Video Transcript: SWOT Presentation pt. 2

Hi everyone. My name is Tom Tubergen, and I've been busy teaching a class  here at the CLI about marketing and how you can apply that to any of the  ministry applications that you're taking part in or want to be a part of going  forward. And the particular module that we're talking about here in the last video, and again, in this video and the next several videos, is something called the  SWOT analysis, where SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Today, we're going to talk about implementing SWOT part two,  which is looking at defining a company or an organization's weaknesses. One of the points that I did want to make here is that a SWOT analysis is very powerful  process to go through on several different levels, not only as part of an  organization or some sort of a larger process of that sort, but even on a personal level, to go through and to identify your strengths, your personal weaknesses,  opportunities that are being put in front of you, and the threats that you're being  faced with. So a lot of what you're learning in this SWOT analysis segment can  be applied on a personal level, and that's really important to note. However,  going forward, what I'm going to be talking about is how you apply SWOT  analysis to to a an organization such as a church or a religious organization or  some sort of a ministry application. And unfortunately, I'm going to refer to these  as company weaknesses. Every owner needs to believe that his or her business is always running smoothly. So this particular part of the SWOT analysis is not  exactly a favorite topic to talk about. It takes a lot of honesty, lot of soul  searching, but it's really vital information, and you're going to need to truthfully  access a lot of these weaknesses within your business, within your ministry,  within your organization for this part of the SWOT analysis to really be effective.  And again, I'm referring to a chart that you had from the last segment, where it's  divided into four quadrants of strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.  So how do you define a company or organization's weaknesses within a SWOT  analysis, weaknesses are internal factors that inhibit, that, they constrain, that  they suppress your business or leave you at some sort of a competitive  disadvantage, the same categories that apply to your strengths column that we  reviewed in the previous segment from earlier can also be reapplied here in  terms of where if they're not strengths, then maybe they're weaknesses. So we'll talk about that in more detail here. So how do you go through the process of  defining your weaknesses personally or for your ministry application? In your  brainstorming session, you're going to want to include a variety of employees,  assuming that you have a variety of employees, or any employees at all, and  you're going to together kind of work through what's going on, what challenges  do you consistently face, what sort of constraints do you have, financially or with talent, or any of these categories? And you're going to put this information on  your four box SWAT template that I just referred to, and you have the ability to  download that template off of this, Course Resources, if you haven't done so  already. So let's talk about some of the categories where you really want to take 

a look at your weaknesses and consider your weaknesses. Financial resources  is probably one of the obvious ones. It includes revenue streams, investments,  diversified income, grants, donations, whatever. What kind of weaknesses do  you have there? Is it abrupt? Does it start? Does it stop? Does it get to a point  where you have to stop what you're doing and go out and raise money to  continue on. Or do you actually have a stream of money that's just consistently  coming in every month that enables you to spend more time focusing on what  you're doing as a core ministry application, physical items like buildings, what  kind of equipment do you have to rent, or do you own? Do you own any  buildings? Do you have access to rent a building or equipment or places that  you can meet intellectual property, things like patents, copyrights and  trademarks, would fall into this category, and this may seem. A little bit kind of an odd thing, but there are ministry organizations that publish a lot of material, they  create graphics design, type stuff and content, and this all falls under the  category of intellectual property, and it needs to be protected human resources.  Think of your employees. How are they managed? How are volunteers who  donate their time? How are they managed? How are they scheduled? How are  they How is their talents maximized to bring your ministry further down the road? And even the mentoring application? Key players, what who are the key people,  the vital people in your organization or your business, and what sort of talents,  what sort of capabilities do they have to bring you another step closer to your  mission statement, employee programs, what kind of drawbacks do you have  about any programs to help your employees or your volunteers really excel at  what they do? And I'm thinking specifically of training. I'm thinking of cross cross workflow, cross training type applications, if somebody is unable to show up to  work for a week that there are other people that are capable that know enough  about what's going on to be able to cover for them, systems and processes  company workflow includes best work practices, very, Very important, enables a  very consistent outflow, output of work, quality of work, quality of services that  you are doing for people. It's not a potluck situation, where you're maybe you're  making meals for homeless people or people who were shut ins, for example.  And today you hit a home run and tomorrow it's like, well, all they got is pork and beans out of a can. So systems and processes allow you to plan ahead produce a very consistent outflow of work. Company culture is another big one,  surprisingly, and this is really the type of environment that your employees work  in. Are you working together as a team? Are you working together as a team to  achieve a specific goal, or, literally, to survive a toxic environment for one more  day? You need to think about that company reputation. What is the reputation of  your ministry application, or even your business, and that is referred to as  goodwill. Do you have credibility out in the in your particular community for  delivering what you say you intend to deliver? Market position, you need to  consider how your business fits in the overall market. So in other words, if you 

have other organizations, say from another denomination, for example, or even  some other type of religious organization, whether it's Muslim or who knows  what, you need to understand how what you're doing fits into that big picture.  What are they doing that is directly competitive to what you're doing, and how do you fit, and how do you deliver your products, your services, to that community.  And then you need to also consider growth potential. Think about how your  business is positioned for future growth, and sometimes that's kind of a ironic  situation. When you're dealing with a nonprofit that is trying to serve people and  help people that are homeless, or help people with meals. Help people find you  know, whatever the situation is, you're not necessarily looking for positive growth to serve more and more of these people. I mean, ideally the situation is, you  want to help people move past and grow out of that particular situation that  you're dealing with there. So let's talk about some of the questions that you  need to ask to find out to identify what your company, what your ministry's  weaknesses are. We've gone over a number of those categories, about six or  seven of them, but to kind of help you along a little bit further, I did compile a list  of some of these questions that are going to help you identify the weaknesses  that you have, that you might be facing. And these questions follow the  categories that we just kind of went through. Some of them might not elicit a  negative response, and if that's the case, then you don't have a weakness in  that area. Maybe it's neither a strength or a weakness, maybe it's just kind of  middle of the. Road sort of a thing. On the other maybe it's a strength so and  then you can kind of move past the particular category question, some of the  starter questions in what areas does your company, does your ministry, really  struggle to deliver what you say you wanted to deliver your mission statement?  Why is it that you exist? What are you trying to do, and why is it that you're not  doing it? Are you doing a good job? Could you do a better job? And then the  second question is, Are there reasons that customers go elsewhere? Do they  know about you? Does everybody in your target community, target area, target  area of influence, does everybody in that area that you want to talk to, that you  want to serve, do they know about you does something specific stop you from  performing at your best? What specific things stop you from performing at your  best? And you want to itemize those things, because no matter how well you do  something next year, there's always just kind of that next level up to up the hill  financial what financial resources, or specific lack of financial resources, are  holding you back? And talk about how that's holding you back. What could you  do? Specifically, what would life look like if you had those financial resources?  And when you go through that exercise of identifying what a perfect life would  be like if you had the financial resources to do what you wanted to do, you're in  a position where you're able to go back out to your donor community and say, if  we had this money available, this is what we could get accomplished. Does  business get this revenue from one main revenue stream? And if so, is 

diversification a concern? What they're talking what we're talking about here is  it's always a dangerous situation. When a business is depending on a single  customer for 80% of their work, that customer decides to go out of business.  They go bankrupt, do they? Do? You know, they switch to another supplier, and  all of a sudden, you're kind of left, you know, waving in the breeze, like the shirt  on a clothesline, for example. And the other last question here is, are you really  preparing for your own financial future? What are you doing to prepare for that  financial future? So you need to think about all this stuff here. There's a lot of  deeper implications to these three questions that we're asking here, and when  you start getting in tune with that, you're in a position where you'll be able to talk  intelligently to the people who are enabling your ministry to go forward, whether  it's a larger church organization that you're a part of, whether you have your own donor community that's been built up, you need to be able to very explicitly  articulate what kind of things are holding you back. And if you had those things  available, if you had those resources, here's what life is going to look like. Here's how you're going to be solving problems in your community. So physical type of  things, like buildings, what physical assets are creating a problem is the roof  leaking? Do you even have a building to be in? What sort of office environment  do you have? Do you have the furniture? Do you have the computers? Do you  have cell phones? Do you have the stuff that you need to have to actually do  business as a nonprofit? What condition is your office in? Is it a place that would attract people? Is it comfortable? Is it is the heat working? Is the air conditioning  functional? Do you have furniture to sit on that's not going to collapse when  somebody sits on it? Those are the kind of things that we need to talk about. But even further than that, we'd want to take a look at, do the people who come in to volunteer, do the people that are actually employed by your nonprofit ministry  application? Do they have the equipment they need to do the job that they were  asked to do. So if you're preparing meals for shut ins, if you're preparing meals  for homeless and all of a sudden one day, your stove goes out, or one of your  two stoves decides not to work, or you're constantly playing around with a circuit breaker to keep that electric stove operating, or who knows what. How does that hamper your mission? So you need to kind of step back and think about where  your problems are here, and you need to prioritize the low hanging fruit the  easiest things. You have available to fix, and you need to devote your attention  to that intellectual property. I mentioned that a little while ago, certain ministry  nonprofits will have a lot can actually create a lot of intellectual property, whether it's booklets or pamphlets or workbooks or any of this type of material, and that  is all stuff that you need to give some thought to. Putting copyright information  on there, trademarks, patents may not be quite as important, but certainly a  copyright kind of a thing to protect your protect your work, and you want to, don't necessarily want to take hold it, to just constantly take credit for that kind of stuff, but you want to control who's using your stuff, why they're using it, how they're 

using it, and that's really kind of the purpose behind this. Are there any  governmental red tape type issues that is keeping you from moving forward with your ministry application, and I'm thinking of things here like just different  documentation that's needed. And sometimes this can even be a competitive  advantage for you, if you have licenses and you have different capabilities that  have been approved by the government. If you're in food service, especially,  they have to come and do their inspections and all that kind of stuff. This is  where that's going to be important, that you have those capabilities and you  keep that up to date. Does your company take too long to file for patents? Not  sure how much that would really apply here, because you're not doing research  and development, per se, you could be in a situation, I think, where copyright  may be much more applicable here than patents or trademarks. Human  Resources, what kind of Human Resources capabilities and functions do you  have if you're part of a larger church? Sometimes they will have a human  resources department where they will be taking care of things like payroll and  benefits, and they will manage a lot of that stuff, kind of inherently as part of  what they do? Are there any of these departments that are lacking or inefficient?  And again, that's kind of something that may or may not be a concern for you.  But the last one, I think, is probably more important, what types of programs do  you have in place to improve your ministry, the quality of the ministry that you  are delivering. And this is probably the part of human resources that is most  overlooked, and that is people are working with you. They're involved in your  nonprofit because they believe in what you're doing first and foremost, if when  that stops, it's not long before they're getting a paycheck from someplace else.  So you need to make sure that they know what you're doing, why you're doing it. And secondly, from a human resource perspective, you need to focus on helping them to do it better. It's not you doing it better. It's your job as the head honcho,  as the CEO of this ministry organization is to recruit people who believe in what  you're doing and help them to do it better. Company, workflow. We're talking a  lot here about systems and processes. What areas can be improved in when it  comes to workflow, one of the things that creates world class, best in class  businesses, the people who are real, the businesses, are the companies that  are really leaders. And their line of work is the profound presence of systems  and processes. And it starts from the time you unlock the door in the morning to  the time you lock it up at night and go home. There is a system. There's a  process for everything that happens throughout that day, from opening the mail  and processing payments or checks or donations and sending them thank you  letters to depositing this money in bank accounts. There is just a very detailed  process that is articulated, that everybody is aware of, that they know this is  their job. This is what I'm expected to do every day when I come to work, and  processes and systems helps you to really handle the general day to day tests  that need to get done in any organization, whether it's profit making or a 

nonprofit, to help them run, so that the CEO that leadership, can really focus on  what's really what the things that really come. Help the things that help that  organization to deliver on its commitments towards its mission statement of  delivering certain services, certain products, certain goods. So systems and  processes, if you're especially setting up a new ministry situation or a new  nonprofit, systems and processes are probably the highest priority that you need to focus on. Company culture is another aspect of the human resources  paradigm. Here. Are you happy with the company culture that you've created?  And you know, every organization that I interface with as a consultant struggles  with this. It's just human nature. You get a crowd of people of 10, 20, 30 people  that are working in a particular organization. There's always going to be  somebody in there that's kind of the Debbie Downer or the somebody that's  really kind of toxic. You need to be very tuned in to what that does. That does an immense amount of damage to an organization. If you have those types of  people who are kind of spraying their poison, I guess, be very careful about  company culture, ministry culture and do not delay. If you're in a position where  you have control of that, don't hesitate to make changes, because it really drags  everybody else down. If somebody is constantly being negative or spreading  toxic poison or gossip or whatever, it's not a good situation. Don't hesitate to  take that individual aside and just suggest that maybe it would be there's a  better place for them to be on a daily basis, company reputation. How does the  public see your company? What do they think of when they think of your  organization name? Do you deliver on your promises? Do you live up to your  commitments that you've made to your donors? Do you live up to your  reputation, or your commitments that you've made with the people in the  community that you're serving. What sort of things do you need to think about to  improve that or repair it? If you don't have a good reputation, there's not much  that's going to happen going forward, the donations will always be hard to come  by the revenue that will support your ministry is going to be very hard. It's going  to be like pulling teeth to get it in the community is going to literally just vote with their feet. So if you don't have a good reputation, do some serious soul soul  searching marketing position. This is really related to a profit making situation, a  business that exists to make money. But in a certain context, you could look at  this and say, Well, what kind of position does my ministry have in the  marketplace? In other words, in my community, in my area of influence, what  kind of position does it have? Am I top dog? Am I delivering the best value for  these people? So you want to think through that if you're only serving a small  portion of it, of what these people need, what your clients, of your constituents,  what they need to have. You need to think that through. What are you  delivering? Why aren't you delivering what they need to have? It'll affect your  market position. You'll be, end up being kind of the go to organization for your  services. Growth potential. You know, I mentioned a few minutes ago that 

there's some really rather ironic you know, when you're dealing with issues of  poverty or health care or hunger or whatever the situation might be, you kind of  hesitate to say, well, what's the growth potential here? You know, do you exist to kind of solve some of these problems? But what problems? What plans is it that  you have to deal with these issues in your community? You're not going to solve  world poverty, but what or world hunger? But what are you doing right here in  your community to cope with the issue of people being hungry or not having  appropriate health care. And, you know, the other competitive non profit  organizations that exist in your area. If you're in a more populated area, maybe  you've got other churches that are kind of doing the same thing. What are they  doing? Uh, to cope with this problem, problem that you're also chasing. Are they  doing things in a way that you can't do them? And what is it that, again, that's  holding your business or your ministry back from growing what is it that is  limiting your ability to reach everybody in your community that really needs your  help. So some tips here to kind of list your weaknesses out, the soul searching  that you need to do, really can be kind of difficult. Be open minded about it as  your employees or your donors, or somebody from like a sponsoring church, or  somebody start suggesting weaknesses that they perceive that you have,  sometimes those perceptions are more important than the actual truth. You need to pay attention to that. You need to be open minded about it. You need to sort  of like, why did they say that? What is their agenda? It's likely that they're going  to bring up some sort of weakness you haven't thought of, or even disagree with you, when it happens, but whatever you do, don't be judgmental. There's a  reason they brought it up. There's a reason they brought this to your attention  that they perceive that there's a weakness there. So when you're doing this  weakness analysis, part of the SWOT analysis, and you're studying your  weaknesses, it's not a good time to be wearing rose colored glasses. It's the  time for just pure, blatant honesty. Be prepared to take a look at your business  or your organization or your ministry inside and out from a very critical level.  What are you doing well? What aren't you doing well?