SWOT – An Invaluable Business Tool

When hearing famous stories from well known entrepreneurs, you often hear the flippant – “we went with the flow, and things worked out.” These people are a rarity, hence their popularity. Most successful businesses have done well because they have planned effectively.

A tool to evaluate any business idea, strategy or plan is SWOT:

• S – Strengths
• W - Weaknesses
• O – Opportunities
• T – Threats

i.e You place your  idea in the centre of page and then evaluate its strengths, weaknesses , opportunities and threats. Once you’ve completed and listed all the presentations for each factor – you can then evaluate.

All the strengths that you come up with through the tool will act as the base for your competitive focus. In you business and marketing plans, you will be thinking of ways to promote/emphasise these strengths to your market.

The weaknesses you identify will become a section within your plan, that you account and plan for, so that plan for wways to accomodate them and work around the barriers they presents. Many weaknesses, marketed right, can be presented as strengths, think past their obvious appearance and see how you can  ompensate for the weaknesses.

Opportunites you consider, will become the pinning points of your plans for development and growth. What opportunites have been noticed that will allow you to increase sales? penetrate new markets? increase brand awareness? reduce expenditure?

Taking time to identify the threats to your business before they occur means you are in a good place to react should they become the problem or issue that you have identified. This will mean he effect they have upon your normal operations and development will be reduced.

It is a good idea to periodically ‘re-SWOT’ your business as it changes and adapts through its life-span. This will mean as your environment evolves your business evolves and stays prepared!