Scout the Other Team and SWOT Them By:Larry Galler

While watching the college basketball championship games a couple weeks ago, I was impressed with the coaches' substitution strategies. It was like a chess match and I realized that they had done S.W.O.T. (S = Strengths, W = Weaknesses, O = Opportunities, T = Threats) analysis in the same manner as business strategists.

Business, like basketball, is a competitive game. Each exploits their advantages while trying to minimizing their disadvantages. When one team takes out their biggest player and substitutes someone who is faster, the opposing coach makes a corresponding personnel change to counter any advantage that otherwise might be gained. The coaches have scouted the opposing team to know which players have advantages in certain situations and work to negate those advantages to the best of their ability. Have you done your SWOT analysis? If not, here's a very oversimplified discussion of how to do it.

List your company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and compare them to those of your competitors. The goal is to discover advantages and disadvantages and then to create and develop tactics to maximize your advantages while, at the same time, keep your competitors from taking advantage of areas they are strong but you are weak.

As an example you might have a process to be the lowest cost provider. Your competitor doesn't have this process yet so you have a pricing advantage. Strategically you could gain more margin and profit because of this differential or win customers by lowering your prices. You might discover that you have a speed-of-delivery disadvantage so you might work on speeding up your delivery process to counter the competitor and not lose customers to the faster competitor.

Once you have determined the advantages you wish to exploit and the disadvantages you need to strengthen, just like the basketball coach, you put your players on the court (the marketplace) and continue to play the game. The SWOT analysis is just one of the analytical tools athletic coaches and businesses use to win. Put your best players out there and go for the gold by SWOTting the competition.