SWOT Analysis (10 min)

The SWOT analysis is a common tool used in business to help direct strategic decision making.  The purpose of this tool is to match strengths with opportunities and weaknesses with threats to identify potential strategies for achieving the proposed goal.   While a simple tool, it can create very impactful results when applied to your wealth building strategy.

The SWOT analysis will help you determine where your strengths and weaknesses match up against the opportunities and threats of the wealth building strategy.  Knowing this information can help you determine strategies to minimize weaknesses and/or maximize opportunities.  For example, if your weakness matches against a significant threat, it may be necessary to either conduct additional training or develop a partnership approach.

Most importantly, just intentionally identifying and systematically reviewing the information will create awareness and lead to creative problem solving.  This is done by determining a focal point of the SWOT analysis and then homing in on the relationship between the strengths and weaknesses of the individual or organization and the opportunities and threats presented by the focal point.

The SWOT analysis can be used to evaluate your readiness to pursue your proposed wealth building strategy.  However, it can also be used to evaluate each goal within your wealth building strategy.  Looking at each goal can help you identify the order of priority between goals and among competing milestones within goals.  For the purposes of this workshop, we will focus on the relationship between you and your chosen wealth building strategy.

Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors that you can control, while opportunities and threats are external factors that you cannot unilaterally control.  Opportunities represent external factors that can support your wealth building strategy and goals.  Threats are external factors that detract from the achievement of your goals.  The goal is to maximize leverage of strengths against opportunities and minimize the impact of threats against weaknesses.