How-to: Conduct a SWOT Analysis

inn assessing your business, you should conduct a SWIT analysis to assess the internal factors (inside your span of control) that could impact your business in terms of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities or Threats. In other words, how could these internal factors change how your company will compete in your markets, segments, against your competitors and offerings?

The best method for eliciting SWOT factors is using the brainstorming method where a team identifies as many potential factors that could impact your business. While many are relevant, often there are 3-5 critical factors that bubble to the top that should be prioritized in future steps in the Strategile platform.

• Strengths:
  • What advantages does your organization have?
  • What do you do better than anyone else?
  • What unique or lowest-cost resources can you draw upon that others can’t?
  • What do people in your market see as your strengths?
  • What factors mean that you “get the sale”?
  • What is your organization’s unique selling position?

• Weaknesses:
  • What could you improve?
  • What should you avoid?
  • What are people in your market likely to see as weaknesses
  • What factors cause you to lose sales?
  • What happens if…?

• Opportunities:
  • What good opportunities can you spot?
  • What interesting trends are you aware of?
  • Useful opportunities can come from such things as:
    • Changes in technology and markets on both a broad and narrow scale.
    • Changes in government policy related to your field.
    • Changes in social patterns, population profiles, lifestyle changes, and so on.

• Threats:
  • What obstacles do you face?
  • What are your competitors doing?
  • Are quality standards or specifications for your job, products or services changing?
  • Is changing technology threatening your position?
  • Do you have bad debt or cash-flow problems?
  • Could any of your weaknesses seriously threaten your business?