Example of a Small Business Performing a SWOT Analysis Essay Example for Free

Example of a Small Business Performing a SWOT Analysis Essay Learn more about performing a SWOT analysis before reading the case study. Background The three members of the leadership team at a small marketing consulting firm were interested in expanding their offerings to their clients. Currently the firm has 20 employees (including the three members of the leadership team) many of whom are consultants with the balance being administrative and marketing staff. The last time the company had done a SWOT analysis was when they were first starting up in business and were working on their business plan. The SWOT session enabled them to develop their business plan by having them think through their business goals and objectives for viability and feasibility. At the time, the three of them, plus a few members of their Advisory Council participated in the SWOT analysis. The goal of this SWOT session would be to: * Determine ways to better position the company in marketplace. * Determine new products and services to offer clients to better compete in a crowded marketplace. Preparing for the SWOT session The leadership team wanted to set aside 3 hours for the SWOT session. Given that the business was small, the leadership team felt that everyone should participate. The following decisions were made: * All 20 employees would participate in the SWOT session * A Friday morning in mid-summer would be set aside for the session (and†¦as a â€Å"thank you† for participating – employees would be given the balance of the day off to spend with family and friends) * The focus of the SWOT session would be toward determining products and services to offer to clients and that information would be provided to participants beforehand so they can begin to think about it * A professional facilitator would be brought in to lead the session since this SWOT exercise was essential to the company’s continued growth and success Additionally, the leadership team was going to provide all participants with a copy of the SWOT analysis done at the very beginning – before the business venture began. While it had a different purpose, it would be valuable for the SWOT session participants to view it and, from the leadership perspective, it would be interesting to compare then to now. The SWOT session Brainstorming was used during the SWOT session to gather data for the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The facilitator led the group – starting with strengths and working through to threats. An hour was allocated for this task. Each participant spent time writing on sticky notes their thoughts, ideas, opinions, beliefs and known truths regarding the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. When done, all of the information was posted on the walls under the appropriate heading (e.g. Strengths, etc.) Prioritizing the information The next hour and a half was spent reviewing the data with an eye toward: * Looking for themes/commonalities – combining similar sticky notes under themes (e.g., Customer Service) * Prioritizing based on: * Significant information/data provided by large numbers of participants (e.g, ineffective use of social media was mentioned 15 times!) * What could be â€Å"quick hits† for the company to start to effectively compete against the competition * Products and service ideas that can be created within a year’s time frame The table below is a small sampling of the data gathered during the brainstorming session. This particular data is selected as when they prioritized their efforts these were the areas of focus. STRENGTHS| WEAKNESSES| OPPORTUNITIES| THREATS| * Long-term employees committed to the company * Customers love the work done by the company * Customer retention is high * Well-known brand in the local area * Company has made a profit every year in business * Client base was growing| * No blog on the website * Ineffective use of social media * No global customers * The business hasn’t expanded in the last few years and seems stagnant. * No presence at trade shows or industry events/ conferences * No â€Å"new blood† bringing in fresh ideas * Client base not growing as quickly as in past| * Ask current customers to refer business * Use social media and blogging to build brand name and gain new customers * Expand business nationally * Target smaller start-ups who needed strong marketing to get their business off the ground * Provide sales support services for clients * Offer dashboards for tracking marketing| * Competition was increasing * A number of local competitors were already blogging and utilizing social media * Current customers wanted social media consulting and it was difficult to do so when the company doesn’t do social media themselves * Lots of individuals and other new small businesses â€Å"popping† up who do marketing consulting| Based on the information gathered during the brainstorming sessions and what the participants believed could be accomplished in a one to two year timeframe to have a significant impact on the business, the following was decided to meet the objectives: Objective: Better position the company for success in the marketplace | Objective: New products and services| * Develop a blog * Assign responsibilities for social media accounts: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook * Ask current customers to refer business * Expand business nationally| * Develop and offer dashboards for customers to manage marketing initiatives * Provide services to start-ups who need a strong marketing initiative * Provide social media services and support| Next steps The company’s next steps were to take the projects they decided to accomplish toward achieving their goals and: * Assign responsibility for that project * Develop a project plan including a timeframe and budget needs * Prioritize the projects further * Begin work! A survey done of all participants after the SWOT session showed that they were excited about the process and the path they had developed to help meet company goals. By getting all employees involved, the leadership team showed that they valued all employees and wanted their contributions to help make the company a success. Once a month the leadership team would meet with each project lead to check on project status. It was decided that on an annual basis employees would participate in SWOT sessions to work on strategy for the upcoming year. As the company grew, employees would have the opportunity to participate on a rotating basis.

I Want to Coach High School Football :: Teaching Education Philosophy

I Want to Coach High School Football As I was preparing to leave high school and look for a career, I had to make an immense decision. I had to decide what field I wanted to pursue, and how to go about it. I knew I wanted to teach because it offered everything I wanted in a profession including, good benefits, decent pay, the chance to work with children, and the chance to eventually coach High School Football. No other career I found can offer all of these advantages. Although I know I want to teach there is more to the teaching profession than that. First, I have to learn the curriculum and then how to bring that material across to the students. The actual learning process comes naturally for me, but I had to stop and think about how I would bring it across once I become a teacher. This involves many aspects of my life and what I feel is important. I feel ones teaching philosophy pulls from every portion of an individuals belief system. These can include your moral and ethical beliefs, your personality, and also what you, as a teacher, feel is important for the students to learn. To me this seems to be a very big responsibility, so when I started considering my teaching philosophy, I did not take the task lightly. It seems to me that there is a very thin line between fulfilling your own expectations as a teacher, and giving the children what they need and even what they want. I decided that I as a prospective educator, found no teaching philosophy that fulfilled all of my beliefs and hopes. I felt that choosing one philosophy in its entirety was to extreme. I feel that there are parts of all of the philosophies that are excellent, but the philosophies as a whole fail the students in some aspects. That is why for me, I chose an eclectic philosophy. I broke down all of the ways of thinking and came up with my own personal philosophy to use some day when I achieve my dream of being a teacher. I feel it is very important to teach the basic skills first.

Literature and Social Reality Essay

In this paper I will discuss and analyze the social forces of immigration and industrialization that shape literature during the period of 1865 to 1912. I will describe the major literary movements of the period. Additionally I will explain how Realism and Naturalism influenced the literature of the period, how immigration and industrialization contributed to the influences. I will illustrate using examples from some of the greatest authors of the period. Immigration and Industrialization The United States’ population grew quickly in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Baym (2008) et al. write that there were 38. million people in 1870 and had grown to 92 million in 1910. This growth resulted mostly from immigration. People came from countries all over the world but predominantly from European and Asian nations. Immigration was also the major cause for urbanization in the United States according to Baym et al. (2008) with a dramatic proportional shift from a mostly rural population to a larger city population. Simultaneously with this mass immigration industrialization was happening creating an abundance of factory jobs and building immense wealth for some while also creating dramatic divides in society. Baym et al. (2008) describe the situation: â€Å"Long-settled white Americans faced newly arrived white people across divides of power, income, and privilege – worker against owner, farm against city, immigrant against native-born, leading to suspicion and social turbulence on a scale that the nation had not seen† (p. 3). The consequences were labor struggles resulting from terrible working conditions. Immigration brought an abundance of workers resulting in low wages as well as â€Å"inhumane and dangerous working conditions† (Baym et al. 2008, p. ). Conflict also arose from farmers being pushed off their land by the railroads and competition between native-born citizens and immigrants. There was also increased suspicion and resentment between the social classes likely based on fear of losing their â€Å"part of the cake† for the upper and middle classes, whereas the lower class was resentful because of how they were treated. Major Literary Movements The major literary movements during this period were realism and naturalism emerging after a long period of idealism and romanticism. Realism shifted literature to a way of describe life as it actually is instead of trying to present an idealized or romantic image. It was an objective style that offered detached perspectives on the everyday lives of the middle-class, working-class and the poor. This style worked well for describing the struggles of the period. Baym et al. (2008) describe W. D. Howells as the â€Å"chief American advocate† of realism (p. 6). Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and others also joined in this movement as well as some distinguished African American writers such as W. E.  B Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett (Baym et al. , 2008). The nature of Naturalism has been debated as being the opposite of realism or as â€Å"extension or intensification of realism† (Baym et al. , 2008, p. 7). Naturalism usually describes more extreme settings and circumstances than realism and focuses on harsher conditions and poorer characters. Baym et al. (2008) suggest that while characters in realistic works often overcome difficulties, in naturalistic pieces the characters never stand a chance. It is a much more pessimistic literary style than realism. Crane, Dreiser, London, and Norris are described by Baym et al. (2008) as the leading American naturalistic writers of the period. How Realism and Naturalism Influenced Literature Realism had an immense influence on the literature during this period. Mark Twain was one of the major authors and his â€Å"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn† is an excellent example of his style, which became regarded as a leading piece for the â€Å"American style† (Baym et al. , 2008, p. 6). Twain used colloquial speech and his writing style puts the reader in the position of participant, almost as if in a dialogue with Huck. It is a very intimate and informal way of writing. Huckleberry Finn is uneducated and sees the world through the lens of his own experience as well as the social circumstances and mores of the time. In chapter 23 of â€Å"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn† Huck ponders about Jim, his African American companion on his adventure: â€Å"He was thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick; because he hadn’t ever been away from home before in his life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks do for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it is so† (Baym et al. , 2008, p. 204). This passage realistically illustrates the view of a young boy at the time who only knows the world through the social context of his time and place, which included slavery and a very derogatory view of African Americans. Twain was very critical and pessimistic about humankind and his writing often reflected this. However with Huck Finn he appears to be attempting to show that even an uneducated young boy in the 1840s could be open-minded and open-hearted enough to see that people are equals. Henry James writes about â€Å"Daisy Miller,† a young American woman who is a new kind of modern girl. She does not appear to care about the established rules and mores of the time and is both bold and naive in her demeanor. Baym et al. (2008) write that James shows his nature as â€Å"a true cosmopolitan concerned with exploring American national character as it is tested by cultural displacement† (p. 317). James is painting a picture of the old and established strict rules of social class and position and how they become a hindrance in forming true connection between people. The established upper- and middle-class look down on the lower class and the up-and-comers. The result is miscommunication, suspicion, and conflict. Jack London was one of the leading naturalist writers of his time. In his essay â€Å"What Life Means to me† he describes his own experience as a working class youngster who toiled in a variety of jobs until finally he had enough of heavy labor and became a vagrant for a while (Baym et al. , 2008). He describes how he found himself at the bottom of society and how in that place â€Å"life offered nothing but sordidness and wretchedness, both of the flesh and the spirit; for here flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented† (Baym et al. , 2008, p. 582). He was keenly aware of the inequalities and injustice that industrialization had brought for the working class. He writes that he realizes that a laborer is finished and broken down at 45 or 50 while an intellectual, â€Å"a brain seller† (Baym et al. , 2008, p. 584) comes into his prime at that age or later. He decides to ducate himself to make a difference both for himself and for the working class dear to his heart. London eventually encountered and the Socialist movement and describes in joyful terms finding â€Å"warm faith in then human, glowing idealism, sweetness of unselfishness, renunciation, and martyrdom – all the splendid, stinging things of the spirit† (Baym et al. , 2008, p. 584). He was a masterful naturalist writer describing in exquisite detail and with a detached, scientific narrative how the man slowly succumbs to the cold and freezes to death in his short story â€Å"To Build a Fire. Clearly his own experiences in Alaska had provided him with great fodder for this kind of story. Conclusion In this paper I discussed and analyzed the social forces of immigration and industrialization that shaped literature during the period of 1865 to 1912. I described the major literary movements of the period. Additionally I explained how Realism and Naturalism influenced the literature of the period and illustrated with examples from some of the greatest writers of that time.

The Industrial Revolution - 1097 Words

Before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, most people resided in small, rural communities where their daily existences revolved around farming. Life for the average person was difficult, as incomes were meager, and malnourishment and disease were common. People produced the bulk of their own food, clothing, furniture and tools. Most manufacturing was done in homes or small, rural shops, using hand tools or simple machines. Did You Know? The word luddite refers to a person who is opposed to technological change. The term is derived from a group of early 19th century English workers who attacked factories and destroyed machinery as a means of protest. They were supposedly led by a man named Ned Ladd, though he may have been an†¦show more content†¦Workers set their own schedules under this system, which proved difficult for merchants to regulate and resulted in numerous inefficiencies. In the 1700s, a series of innovations led to ever-increasing productivity, while requiring less human energy. For example, around 1764, Englishman James Hargreaves (1722-1778) invented the spinning jenny (â€Å"jenny† was an early abbreviation of the word â€Å"engine†), a machine that enabled an individual to produce multiple spools of threads simultaneously. By the time of Hargreaves’ death, there were over 20,000 spinning jenny s in use across Britain. The spinning jenny was improved upon by British inve ntor Samuel Compton’s (1753-1827) spinning mule, as well as later machines. Another key innovation in textiles, the power loom, which mechanized the process of weaving cloth, was developed in the 1780s by English inventor Edmund Cartwright (1743-1823). Developments in the iron industry also played a central role in the Industrial Revolution. In the early 18th century, Englishman Abraham Darby (1678-1717) discovered a cheaper, easier method to produce cast iron, using a coke-fueled (as opposed to charcoal-fired) furnace. In the 1850s, British engineer Henry Bessemer (1813-1898) developed the first inexpensive process for mass-producing steel. Both iron