Ms. Rachel teaches songs, speech, and strategy

Can you tell I have a toddler at home?

Ms. Rachel is actually an interesting case study in sound strategy. It’s how she took off like a rocket.

Let’s do a SWOT analysis.

Ms. Rachel really took off during the pandemic - everyone was stuck at home with their kids. This is a great example of turning a threat into an opportunity.

She has multiple key strengths. After all, there was plenty of children’s programming on YouTube. Why did she take off?

First, her voice. Kids love it. She has a higher-pitched voice than her competition.

Second, her and her husband’s musical training and background. They can compose and produce their own music, avoiding copyright issues and having their own copyright protections.

You can see them try to leverage this at first in their original branding, “Songs for Littles”

The partnership between her husband and her will also create more innovative content faster than a more formal relationship such as that with Catie’s Classroom.

Third, her son’s speech difficulties taught her a lot about teaching young children to speak, content that isn’t widely available on YouTube but is perfect for her pre-speech audience.

Finally, she’s a trained preschool teacher. This isn’t incredibly rare in terms of strengths, but combined with the other strengths, it creates a coherent whole.

We can see via this analysis that both having the insight to see COVID-19 as an opportunity AND having just the right combination of strengths springboarded Ms. Rachel’s success.

Notice, too, that in many cases, we turned a negative into a positive - from the pandemic to her own son’s speech difficulties. Finally, we must acknowledge that many of these strengths are “path dependent” - you have them for various unplanned reasons.

Thus, she shows that it wasn’t necessarily dedicating herself to building any certain strength or expertise that made her successful—it was recognizing the strengths she already had—both those that path dependently may have been seen as irrelevant by others too focused on a traditional approach and those that would be written off as negatives or hindrances.

What are your strengths you aren’t using in your job? How can you apply them? What do you see as threats or weaknesses in the current environment? How can you flip those around?