July Retrospective: Back in July 2014, I wrote a daily series exploring the realities of navigating the creative economy. Twelve years later, looking back at these entries (and my original awful hand-drawn illustrations!), I’m struck by how the core truths of a creative career remain completely timeless. Each day this month, I’m opening up the archive to share these foundational lessons—with a few modern reflections layered in.

If you’re a new creative graduate looking to find your footing in the creative economy, a Gen X looking to pivot into a creative business, a side-hustler or someone who just wants to up their creative business game, there’s something for you in this series. Just don’t judge my drawings 😉

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a business planning tools that has been around for a long time. But for a good reason: it’s quite useful. Spending some time doing a SWOT will give you a really good understanding of where you stand within your market.

SWOT stands for

Strengths

Weaknesses

Opportunities

Threats

Strengths and weaknesses are internal to your business. This is where you look with a cold, hard, critical eye at you and your business to determine its strengths and weaknesses.

Make lists of each.

Then you want to consider two things. First, how can you make your strengths even stronger? And how can you either improve your weaknesses or mitigate them (find a way to work around them) so they aren’t a chink in your armour? Second, can you plan your business or your offering of products/services to take advantage of your strengths and avoid, where possible, your weaknesses?

Can you take your weaknesses and figure out how to turn them into strengths? For example, if you are a jeweller, working on your own, maybe you perceive a weakness that there is only one of you so you aren’t able to produce very many jewellery pieces. Can you turn that into a strength by saying that your goods are exclusive and limited edition? Turn the scarcity into a selling point. Go through your other weaknesses and see if there is a way to make  a strength out of them.

Opportunities and threats are external to your business. This means looking at your potential market to figure out the opportunities that are available to you that you can make the most of.

Also, you want to consider any threats to your business  or your industry (social, economic, political etc) that might have a negative impact on your business.

If you are aware of them you can plan around them to ensure they don’t catch you unaware.

Opportunities you pick up will present directions you may want to take your business.

Time spent considering these four areas will be well spent. (Tomorrow we will be using the SWOT to work out your positioning within the market.)

Action: Take a sheet of paper. Write four columns: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats and start making lists under each column. You might want to live with this list for a week so you can keep adding to it as you go deeper.

Once you’ve done your SWOT analysis, use the message box below to tell me what you learned about your business from the exercise.

Longevity in a creative career isn’t accidental—it’s built on strategy.

While the landscape shifts, the core principles of thriving as a creative freelancer haven’t changed. For deeper, modern frameworks on building a sustainable creative practice:

• Read the Book: Looking for a step-by-step field guide to building a resilient career in the creative economy? Pick up my recent book The Thriving Creative: Successful Freelancing in the Creative Economy available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and from my publisher Routledge.
• Stay Connected: Join my community and to receive the complete 31-day hand-drawn playbook as a single PDF at the end of the month. Sign up below.