Team and S.W.O.T. analysis

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: In this example I want to briefly stop by and resume the business plan and look at the team and co-founders and essentially the team when it started out was just jeff white the founder and what really helped him is his experience in this industry now many people do something that's popular these days they go to these sites like Alibaba Aliexpress or have other products that they don't have a particular expertise in those products but they go to those product sites and they white label or license or buy up a ton of products just to sell now there's a big difference between Jeff and those kinds of commerce sellers because Jeff had tremendous expertise what you see is that it helped him have the confidence in the product understand ins and outs of customer experience so if anybody complained he was able to address like hey you're using it wrong or you're using it on the wrong kind of tile or you're not applying the cleaning solution right so he knew it better than anyone and he was able to adjust a lot of problems do a great customer support and know when he really got the ideal product that was just effective enough but not too chemically enough because that was a concern by consumers he had authority as well people often ask well who are you and he's like well I'm only an expert in the field I've been in it for 20 plus years I've cleaned every kind of grout myself and when I see a lot of people getting into commerce and Commerce is a fantastic industry the challenge though is that having no expertise and a product really is a little bit of a disadvantage and I want to segue right here to SWOT analysis which is essentially advantages and disadvantages so we'll talk about what are the advantages of this product what are the disadvantages the strengths I listed as it is the highest quality cleaner on the market but I should also add a founder with deep industry expertise the weaknesses small team under-resourced low budget in the beginning it's competing against some really established players both on Google search and on Amazon and even in brick-and-mortar everywhere is hard nobody wants to work with or by an unknown product and also even though the founder had deep expertise in the ground industry there was no marketing or sales expert on the team that was my role in a way in the opportunity by the way SWOT stands for strengths weaknesses opportunities threats.

It should be very obvious because these are the sections so the opportunity the all part of SWOT is it's basically a commodity commoditized and stagnating market that is ready to for disruption there is no perfect product yet before this product came along there wasn't a perfect product and it's a big enough market there were obviously some winners whatever ground cleaners are being sold in stores now or whatever grout cleaners are wore number one on Amazon at that time they were the winners at that time but it was a market if you had insight into this market and you can try those products and you saw they don't work perfectly and that's where Geoff's strengths came in he did use those products they didn't work perfectly he applied them on the job saw the market saw the products got to know them deeply and that's what compelled him to make his own and he would knew how to disrupt he knew what to make to disrupt that product he knew that category needed disruption if you on the other hand are coming into a industry that you only have a little bit of knowledge about it's much harder to know what are the little pieces of the industry what are the nuances of the industry that are not performing well that could be done better because notice that if you were on the outside looking into this market you can say well this market is competitive there is a winner on Amazon there's a winner in the brick-and-mortar stores done but that would have been false but it only falls to an untrained eye you couldn't notice but to a trained eye and that's where the experience comes in that was noticeable and that was that today that he noticed and went after and if you are in the e-commerce business I do want you to think about like how deeply do you know that's the product it actually is going to end up mattering quite a bit and the last piece threat well competitors there's a lot of rich competitors who can basically see Oh a chemical company was able to make this we all try to make our own it's probably relatively easy at the end of the day and boom they're gonna have some chemists who create a similar solution or even better who knows and they're gonna outsell out-compete this product so that's a threat that big players will notice that this little guy is disrupting them and they might try to make a better competitive product or equivalent competitive product to compete so that's the SWOT analysis and it's related to the team in this case so I coupled those together in this video.