We’ve all heard the phrase “working on not in our business” – yet it’s something that too many business owners avoid doing in, as they try to focus on just keeping their heads above water.
Today, more than ever, it is critical for us to look at what we’re doing and how we could be doing it better. With the recession being far from over (as much as we’d like to just keep holding our breaths and hope for a better day tomorrow), the reality is that only the fittest and most relevant businesses will survive in the short term.
I subscribe to a theory that businesses should be a continuous evolution and that we can constantly improve and find ways to streamline and factorize. The end goal being to create a seamless production flow that will enable the business to successfully support growth.
Often I’m asked, ‘but where do I even start?’ Analysis needn’t be rocket science and don’t let a little word like ‘strategy’ scare you off. The best place to start is with a very simple strategic analysis tool commonly used by businesses – the S.W.O.T: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
SWOT’s include looking at each of the favourable and unfavourable elements to the objectives of a project or venture. You might choose to look at only one portion of your business – like your brand, or you could apply the analysis to the overall business. There is no right or wrong answer, but it does require taking an objective stand point and asking yourself why you believe that the answer you have written down is true. Often, as business owners, we do things because we’ve just always done them that way. The key to being successful, I believe, is in questioning our rationale. Perhaps invite a colleague or an unbiased third party to go over your first SWOT draft with you to see if they can challenge areas that you may have either missed, been too harsh or light on.
When it comes to strengths, keep these to the actual things you do have right now – not the potential. Under opportunities you can add in all the possibilities. Weaknesses should include any attributes that are harmful to achieving your objectives – I generally try to keep these to things that we need to change now and are actual and real issues. Threats, however, are more items that potentially could create damage if you don’t mitigate.
It’s important to remember that SWOTs are not strategy; they are merely a simple analysis that should help guide overall strategies or help set a business up to continue with their planning.
Here we use SWOT to analyse the market position of a small management consultancy with specialism in HRM – thanks to Wikipedia.com
| Strengths | Reputation in marketplace | Expertise at partner level in HRM consultancy |
| Weaknesses | Shortage of consultants at operating level rather than partner level | Unable to deal with multi-disciplinary assignments because of size or lack of ability |
| Opportunities | Well established position with a well defined market niche | Identified market for consultancy in areas other than HRM |
| Threats | Large consultancies operating at a minor level | Other small consultancies looking to invade the marketplace |
Have a question on how to analyse your business? Ask us!
Author: Jenene Freer
