Phase Two

Now that you've identified your company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT), it's time to bring it all together in a SWOT analysis. This layout makes it easy to compare your company's external opportunities and threats to its internal strengths and weaknesses. The SWOT analysis layout allows your company to compare internal and external forces as well as positive and negative forces acting on your business. Laying out these attributes in an easy-to-read format, such as a graph or chart, can help you and your team easily communicate about them. With our SWOT identified and articulated let's dive into the strategy for working with and around these findings. 

Mission Statement and Values 

Every organization should have a mission statement. Your company's mission statement can be as small as a sentence or as large as a document. However, the most effective mission statements are those short, concise statements that speak to an organization's scope. Your company's mission statement should state why the organization exists. It should capture the purpose and reason for your company's existence. 

Next, you need to define the company's values. The company's value statement describes what your organization stands for. In other words, it represents the values that your organization believes in. Along with your statement of values, you should define the kind of behavior you expect the business and those involved within it. 

Questions to answer

• What are our non-negotiables that are critical to the success of the company?
• What are our guiding principles that are core to how we operate the company?
• What behaviors do we expect to see?
• If circumstances change and we are penalized for holding this core value, should we keep it?

Try and create five to seven values you can use as your guiding light.

With these values, and your mission in mind let's move to Phase Three.