3. WHERE - your starting positio
The next time you start up your GPS notice that the first thing it does is find your current location, and for a good reason - a journey will be completely different when starting in point A than when starting in point B.
While a GPS does it by calculating the distance to 3 geostationary satellites (or 4, if you want to take altitude into consideration), business life is not that easy.
There are many ways to assess your current position. In this article we will look at two of them that are recommended to be used concurrently:
Wants vs Reality:
There is surely a list of things you want your business to provide; it may include financial security, fun, work-life balance, care for the environment, contribution to the community - this is just a short list that may have little to do with what matters to you so please go ahead and create your own list.
Once you are happy that the list includes all the elements that are important to you, sort them by importance.
Finally, on a scale of 1-5 (1 being not at all, 5 being perfectly) score the elements in the list by the level to which they are currently being achieved. So if for example, you have achieved a perfect work-life balance give it a 5, if your financial security leaves something to be desired give it a 3 or 4, and if you have no fun at all give it a 1.
Remember, list, sort and score the elements that are important to you, not the ones in the A/M list.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It is used to analyse the internal and external elements that affect the organisation at any given time.
Examples of strengths:
Professionalism
Strong team
Financial reserves
Examples of weaknesses:
High employee turnover
Poor cash flow
Sensitive supply chain
Examples of opportunities:
New markets
Favourable legislation
Changing customers preferences
Examples of Threats:
Adverse trading conditions
New competitors
Global warming
Obviously, internal (strengths and weaknesses) elements are under your control, while external ones are not. Consequently, while you can fix your weaknesses you can only mitigate threats, but we’ll get to that later.
The Wants vs Reality analysis gives you a value-based image of where you are on things that matter to you; the SWOT analysis gives you a substance-based analysis of what works for you and against you, both internally and externally. Later in this series we will use the results of these analyses to select what to focus on on the journey to greatness.
In the next post we will start the actual planning. Stay tuned.
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