Vincenzo Belpiede

“Personal SWOT SWOT, a common business strategy practice, flushes out the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a particular business. Applying this common business strategy to yourself will fine-tune your self-understanding. The strengths you identified in the last section can go under your strengths, but what about your weaknesses? Just as important as knowing what you’re good at and what you enjoy is knowing what type of activities you should avoid. What areas, tasks, and even possible industries are off-limits for you? What activities just absolutely do not interest you? What assignments do you drag your feet on? These should be identified so you can concentrate on working within your sweet spot and focus on what you do best. Get it all down on paper: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Once you’ve examined where you thrive and what to avoid, it’s time to build your resume. The exercise of putting it together is an important part of looking inward. Record your relevant work experience and what your role was in each position. Be sure to use action verbs to frame your accomplishments; quantify the specific results you achieved. This helps to emphasize what really stands out in your career, where your interests lie, and where and how you get the best results. It also serves to identify what your role should be moving forward. Do you excel in marketing, sales, process implementation, or accounting? What areas are you comfortable growing into and which ones do you want to hire assistance for. One of the most fatal mistakes an entrepreneur can make is assuming that just because they understand the technical work of the business does not mean they can successfully run a business that does the technical work. As Michael Gerber describes at length in his book The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, staffing, marketing, and cash flow management have nothing to do with baking pies, but everything to do with running and growing a pie business. Spend time reflecting on yourself. The exercise will drive interest in opportunities that may have otherwise not appeared interesting. For the purpose of true self-discovery, ignore your passions and interests for a moment. Simply focus on the activities and functions you are well-equipped to execute. This is about getting in tune with what you’re good at and doing a deep dive into your skillset. At the end of this section, you should have a personal SWOT analysis and a resume written out for your review.”
― Walker Deibel, Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game