Know Your Advantages: Turn Strengths Into a Business Strategy

An Advantage Only Matters When You Use It

Most organizations can list strengths: experience, relationships, technology, location, reputation, talent, or access to capital. Fewer can explain how those strengths create a result customers value. An unused strength is potential, not an advantage.

In Jim Krigbaum's CHARM DANCE Framework, the A in DANCE stands for advantages. Leaders must identify what they can do especially well, understand where it matters, and build a strategy that uses it. They must also recognize that a strength in one situation can become a weakness in another.

Leadership development is partly the discipline of seeing the organization accurately. Teams cannot build a sound strategy around flattering assumptions.

Begin With an Honest SWOT Analysis

SWOT analysis organizes discussion around strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The tool is familiar, but its value depends on the quality of the conversation. Generic statements such as “great service” or “strong team” are too vague to guide decisions.

Bring together people from sales, operations, finance, customer service, and leadership. Each group sees different evidence. Sales understands demand and objections. Operations understands capacity. Finance understands cash and margins. Customer service understands recurring friction.

An executive coach may recommend holding the discussion away from normal routines so people can think more freely. The setting matters less than psychological safety. Participants must be able to challenge the founder, question a favorite project, and name weaknesses without being punished.

For each strength, ask how it is proven, which customers value it, and how difficult it is for competitors to copy. For each weakness, ask what result it prevents and whether it can be corrected, delegated, or avoided.

Convert Weaknesses When the Return Justifies It

Some weaknesses can become strengths through hiring, training, technology, partnerships, or process changes. Others are expensive distractions.

Jim describes his own limited interest in fine detail. Instead of pretending the weakness does not exist, a leader can build a complementary team and systems that protect the organization. The objective is not to become excellent at everything. It is to ensure the business has access to the capabilities required for success.

A high performance coach helps people distinguish between a developmental weakness and a structural reality. If improving a skill will open valuable opportunities, invest in it. If another person can perform it better and more efficiently, delegation may be the stronger strategy.

Competitive and Comparative Advantages Are Different

A competitive advantage helps you perform better than alternatives in the same market. It may be a lower cost, stronger brand, proprietary process, unique expertise, faster delivery, or trusted relationship.

A comparative advantage concerns where your resources produce the greatest relative value. A company may be capable of doing several things but should focus on the activity where its opportunity cost is lowest and its contribution is strongest.

Jim's work in Paraguay illustrates this thinking. Paraguay did not have the strongest domestic forest resource for a wood molding industry, but neighboring countries had raw materials while Paraguay offered labor and other favorable conditions. Looking only at one missing resource would have hidden the wider regional advantage.

A business mentor looks beyond obvious labels and asks how assets can be combined across partners, locations, and markets.

Strengths Can Become Risks

Founder-led businesses often move quickly because one person can decide and act. That speed is a strength during experimentation. As the company grows, the same centralized control can delay decisions, prevent delegation, and make the organization dependent on one individual.

Entrepreneurial energy creates new ideas, but too many simultaneous ideas can divide focus. Deep specialization creates authority, but it may make adaptation harder. A loyal culture can support retention, but it can also resist necessary change.

The leadership mindset must therefore remain dynamic. Do not ask only, “What are our strengths?” Ask, “Under what conditions does this strength stop helping us?” This connects the Advantages principle directly to risk awareness.

Opportunity May Require Challenging Your Preferences

Jim references the story of Starbucks and cold coffee. The traditional vision of coffee emphasized a hot drink, but customer behavior in a California store revealed demand for cold coffee beverages. What initially looked inconsistent with the brand became a major category.

Leaders can become attached to the way an advantage has always been used. Market evidence may reveal a more valuable application. A reputation built in one industry may transfer to another. A technical capability developed for one product may solve a different problem. A distribution network may support a new category.

Business success comes from protecting the core value without freezing the expression of that value.

Use the B OODA Loop to Keep Adapting

Jim expands the well-known OODA loop—observe, orient, decide, and act—by adding a B for breathe. The resulting B OODA process reminds leaders to remain calm enough to use judgment.

• Breathe so urgency does not become panic.
• Observe the current facts and changes in the environment.
• Orient by connecting the information to goals, capabilities, and risks.
• Decide which action offers the best available path.
• Act, then observe the new result and repeat the loop.

This is not a one-time planning exercise. Advantages change as competitors copy ideas, employees leave, technology advances, and customer demand shifts. Continuous observation keeps strategy connected to reality.

Create an Advantage Statement

After analysis, write a specific statement: “We help [target customer] achieve [valued result] because we can [distinct capability], supported by [evidence].”

If the statement could describe any competitor, continue working. If customers do not value the capability, it is not yet a useful advantage. If there is no evidence, it is still a hypothesis that needs testing.

Then align resources. Decide which opportunities fit the advantage, which weaknesses must be addressed, and which attractive projects should be declined. Strategy requires saying no to work that consumes resources without strengthening the chosen position.

Build Strategy Around Reality

The A in DANCE encourages leaders to see strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats without ego. Use diverse perspectives. Test claims with evidence. Strengthen critical gaps, delegate where others are better, and keep watching for changes that turn strengths into risks.

An advantage becomes powerful when it is relevant to the market, difficult to replace, and supported by focused execution. That is where leadership development becomes business strategy—and where potential turns into results.

Ready to keep building momentum? Explore the 10 Keys to Thrive and put the CHARM DANCE Framework into practice.