Strategic planning requires you to understand the competitive landscape in which you’re operating. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to get your arms around the complex market dynamics you face. A great tool you can use to assess the environment is SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Strengths and weaknesses are those typically found within your own organization. They’re capabilities you have or don’t have. As far as opportunities and threats, they can either be internal or external market-facing opportunities and threats.

As you build a SWOT analysis, you’ll want to have the team together so people can throw out their ideas in each of those quadrants. It’s generally a brainstorming session. Your job is to capture all the ideas to synthesize later. Let me walk through an example.

Strengths

Perhaps we start our SWOT Analysis by looking at our strengths. Our strengths consist of:
• The brands we have
• How efficient our supply chain is
• The strength of our sales force and how well it sells our products
• Safety within our manufacturing plants
• Our recruiting information technology
• Our financial position

As I’ve laid out the strengths, notice they’re all internally-facing capabilities of the company.

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