New Year Planning
The new year is right around the corner and it is time to look at your business plan for the coming year. This series is dedicated to preparing your business plan correctly and come out on top. The first part is how to do a SWOT analysis.
What is a SWOT?
SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is a strategic analysis that business use to look at their competition and internal processes. To help best explain how to do a SWOT, lets look at each part:
Strengths
This is the easiest section to describe. Just ask yourself “what am I good at ?”. For people that are hard on their own business this may be difficult. To help make this easier I would suggest asking past clients too see what they have to say about the process.
Weaknesses
These are weaknesses that are internal to your business. Think “what do I really need help with” or “what did I do bad at this year”. Really dig on this and think of things that can be improved in your business, not with a competitor. Focus on things you can fix because this will ensure you are being productive with your time.
Opportunities
This is looking at the possibilities to improve on your business. A good example is education. Say for the new year a conference out of state will help you with marketing. That is an opportunity. Another opportunity could be a new vendor you want to form a relationship with. Opportunities are not internal to your business, but they are things that exist outside in your environment or in other areas of the country.
Threats
This is the stuff that keeps you up at night because it can directly harm your business. Again, these are things outside your business. Maybe a new competitor just got there and they are taking your clients or weather is really an issue year around. The big thing with threats is to neutralize them when you can and figure out work arounds for things you have little control over. DON’T IGNORE THEM!
How to implement
The first thing you have to do is wright all of these things down. The easiest way is to join our FB Private group and get our editable SWOT analysis file. Next, subscribe to our you tube page and watch the SWOT video that goes with this blog to get the next steps to implement your SWOT analysis to having a great next year.
Let’s stay connected
I hope you have enjoyed this post. Do you want to dive deeper into how to be successful in new markets or are relocating your business and need some help? Come join our course Break into a New Market.
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