Explore the SWOT Analysis of Yourself, Your Team, and Your Business

In this episode of 10 Keys to Thrive, Shawn Dooley breaks down how SWOT analysis can become one of the most practical and powerful tools for strategic business growth when used correctly. Far beyond an academic exercise, this conversation explores how businesses can evaluate their current reality by identifying internal strengths and weaknesses alongside external opportunities and threats that directly impact long-term success. 

Drawing from decades of executive leadership, international sales, operations, and business development experience, Sean explains why businesses must continuously reassess themselves as markets, customer demands, technology, supply chains, competition, and global events evolve. Through real-world examples ranging from manufacturing and agriculture to global trade and pandemic disruptions, listeners will learn how external factors like tariffs, exchange rates, weather, consumer behavior, and economic trends can dramatically reshape opportunities and risks almost overnight. 

This episode also dives into the importance of alignment between departments, the value of customer and supplier feedback, benchmarking against competitors, and why many businesses incorrectly assume their strengths without objective validation. Sean shares practical insights on strategic planning, operational efficiency, scalability, market positioning, and creating adaptable organizations that can respond quickly to change. 

Whether you are a startup founder, executive leader, entrepreneur, or business owner looking to improve decision-making and long-term growth strategy, this episode offers a practical framework for evaluating your business more effectively and positioning your company for sustainable success in an ever-changing marketplace.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Today's episode is going to be a little different than normal because I've had an eye surgery. I won't be leaving this session. I'm turning things over to a lesson prepared by Sean Dooley and presented under the 2020 DC banner to students and business people globally. Sean is Vice President of Training and Resource Development at 2020 DC, where he has led training in export, sales, marketing, and operations, and brings decades of hands-on executive experience in business growth, including international sales. He has helped companies think strategically about growth. That makes him exceptionally well qualified to teach today's topic: how to use SWOT analysis as a practical business tool, not just as an academic exercise.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

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

SPEAKER_02 1:02

A SWOT analysis is a snapshot in time, a picture of what your company looks like today, looking at the strengths, the weaknesses, and the external opportunities and threats that impact your business. What your company looks like today versus six months ago or a year in the future will change because your company changes. Remember, before you had a good supply of blueberries and were able to make blueberry jam, remember before you had the packaging line or before the competition put in a bigger packaging line, those things changed your business. So a SWOT analysis is the picture of where you're at today, knowing that it will change over time. A SWOT analysis is part of the planning continuum that starts with what's the vision for our company? What's our strategy for getting there? And what are the individual annual or quarterly objectives that we're working on? The SWOT analysis hovers over the top of that and says, are those things consistent? Are they internally aligned? For instance, if you say the sales team says we're going to triple our sales this year, and the people in operations say we can't package any more jam because we've used all the packaging time and lines that we have, then you have an internal inconsistency. You're going to have a problem meeting your company strategy or goals for the year. That's where a SWAT analysis is part of that planning process. In order to do that well, you need input from throughout the company, from the production floor right to your executive level. You need comments and suggestions from your customers and your suppliers because they all have a different point of view on how you compare to the competition and the industry as a whole. They're also aware of what those trends are in the industry. When you look at strengths and weaknesses, it's generally internally focused. How are we doing compared to the competition or the industry standard or our own internal benchmarks? It's important to remember two things. One, everyone thinks they have wonderful quality. Take that off the table until you have some external benchmark that the customers think that you have better quality than your competition. You don't know how many times I've gone to international trade shows and taken people with me who said, I thought ours was the only country that produced that particular crop or commodity. I thought we were the only one who packaged it that way. Oh my heavens, their packaging is so much better or different, or I hadn't thought about doing that with the nut crop that we have. That's why international trade shows are a great way to benchmark yourself against competition. Be careful when you say our quality is the best and that's our strength, because it may not be. The other thing to look at is strengths and weaknesses are kind of relative. We had a production line that we made for about 50,000 US dollars that produced at a relatively slow speed compared to the big companies who spent about 3.5 million US dollars making their processing line. Theirs ran a whole lot faster, made a much different commodity product. We could have said, oh, that's a weakness because we're very slow and inefficient in making that kind of product if we had been comparing ourselves to the commodity product. Instead, we said, we can do custom sizes, we can do small runs, and we can give quick turnaround time. So for us, it became a strength because we changed the definition of what the market and the product is that we were trying to produce. Strengths and weaknesses, they're relative. And there are times that the same thing can be on a strengths list and a weakness list, depending on who put the list together and for what product and what customer type the item is in reference to. Now, when you look at opportunities and threats, those are generally externally driven. Those are what's happening in the world, the competition, the global marketplace, those types of things. There's another management tool called an SWT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, trends. You can think of trends as a shorthand, another way of looking at what those opportunities and threats might be, because it is what's happening in the industry and the economy as a whole. Now, it may be something as simple as weather. The weather in Australia has an effect on the buyer in India that wants chickpeas because it's a threat if they can't get product in to meet their customers' demands. But it's an opportunity if you're a chickpea farmer in Ethiopia or a South Dakota of the U.S., who may say, aha, the Indian market may be open to us this year. A threat may be something externally influenced. U.S. importers have had faced a lot of challenges due to changes in foreign policy, exchange rate, and tariff situations over the last couple of years. Those things change. Those exchange rates and government programs change over time. So that can be a threat or an opportunity that you have to be aware of at all times. COVID-19 is probably the best example of a global situation where opportunities and threats to individual companies came up out of nowhere when the pandemic hit. Markets closed, new opportunities came about, people started using video conferencing to communicate with customers, and that business took off. Whereas food supplies were interrupted because processing plants were not able to open because they couldn't get enough workers, the transportation slowed down. Those are the examples of opportunities and threats that require a business to look at itself right now and continue to evaluate where we're going as a company in the future. Now, it's important that you look at the business on a regular basis and evaluate yourself because it's part of the planning process that will help you get better at what you're doing and fight off the competition so that you can continue to succeed as a business.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

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 10keystotrive.com to pick up a free copy of Jim's Gift. And join us on the next episode.