Strong planning is the bedrock of your business. Crucial to those plans is having a method in place to protect your business from unplanned changes that can threaten your survival.
The SWOT analysis is one method that many businesses use.
SWOT stands for:
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
The SWOT analysis method enables you to:
- Access your position in any given situation
- Identify aspects that require re-evaluation affecting the delivery of your products and services
It is key to understand where your company sits in the marketplace. This analysis will help you figure that out.
How to analyze:
- Layout in a chart form and group together.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths and weaknesses will be the internal analysis of the processes, procedures, products, and services from an employee and customer perspective. Your employees and customers can give valuable feedback about what works and what does not. A strength may be consistent communication across the company. A weakness may be how inconsistent we communicate with our clients.
Opportunities and Threats
Opportunities and threats are the external analysis of industry and market trends and what your competitors are doing. Your competitors can give you valuable insights. How you gain these insights could be looking at their collateral materials, brochures, websites as well as speaking to people who deal with them.
Once the four quadrants are filled. Themes emerge that, you can then group further down into specifics for re-evaluation and suggestions for improvement.
From those themes choose an objective, brainstorm, and ask open-ended questions. Questions stimulate creative thinking. There is no such thing as a bad question.
Conclusion
Unplanned changes do not have to have a catastrophic effect on your business. With the SWOT analysis method, you have a framework to re-evaluate and make a corrective course of action at any given time.
