0:07
Now, let's use this video to bring together pretty much everything
we've been talking about to some extent, throughout the course.
And in particular some of the tools we've been talking about.
This is somewhat large set of slides
compared to a lot of the slide decks that we posted online.
I don't really have much new to say, so
I'm gonna go through it relatively quickly.
Because I just have each of these slides in here more as a place holder to
illustrate, how you might walk through a strategic analysis that
draws all the way back into making use of political
assessment and analyzing supply and demand.
1:14
this is not something a single individual would do maybe this is something that
would require all kinds of input from across an entire organization.
But thinking about strategic analysis and planning for
either business enterprise or as I've said in other videos any
kind of organization can evaluate their plan.
And set goals to achieve their objectives and
achieve their ultimately establish a pathway to achieve
their vision of the organizations essentially by using these steps.
First, you need obviously to define your situation and
the options facing you to achieve these broad set of general goals that you have.
And then what you would do is presumably conduct some kind of strategic
analysis of the situation you're in and the options facing you.
We've talked in detail about two different tools, the SWOT analysis and the Porter
5 Forces as approach to evaluating the different forces in your market.
As I mentioned there are a bunch of other tools that you may find useful.
Now this importantly,
is going to be a preliminary analysis under currently known conditions.
In one of those currently known conditions is the strategy you are currently
implementing.
So keep that in mind what you're gonna notice is we're gonna be doubling back and
making use of these tools over and over.
So what happens is we keep coming back essentially to make use of whatever
tools you wanna use, as you're refining your understanding of your environment,
your options, and your plan going forward.
Once you do this preliminary analysts,
presumably it's going to identify some needs for a deeper analysis or it might.
It might or it might not.
Maybe you already know everything.
Maybe you anticipated those needs and you just did those analysis up front.
But for instance, the type of analysis you might need to do is you
might need to do a thorough market analysis.
You might really need to study supply and demand.
Maybe what you learn from your preliminary analysis is that I need
better cost to revenue models.
So that would lead you to more thorough economic analysis.
Maybe what you learn in your preliminary analysis is that you have to
better understand the regulatory environment or
some of these non market risks or political risks.
So then of course, you would do some kind of issue analysis using tools
4:00
Then what you would do is, construct
a strategic analysis of your situation and
options thinking now from the perspective
of some improvement in your assumptions.
So here presumably you've improved your assumptions, but
what you're gonna do again is use some of these tools to maybe evaluate once again.
Because the first step you simply identified
where you had to do the deep dive analysis.
Now, that you've incorporated that into your situation and options,
you might want to double back and verify that your strategic assessment is right.
So now, you have a final analysis under these currently known
conditions then presumably you would develop some kind of strategy.
And then what you can do is, you can use these tools again to
evaluate this strategy that you developed.
5:07
So your basically these are very general tools again that can be applied to
business organizations or social mission organizations.
But the thing is you're constantly using them over and
over again, probably throughout the process of getting
down to what you feel is going to be a robust strategy.
It's not just dump information in and then sort of see what comes out and
run with it.
Assume that all the while it's these tools themselves that are helping
you identify more information and you need to do a better analysis.
So let's quickly go through this for our example.
Again, I'm not going to discuss much of this in detail because you've seen it all.
But I wanna just sort of walk you through the way I would think about it and
even if it's just in a hurried fashion.
So we have a certain case situation here.
[COUGH] We're already familiar with this.
This is the information you saw in previous videos.
We have a refinery we can invest in.
We've got an existing local supply of crude.
It's gonna depend obviously, on the XL pipeline coming in.
6:35
We have a little bit of a financial summary here.
I'm not going to do a financial analysis that would be
another dimension of your analysis, obviously.
But depending on your cost of capital it just turns out the way
we structured these numbers that this could be profitable.
But if certain things don't break your way, it might not be profitable.
It might be quite costly.
So that's another factor that that we kind of blew over is the financial analysis.
So you basically have a handful of options.
You either pass on the opportunity or
you buy it and you upgrade and compete regionally or
you upgrade immediately and sell both regionally and elsewhere.
Or you upgrade later, you kinda defer some of those investments and
then coupled with that you either compete regionally or predominantly elsewhere.
So those are your options.
Now, recall our SWOT analysis that we pulled together really quickly.
This was for our current.
8:03
And then we also, without having done much of a deep dive into anything we kinda used
the Porter 5 Forces Analysis to analyze the market.
Again, this is a preliminary analysis of the current situation.
And this may help us prethink a little bit where some of the main forces
suppressing our ability to achieve our financial goals would be.
And that's presumably where we're gonna deep dive a little bit.
8:34
And what you do is you kind of find out through that first pass,
well there's some things we probably need to know better.
We really to understand our costs, we need to probably understand transportation and
in particular this XL Pipeline addition seems key.
We probably need to understand the competitive environment because even
the very first pass at this makes it look like we're gonna be selling into
pure price competition world.
10:02
How steep is this demand curve which is going to then determine
whether prices fall a little bit or do they fall a lot more?
Okay?
So those are some of the factors that you would want to think
about in your market analysis.
But that's why you're doing that kind of analysis, kind of identifying the key
factors in each of these markets you're selling into or buying from.
10:54
The supply curve is gonna move out so we're mostly
gonna be interested in what's going on here.
I know this is all obvious, technology may matter a little bit for
controlling your costs but these are all the supply side factors.
And then the determinants of demand, it's not obvious there's a lot of action there.
11:26
Another issue we identified was the political issue.
So I'm not gonna go through this slide.
It's just here symbolically to remind you that we can do explicitly analyse this
this issue which is very central to the ultimate success of our opportunity.
We may have a whole bunch of different stakeholders here.
12:26
So what you'll then do, as I mentioned is double back and
maybe revisit the analysis of the current situation.
This will be our final analysis and
you're gonna decide well, some things are maybe less important.
Maybe this availability of new supplies doesn't belong in the positive
column for or strengths column for this business opportunity.
Because actually we conclude this is much more, this is a significant risk and
it's not obvious that we really want to plan on excess supply here.
Actually, we really have to build a strategy that mitigates that problem.
And then we also know with maybe a higher degree of certainty we're really gonna be
facing peer price competition,
which starts getting us thinking about cost control.
13:22
The other thing you might do is also double back on your market analysis.
So you really understand where these forces are that are going to put
pressure on your ability to achieve some of your financial goals.
So again, without thinking to hard about what your strategy is going forward yet,
what is our current just sort of humming along and
moving ahead without really thinking intricately about an intricate strategy.
But this is our more final analysis and a few things that we might highlight is
actually maybe we should upgrade the degree of the force that is here.
And I kind of put the suppliers as a bit between
14:23
The other thing we might do is even,
I can't really make our industry competitors much redder.
But you might decide wow, we really have concluded that this all about
price competition because we are in a commodity market that gets you focused
actually, a little more acutely on cost containment or something like that.
16:01
So if we know we're gonna be in a price driven market,
what we're gonna have to do is a part of our strategy's gonna be to
develop an effective workforce very quickly.
We have some opportunities in that regard because we're in a region that probably
has excess supplies of workers who are technically proficient in this
somewhat high tech industry.
We'll have to also probably prethink some these distribution customary relationships
because that can take some of the in securing longer term contracts for
sale of a product.
And take some of the edge off the peer price competition rather than just selling
16:41
sort of feeling like your selling day to day into a spot environment.
And you might even think about we're going to actually stage some of our
commitments contingent on the XL Pipeline.
So either expansion might be contingent on
how exactly that political decision breaks or maybe the entire
17:02
acquisition, if there's a way to actually stage it and get yourself lined up.
So that you pretty much just have to sign on the dotted line as soon
as the president would sign on the dotted line or or don't sign, if he doesn't sign.
There's lots of front end work that you can do to make sure that works.
But ultimately what this does specifically is,
it addresses these key weaknesses here.
It leverages some of your strengths to address these key weaknesses and threats.
It focuses on the keystone Excel Pipeline.
It focuses on cost control and
getting that workforce in place to compliment the leadership team.
17:46
And ultimately you could even, when you present
this kind if illustrate how your plan
assessed within say one of these tools in this case, I'm using the SWOT framework.
Actually, does a job of getting rid of some of these threats or
risks and mitigating some of these weaknesses and
specifically move some of these items in the positive column to some extent.
18:19
So that's just a quick illustration of how we very quick, obviously.
This would take a number of days or weeks or
months to actually [LAUGH] to put all of this together, well maybe not months.
But you can actually, it would take a considerable amount of time with a number
of people to do this thoroughly.
But I just wanted to quickly step through and show you how you're utilizing
these tools for thinking about strategic analysis and planning.
And also how they invoke your need to go back and maybe do deeper dives with more
technical tools to evaluate particular risks in real and political markets.