Strategic Analysis

When is the last time you performed a detailed Strategic Analysis of your business?

The first step in strategic planning is to know exactly what your strengths and weaknesses are and how they relate to your competition.  It’s amazing how few business leaders actually do this.  Until you know your business positives and negatives, it’s impossible to gain the ultimate rewards you’re after.  In order to get to where you want to go, you have to know where you are.  Only then can you determine what you need to focus on.

The following questions will help you evaluate your business strengths and weaknesses in order to identify and establish the basis of your current success or lack thereof.  By simply answering these questions you’ll gain vast insight into you and your business.  If you don’t understand a question or it doesn’t seem to apply to you, just skip it.  Once you have read, watched, and listened to all of the resources you’ll find on our site you will understand the meaning of all of these questions and you will come to appreciate the value and importance of all of them.  Feel free to copy and paste them into a Word document and start answering them as honestly as you can.  The end result will be greater insight into where you are and what you need to do to get where you want to be.  – Namaste, Shea Ellison

1. What initially got me started in my business?  
2. What was my motivation, occurrence, circumstances, etc.?
3. When I first started, where did my clients or promotions progress come from?  
4. What process, method, or action did I use?
5. Why did clients originally buy from me, or buy me?
6. Why do clients buy from me, or buy me now?
7. What primary method of generating clients was used to build my business?
8. Which of my marketing or sales efforts brought in the bulk of my sales or clients?
9. What percentage of my business comes from this particular effort?
10. Do I test the various aspects of my marketing and selling activities to make sure they’re producing the best and most profitable results?
11. How well connected or how involved am I with my clients at the sales/networking or transaction level?
12. Do I still sometimes take orders or sell or follow up?
13. What ongoing sales/networking efforts do I personally perform today?
14. How do these functions differ from those I performed when I started my business?
15. Where do my clients come from specifically?  What are their demographics, psychographics?
16. Would I rather attract more new clients or garner more money from my existing clients?  Why?  Or would it be both?  Why?
17. Who else benefits from my success, excluding my clients, my employees, and my family members?
18. How many of my suppliers or business colleagues would be motivated to help me grow my business more because it will directly benefit them at a very high level?  Who are they?
19. When I create a new client for my business, who else have I directly created a new client for?
20. Describe completely what my business does; what I sell, how I sell it, and whom I sell to by industry, commercial category, or specific niche.
21. What is my business philosophy as it relates to my clients?
22. How have my methods for doing business, or product or service lines I market changed since the inception of my business?
23. What are my sales per employee or personal/departmental performance levels?  Is that above, below, or equal to my industry average?
24. What is the lifetime value of my typical customer/client?
25. What is the biggest customer/client complaint about my company?  What have we done to overcome this?
26. What is my company’s “Identity”?
27. Why do my customers/clients do business with me versus any of my competitors?
28. Is my Identity consistently communicated in all of my marketing and sales efforts?  If ‘Yes’, how?  If ‘No’, why not?

More to come…  check back when you have finished these.