Challenge 4: How my SWOT analysis will affect my business

• 5 week challenge, How to Start a Business, Marketing plans and strategies

You are probably thinking to yourself, “Man, do I have to look at strengths and weaknesses again, we just did this in challenge 3?”

The answer is “Yes” .   Just because you know your strengths and weaknesses does not automatically make you a successful entrepreneur you have to work them all to your advantage.  You want to set up your business so that you maximize your strengths and do something about your weaknesses.  Aka hire experts or staff to compensate in the areas that you are weak in.  Further you want look at external factors that will create opportunities and threats for your business and then look at these four areas holistically and develop strategies and goals to proactively deal with situations or maximize our revenue potential

To do this we need to do a SWOT analysis.    SWOT stands for…

S = Strengths: what your business is good at.

W = Weaknesses: what your business can improve on.

O = Opportunities: where are their opportunities for you to grow, make money and raise awareness about your business?

T = Threats: What threats do competitors or other factors in the market place hold for you?

Personally, I love the SWOT analysis framework they are perfect for so many situations 1) starting a business 2) import life decisions 3) competitor analysis.  It helps you draw important conclusions about how you can move your business forward.

For the SWOT Template please fill out this form to download the template.

The Internal Analysis

Strengths and Weaknesses are related to you and your business, the internal factors that make up who you and your business are.  For example; “I am really good at marketing” this is a strength and “I don’t know anything about accounting best practices” is a weakness.

The External Analysis

For opportunities and threats these are external to your business.  For example, an opportunity could be ‘an article highlighted that there is a growing demand for my business’ a threat could be ‘customers are not very knowledgeable about my business’.

Once you have explored your internal and external influences you can evaluate and combine them to create action items.

For example:

• I will make sure to clear my schedule so that I can spend more time on marketing and create content to educate my customers about my product or service, or
• I will hire a good accountant in two months time.

For more information and exploration of this swot analysis please see the video Challenge #4 SWOT Analysis on our Channel.