photo credit: www.health.state.mn.us

SWOT analysis is the acronym for a framework that allows you identify the strengths and weaknesses within your business as well as opportunities and threats in your external environment.The S is for strengths,W for weakness,O for opportunities and T for threats. Strengths and weaknesses are internal to your company while opportunities and threats are external to your company.
Applying the SWOT analysis to your business enables you to do the following

– Optimize your strengths to achieve your objectives.
-Minimize and overcome obstacles.
–  Align your business to relevant opportunities.
– Analyse your competitors well enough to device a strategy that differentiates you from them and allow you compete successfully in the market place.
– Analyse risks that can affect your business.

Lets walk through identifying strengths and weaknesses in this post; you might want to answer the following questions to identify the strengths and weaknesses within your business

STRENGTHS
– what are the characteristics of your company ? you might find some strengths within that
-what advantage does your company have ?
-what does your company do better than anyone else?
– what unique and/or low cost resources do you have access to that no one does?
-what do customers and people in your industry see as your strengths?
-what is your company’s unique selling point?
– what qualities currently gets you customers/clients ?

WEAKNESSES
-What can your company do better?
-What should your company avoid doing?
-what makes you lose sales?
-what will clients/ customers and people in your market space refer to as your weakness?

SWOT Analysis (2) will be aimed at identifying opportunities and threats that can affect your business.

Do let us know how relevant this post has been to your business?