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A SWOT analysis allows you to construct a strategic balance sheet for your company. In the analysis, you bring together all the internal factors, including your company’s strengths and weaknesses. You then weigh these factors against the external forces that you’ve identified, such as the opportunities and threats that your company faces due to competitive forces or trends in your business environment.
SWOT Analysis Template You can Follow these steps to conduct SWOT analysis on your business. 1. Divide all the strengths that you’ve identified into two groups, based on whether they’re associated with potential opportunities in your industry or with latent threats. 2. Divide all the weaknesses the same way– one group associated with opportunities, the other with threats. 3. Construct a grid with four quadrants. 4. Place your company’s strengths and weaknesses, paired with industry opportunities or threats, in one of the four boxes SWOT Analysis Template Strategy The SWOT analysis provides a bit of useful strategic guidance. Be sure to address each of the following steps in your business plan: ** Eliminate any company weaknesses that you identify in areas in which you face serious threats from your competitors or unfavourable trends in a changing business environment. ** Capitalise on any business opportunities that you discover where your company has real strengths. ** Work on improving any weaknesses that you identify in areas that may contain potential business opportunities. Update regularly: Change is the only constant in your business, your industry, and your marketplace. Constant change means that you can’t complete your SWOT analysis only one time; you have to revise the grid regularly as your company grows and as the environment around you changes. Think of your SWOT analysis as being a continuous process – something that you do repeatedly as an important part of your business-planning cycle. |