No matter what industry you work in, a S.W.O.T. Analysis can help you determine your business goals, objectives, and strategic plan.
What exactly is a S.W.O.T. Analysis?
S.W.O.T. stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. If you’re unable to hire a third party company to conduct this analysis for you, here are some basic tips to do this on your own.
Strengths.
Take a look at your analytics and sales and identify the top 3-5 things your business is doing very well. These are your strengths. Many people, including myself, have a hard time talking about the things we’re doing well. But the numbers don’t lie! Do a deep dive into your stats and celebrate your wins.
Weaknesses.
Here’s the part we’re all good at! Identifying what is not going so well. Take the stats you’ve gathered about your strengths, and look at where there is a need for improvement. You also want to understand the why. Is there a reason you’re performing low in one area of business, but higher in others? Are there numbers behind the failures that can help you turn them into wins?
Opportunities.
This is my favorite part of a S.W.O.T. Analysis. Here is where you can take those strengths and weaknesses, and create a strategic plan to turn them into new opportunities for your business. Look at the silver lining.
For example: If you know your social media stats are performing well, but your website traffic is low, you can find ways to direct traffic from social media to your website by adding your website link at the end of every post, or adding more website content that will make people want to visit.
Threats.
Here is where you have to keep it real with yourself. Even more real than when you had to determine your weaknesses. Threats are more than competitors, these are also areas where you can even be a threat to your own business. How are you hindering yourself? Are you afraid to invest in your business? Are you too scared to take advantage of new opportunities? Threats are worse than weaknesses. A weakness can be improved, a threat could potentially end your business.
We only have 4 more months to close out 2018. As you move through the remainder of the year, I challenge you to perform a S.W.O.T. Analysis and prepare your business for 2019. If you need help with this, please do not hesitate to contact me.