Feb 24, 2022: SWOT Analysis
SWOT is one of the tools you can use for thinking about your business. It’s a common business method, for looking at aspects of your business.
Small businesses should look at their strategies every 4 to 6 weeks and as a small scalable startup, you should look at what you are doing frequently.
Example on how to put things into different categories to understand or to create a SWOT analysis.
Strengths: Character of a business which gives it advantages over its competitors.
● Employees care.
● Low competition.
● Unique customer is demographic.
● Business model holistic.
● Trust in employees.
● Not overwhelming – small, peaceful.
Weaknesses: Characteristics of a business that make it disadvantageous relative to competitors.
● Classes revenue/profit & loss.
● Gym revenue/profit & loss.
● Communication within the firm.
● The customer demographic is maybe less geographically mobile.
● Front desk lack of person present.
● Software program redundancy – requires further research.
● Employee appreciation.
Opportunity: Elements in a company’s external environment that allow it to formulate and implement strategies to increase profitability.
● Pricing appears lower than comparable: pricing to desired behaviours.
● Advertising effectiveness and building brand awareness.
● Measuring advertising ROI / Effectiveness.
● Complete the package: requires analysis.
● A financial analytic approach to decision making.
Threats: Elements in the external environment that could endanger the integrity and profitability of the business.
● Debt load.
● New entrants.
● Loss of key employees/backup.
● Lawsuits.
● Natural disaster.
● Additional capital expenses or expansion before the core model is solidly profitable and financial reserves built.
Entrepreneurs and start-ups should look at their strategies every 4 to 6 weeks but you shouldn’t change your strategies every 6 months, but you should revisit what you doing because as a start-up you are getting a lot of new data, and that could be used to improvise on trying different things.
Your SWOT analysis can be used to inform you about the things you have been doing in your business model.
Like working on your: Key partnerships, key activities, value proposition, key resources, channels, it can be used in multiple ways to organize the information.
In SWOT analysis what we do is, look at all the data points, then later we connect those points and segregate them based on high priority to low priority.
To learn more on how to build a team, and become a better Entrepreneur join us next Thursday, on our weekly Mentorship Program with our mentor David Wagstaff.