2023 - The S.W.O.T. Analysis Document

The S.W.O.T. Analysis

Work “ON” Your Business Not “IN” It

Your business like any other, must be looked at strategically, ideally, before creating any specific goals and outcomes.  I will imagine that your goal is to build a successful and thriving enterprise.  A business that is: Cash Flowing, Profitable, Scalable, Leverageable, and Sellable. ** If this is important to you then using the SWOT Analysis will help you to navigate through the different components of your business so you can be more strategic, effective and efficient with your operation.   

The SWOT Analysis is a strategic planning technique used to help you, your company and your team identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to your business such as competition, markets, project planning and the like. 

According to Wikipedia The SWOT Analysis is intended to specify the objectives of the business venture or project and identify the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving those objectives. Users of a SWOT analysis often ask and answer questions to generate meaningful information for each category to make the tool useful and identify their competitive advantage. SWOT has been described as the tried-and-true tool of strategic analysis.

The Overview:

• Strengths: characteristics of you, your business or project that give it an advantage over others.
  • i.e. Good at lead generation
• Weaknesses: characteristics of the business that place the business or project at a disadvantage relative to others.
  • i.e. your physical environment does not allow you to maximize your strengths
• Opportunities: elements in the environment that the business or project could exploit to its advantage.
  • i.e. An Individual and/or company has strong brand awareness
• Threats: elements in the environment that could cause trouble for the business or project.
  • i.e. Complacency and others are using social media more than you to broaden their brand awareness.

** As I noted that using SWOT will be useful “IF” you want to have a growing business.  Keep in mind, it doesn’t matter where you are … it matters where you want to go.  Meaning that if you are in your first year of business or you are re-building your business, and your goal is… 12 deals this year and 15 the next and 25 and so on… then the SWOT is critical and helpful.  However, on the other hand, if your goal is to do only a handful of deals each year, going through this exercise may not make sense.  If this is the case, then do your few deals and then take off for the rest of the year.  Of course, the choice is yours!

On the next page are 2 images … one is the description of the SWOT Analysis and the other is for you to use as an exercise for your business goals and or any situation where a SWOT is needed.

A couple of final thoughts on the use of the SWOT Analysis…

One is to not only can you use the SWOT on your overall business but also for the other components of your business operations as well.  For example, you can do a SWOT on your lead gen, presentations, sales, customer service processes and so on…

Two is to understand that this is not as complicated as it may appear.  As your coach, we’ll work on it together and fine-tune all aspects of it and how to use it to your advantage. 

Download the S.W.O.T. worksheet below by clicking the link

 Click here to download this document

If you need help with this... reach out and jump on my calendar.

Great day, Mike