Improve Any Part of your Business
Whether you believe it is best to focus on your strengths or minimize your weaknesses doing a SWOT analysis on your business, a department, a product or a service can help you identify areas of improvement.
The SWOT analysis tool helps you to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Strengths: These are generally within your control, such as 80% referral or repeat business, or a feature that is not provided by your competitors. Find your strengths and then determine what needs to be done to keep these strengths.
• Weaknesses: These are generally within your control too. You should look at your weaknesses and determine if the cost of addressing the weakness is less than the return to the company when the weakness is fixed. One business spent thousands of dollars to fix a weakness that only affected 3 marginal customers and thus had a negative ROI.
• Opportunities: These could be short-term or long-term. Brainstorm the opportunities before you decide which ones to further develop. Once you find ideas that will provide a positive impact determine what the ROI would be to bring these opportunities into existence in your business.
• Threats: These are things that generally outside of your control. Identifying threats often leads to better product development (sometimes a new product), or to changed business strategies.
A SWOT analysis can provide you with a lot of information. And this information can help you improve any part of your business.
The SWOT analysis tool helps you to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Strengths: These are generally within your control, such as 80% referral or repeat business, or a feature that is not provided by your competitors. Find your strengths and then determine what needs to be done to keep these strengths.
• Weaknesses: These are generally within your control too. You should look at your weaknesses and determine if the cost of addressing the weakness is less than the return to the company when the weakness is fixed. One business spent thousands of dollars to fix a weakness that only affected 3 marginal customers and thus had a negative ROI.
• Opportunities: These could be short-term or long-term. Brainstorm the opportunities before you decide which ones to further develop. Once you find ideas that will provide a positive impact determine what the ROI would be to bring these opportunities into existence in your business.
• Threats: These are things that generally outside of your control. Identifying threats often leads to better product development (sometimes a new product), or to changed business strategies.
A SWOT analysis can provide you with a lot of information. And this information can help you improve any part of your business.
Posted by Cal Tingey at 10/8/2011 2:02 PM 
Categories: Risk, Strategies, Business Tools
Tags: SWOT. Strengths Weaknesses opportunities threats SWOT analysis
Categories: Risk, Strategies, Business Tools
Tags: SWOT. Strengths Weaknesses opportunities threats SWOT analysis
Comments