What Are Your Business Weaknesses?
Larry Easto
I Help Self-Employed Professionals Market & Grow Their Service Businesses | Marketing Coach | Author of 30+ Books & Online Video Courses | Sharing Practical Strategies for Authentic Business Growth |
In effect, this would mean asking yourself:
What’s not working in your business?
Using this question as a starting point, you can probably generate many more probing questions to identify specific deficiencies, issues, problems, shortcomings, vulnerabilities or whatever synonym you choose for the word weaknesses.
Most service professionals are fairly adept at using probing questions to discover the root cause of their clients’ situation.
This same skill-set can be repurposed to play an important role in identifying weaknesses in a SWOT analysis.
Gaps In Resources
Having identified what’s not working, from a planning perspective the next logical question is:
What is necessary to achieve goals … but is not readily available?
Business necessities include various kinds of people, tangible items such as money, office equipment and supplies as well as intangible factors such as information, know-how, relationships, personal brand, professional credibility and so forth.
Ideally, the process of identifying strengths will also uncover gaps in available resources.
These are those resources that are necessary to achieve your goals but are not readily available?
In effect, these unfilled gaps are weaknesses to be addressed.
Messy and Complicated
However simple the process of identifying weaknesses may appear, it is not without problems of its own.
First and foremost, it’s not as pleasant an experience as identifying one’s strengths.?? Who doesn’t like to have our strengths identified and validated?
It’s also much messier and more complicated.
In many cases, the root causes of our weaknesses are more subjective than objective.?
Although some our problems arise from what we do, for the most part they are determined by what we think and believe.
As a result, in order to fully identify the weakness component of a SWOT analysis, it’s necessary to work a little harder and dive a little deeper.
Fears
Along with the happiness and joy of starting and running our own businesses there is a whole lot of fear.
These fears could include lack of money, support, connections or other resources.
Or the fears could be too many competitors, too much to learn or too much of something else.
Even the bravest among us experiences fear from time to time.
However, the thing to recognize is that whatever fear may mess with our heads from time to time, we can learn to address these fears in such a way that they don’t threaten our success.
Limiting Beliefs
A limiting belief is a state of mind, conviction, or belief that you think to be true that limits you in some way.
This limiting belief could be about you, your interactions with other people, or with the world and how it works.
Limiting beliefs can have a number of negative effects on you.
However, we began to age, we were introduced to an unending list of rules about what we should say, how we should be, and what we should do.
These “should”s creating limiting beliefs that invariably prevent us from realizing our full potential.
As is the case with fears, we can learn to address and even better, eliminate these beliefs that limit our success.
Bad habits
According to Jack Canfield, Success Coach and co-creator of the Chicken Soup books, 90% of our behavior is habitual.
In other words, 90% of the hundreds of our daily actions both big and small, we undertake by habit.
The good news is that habits free up our minds while our bodies operate on automatic pilot.
The bad news is some habits are counter-productive, and as such represent weaknesses as opposed to strengths.
When we do what we have always done, invariably we get the results we have always gotten.
As Jack Canfield says, negative habits breed negative consequences. Positive habits breed negative consequences.
A SWOT analysis offers an ideal opportunity to identify those negative habits, aka weaknesses, that breed negative consequences.
3 Choices
Before leaving the discomfort of discussing weaknesses for excitement of opportunities, one more comment is appropriate.
Once weaknesses have been identified—what’s to be done about them?
Realistically, there are three choices.
First, you can ignore them.
Given that when we continue to do what we’ve always done, we get the results that we have always gotten.
If that’s what you want, so be it.
A second option would be to work around weaknesses.? That’s kind of like a detour on a road trip.? More often than not, detours add unwelcome time hassle and even expense to a journey. Probably not an ideal or permanent solution.
The third, and in my mind, the best approach is to address the weaknesses or solve issues in a manner that contributes to the overall achievement of goals.
Not sure about your weaknesses?
Try a SWOT analysis.
Not surprisingly, the Internet is a great source of information.
But if you want a SWOT analysis designed for service professionals, here’s one you might like.
Next Article: Identify Your Opportunities
Related Articles:
?