Conducting a SWOT Analysis on Your Business

For those of you who don’t know, SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  Identifying and specifying these 4 aspects of your company allows you to truly understand what you’re up against when operating a business.  You can also do a SWOT analysis on a project, industry, location, employee and many other aspects of business that need to be analyzed as part of your due diligence process.

There could be several reasons for conducting a SWOT analysis on your business.  It’s certainly something that you can include in a business plan as it gives investors and venture capitalists a realistic, bird’s eye view of your business without smothering them with optimism.  It can also force you to look at your business from a different perspective and allow you to realize things in a different manner that you might not have considered before.

The 4 categories in a SWOT analysis are pretty self-explanatory so you really don’t need to know too much to put this in motion.  Nevertheless, I will provide some examples to get you started.  You’ll be surprised how useful the information is that the analysis will render.  You can use these factors for decision making, expansion plans, strategy building, converting weaknesses to strengths, marketing research, protocol implementation, troubleshooting, identifying operational deficiencies, etc.

Strengths

• What does your company do better than your competitors?
• What advantages does your company have?
• What makes your company unique?
• What factors help to generate revenue?
• What makes your company adaptable to industrial changes?

Weaknesses

• What aspects of your business need improvement? 
• What areas of your industry should you avoid?
• What factors make your company lose money?
• What operational aspects are wasteful?
• What are your operational deficiencies?

Opportunities

• Where is there room for growth or expansion?
• What industrial trends are becoming apparent?
• What changes are occurring that could work to your benefit?
• How can your company operate more efficiently?
• What areas can money be saved?

Threats

• What are the obstacles that your company is faced with?
• What industrial changes could have a negative impact in the future?
• Which competitors are expanding and gaining more market share?
• What could put your company out of business?
• Are there any changes to the industry that could affect your bottom line?

With the answers to these questions, you can plan on how to maintain what is good and improve the areas that are lacking.  It also forces you to look ahead to the future in an effort to prognosticate market trends and anticipate potential landmines so that you can be better prepared to handle them as the occur.

You may think you know your company well and that you have every aspect of its inner workings at the forefront of your mind.  However, until you sit down and write all of these factors out on a piece of paper, you will never be able to fully identify everything that can come out of doing a SWOT analysis.  It just brings you one step closer to being able to stay organized and realize certain issues that need to be addressed.  Sometimes, just focusing on these issues and dwelling upon the possibilities can bring about ideas that could help you run your business better. 

For more information on how to conduct a SWOT analysis on your business, please contact Ashlar Consulting Corporation at 305-849-9399 or visit www.AshlarConsultingCorp.com.