oh, your prices are always best. You have great prices. I said, Great. How's our service? Your service is always best. You give full details, you communicate effectively, you communicate honestly, going back to the charm dance principles. I said, Well, wait a minute, how come I have$3 million and my competitor has$30 million? They pointed on the wall behind me, and I turned around. There's a picture of their chairman shaking hands of my competitor's chairman on the front page of Forbes magazine. We couldn't compete with that. So that was a weakness. So how do we change that weakness? How do we change the fact that we were small into a strength? Well, that was easy because we were able to move quickly. We were able to make decisions on an individual basis. We could look at things from the long term. Because the company was privately held. I didn't have to worry about pleasing stockholders immediately. I could look at the long-term value and the long-term growth of the business. So that weakness, we converted it into a strength and we promoted it as such. Opportunities, we looked at the opportunities. We understood what the opportunities for the business were. We looked at opportunities for our people. I sat down with my employees and the one who spoke Chinese. I said, What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish in your life? Because I've learned that the best way for me to get what I want is to help others get what they want. So we sat down and I said, What do you want to accomplish? You've got the language skills, you've got the marketing skills. Where do you want to go? What are the opportunities there? Same thing with the individual who spoke Japanese. I said, What do you want to accomplish? If they would have come to me and said, hey, I want to live in Hong Kong. I want to live in Japan where I can use these skills and be our representative, our agent there, then we could have built the company and built the structure and built the program to get them to achieve their goals. Again, the best way for me to achieve my goals are to help others to achieve their goals. Threats, we look at threats from the outside. What if a competition comes in and offers one of my employees more money? What if they try and hire them away? So there's a threat. I'm investing in this employee. I want the employee to be long-term because they make a mistake today. And as we talk about mistakes are experiments. And as if you learn from the experiment, it makes you better, it makes you stronger. So I had a philosophy of if my employees made a mistake, that's okay. We built from that. We said, okay, what did we learn from that lesson? Well, in the process there, I was building their skills and building their character and building their value in the market. The threat was that the competition could say, hey, this person's great. They've done this great things with for Jim's company. How do we hire them away? So that was a threat. Now, how do you do a SWOT analysis as far as the operational concept and the operational process? What I like to do is pull the team, pull the company away from their daily activities. Whether it's into a hotel over the weekend, whether it's to a resort or retreat, whether it's to my house, it doesn't matter. I needed to get them out of their comfort zone. I needed to get them into a uniform situation to where there wasn't a hierarchy because I needed the executives to communicate and I needed the line from workers and the four people to communicate. They had to communicate openly and without fear of reprisal. They had to be able to say what they felt. And we also have to make sure that you don't just have the salespeople. The sales team is going to sit there and they're going to come up with all these numbers. That's what the company did where we had the contract with Kraft. My goal was to go out and make the sale through Kraft. And I did, I made the sale. But we hadn't communicated with accounting. We hadn't communicated with the financial team to say, if we make this contract, can you afford it? Can we make it happen? So if you do a SWOT analysis and you just do it in a silo, you just have your salespeople, or you just have your marketing people, or you just have your operations, your production, your logistics, your accounting people in their own silo, in their own group, and you sit down and talk about it, you're missing the whole picture. You may have a situation where the salespeople say, we have this opportunity. We can sell 10,000 of these units. Production over here saying we can only produce 4,000. Doesn't matter what sales can do. We can only do 4,000. So by having these people together, they could communicate and say, okay, we can do 4,000, you can sell 10,000. We need to raise our price so we sell less and make more money. We need to increase our production so we can produce more product. What is the long-term expense of increasing our production? Are we going to be able to recuperate that? If we produce more, is the price going to go down and we actually end up losing money? That's where you have to understand the basics of supply and demand and understand being a price setter versus a price taker. Those are all topics that we cover throughout the Charm Dance, the 10 Keys to Thrive podcast is how to become a price maker as opposed to a price taker, how to move your product from a commodity to a niche product. So you bring these people off site, you have them sit down. Sometimes it's a day, sometimes it's a weekend, and you have discussions, you have open discussions. You allow people to talk freely, you encourage them to talk freely. One thing that a lot of people do is they'll do things where there are some games of some icebreakers to get it so people communicate. Now I've been in some of those, and I've been in some where one person ends up dominating the whole thing. If somebody's dominating and talking real loudly and say, this is what we're going to do, this is what I have a hard time arguing with them because, like, okay, let them run with their thing. How do I focus on what we need to do? And so you got to be careful that somebody doesn't dominate the conversation, somebody doesn't dominate the discussions. And you have to be able to control it. You want them to talk. You want them to communicate, you want them to challenge each other, but you don't want somebody that's dominating. You don't want to have people belittling people, you don't have people putting people down because of their thoughts. Every thought has an option, every opinion has a position, and everything must be taken into perspective. One of the things that we talk about is your view of what's going on is from your perspective, from where you sit, from what you see. Somebody over here is going to see things completely differently or from a different angle. So being able to get these people together, you can then paint a picture that it's three-dimensional. All of a sudden, you've got the view from here and the view from here and the view from here. So you've got all the individuals within the organization involved, getting them away, starting with the topics of, you know, what is our strengths? And when you're talking about the strengths, people will bring up challenges. They'll bring up some of the opportunities, some of the threats. And that's great. Put them on a chalkboard, put them on a white sheet, have it down so that you can go. Take that white sheet when you're done, post it in your office so people can see it. But before you do that, when you see this chart, when you see what's up there, figure out what we can do to change our weaknesses, what can we do to protect ourselves from the threats, and what can we do to maximize our opportunities. Doing a SWOT analysis without doing a plan on how to implement changes that accomplish your objective. You have to have a plan that changes your weaknesses to strengths and how you're going to do that. You have to have a plan that has how are you going to protect yourself from challenges. So you develop a plan, you execute it. One of the things that happens a lot of times, companies will get together, they'll have a retreat, they'll do a SWOT analysis, and they'll never do it again. They say, okay, we've done that. But a swallow analysis needs to be a moving picture. It needs to be a constantly changing picture because the environment is changing. The economic environment, the product environment, the technology that's being developed is changing. So you need to be able to have a moving picture, not just waiting for things. We did our analysis. We know what's going on because things change. Things change overnight. Particularly now we've seen AI coming in and changing the world and a lot of different things. So that is a SWOT analysis. The next one is the Boston Consulting Group's box theory. And what they do is they develop certain boxes. And one box is for cash cows, which is part of your business that is generating cash. And I had that when I had my export business, I had soft drinks that sold. And during particularly during the summer, soft drinks sold every day, every week. And at one point in time we were shipping 100 containers a week. That was a cash cow, was generating cash. And it was particularly a cash cow because we got paid within 14 days. We didn't have to pay our supplier for 30 or 45 days. So it generated cash. We could use that cash for other areas of the business. Stars. Stars are areas of the business that have growth potential. And as a business owner, you have to look and say, where are we going in the future? This works well when you're a private company and you can look at the future and you can invest in the long term. In my business, we had the soft drinks, which were the cash cow, but we also saw potential in organic products. And we also saw potential in dog food and dog products. Organic products took time. It took time to develop our supply chain. It took time to get a reputation that we could do that. That business was not creating profit immediately. It was creating potential. It's creating opportunities for the long term. The problem I had is the guy that was selling the soft drinks goes, but I'm making all the money and we're subsidizing over here. Yes, that's what's happening. That's part of the business decisions. That's what we're trying to do. We have a cash cow. How do we sell as much of this as we can to generate cash? So we can take these stars and move the stars into cash cows. That's what you want to do. Question marks, boxes for question marks, where you're not sure where the market is. You're not sure what the potential is. And those are things you're developing. Those are more long-term. Those are things that you can say, okay, I'm how am I going to develop this? One of the things I've mentioned in my podcast about Chen Sun Wong is that he doesn't get involved in a business that isn't going to go from zero to a billion dollars. So he's got a lot of question marks. He's got a lot of experiments. He's got a lot of challenges and opportunities he's trying to develop and make mature. And then the last one is dogs. And every business has dogs. Problem is a lot of time people love their dogs. They love the product that they built their business on, but that has changed. It may not be the most profitable. It may not be the best use of your resources. So you've got to take a look at the dogs. And at some point in time, you've got to put the dog asleep. You got to put the dog in the background. And you've got to take it so that your dogs are minimal. And you can have situations where I want to continue the dog because I love the dog. And we saw that with Georgian winemakers. The Georgian winemakers beat their chest and said, our wine is the finest in the world. To them it was. To the market, it wasn't. But they continued to produce it for themselves, kept their dogs alive. They kept it going because that's what they liked. But then they also at the same time, the better company said, what do we need to produce for the market? What do we need to change to meet the market demand? Why in the world would anybody buy our product? They're not going to buy your dogs. They might buy your stars. They're definitely going to buy your cash cows. And that's going to change. A cash cow today may not be a cash cow tomorrow. And that's one of the things we saw on the soft drinks. Soft drinks were a cash cow during the summer months. But what happened in the winter when consumption was down? One of the things we looked at there is could we develop our soft drink sales in the southern hemisphere so that our sales in the wintertime, and where I live in the Northwest, was summertime in the south. We did that. We developed soft drink sales into Argentina, Brazil, and into Peru. So we tried to offset the winter months with producing product for the different hemispheres. So we looked at that as an opportunity. Again, that took time. You don't just show up in the market and sell 100 containers a week. It takes time to build that and it takes resources. So we had to take the money that we made from the summer sales of soft drinks and support and develop the winter opportunities. The Boston Consulting Groups box is a way to how do you categorize your business models? How do you categorize your segments within the business? If you use these tools, SWOT analysis and Boston Conservatives Groups box, you'll be able to get a good view of your product. You have to understand at the end of the day, question you have to be able to answer is why in the world would anybody buy my product? And you have to build your business to accomplish that objective. Thank you. Stay tuned for next week's session.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

So that's it for today's episode of Ten Keys to Thrive. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. Be sure to head on over to tenkeys to thrive.com to pick up a free copy of Jim's gift. And join us on the next episode.