Evaluate Your Position
As a business owner, you will be faced with major decisions.
A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Analysis a planning tool that helps look at your business’s current standings and determine what new leads to pursue. Many companies use a SWOT Analysis often to effectively evaluate their business decisions.
The primary goal of a SWOT Analysis is to help companies develop a full awareness of all the factors involved in the decision making process. This can include exploring new initiatives, revamping internal policies, pivoting in the market, or collaborations.
Some companies will create a SWOT Analysis to simply check the current status of their business to improve business operations. Through this analysis, you will be able to see key areas of your business that are performing optimally, as well as what will need adjustments. It is very important to look at the analysis with facts and not predictions of how you think the company will perform.
SWOT Analysis Breakdown
Strengths: Positive characteristics of your business that provide an advantage over your competition.
Weaknesses: Characteristics that prove to be a disadvantage to your business.
Strength and Weaknesses are considered Internal Factors and include resources that are readily available to you such as: funding, sources of income, investment opportunities, location, facilities, equipment, employees, volunteers, target audiences, access to natural resources, trademarks, patents and copyrights.
Opportunities: Changes and trends in your industry that offer opportunities for your business.
Threats: Elements in the environment or industry that may cause problems for your business.
Opportunities and Threats are External Factors and commonly affect all companies such as: market trends, economic trends, funding, demographics, political, environmental, and economic regulations
Here is a basic example of a SWOT Analysis of a holistic bath & body company:
From this SWOT Analysis, we can see that this company needs to focus on getting their products in other stores in addition to their online market. Sales would increase, they would be able to buy in bulk to keep packaging prices low, and hire employees to keep up with increased production.
Evaluate your business and complete a SWOT Analysis.
Based on your results, brainstorm recommendations and strategies based on your findings. The goal is to leverage strengths and opportunities to overcome weaknesses and threats.
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