Every business needs a little help now and again, especially when it comes to growth. If you feel like you could use that little bit of support in growing your business to be stronger and more dependable, then a SWOT analysis is a great place to start!
Growth with a SWOT Analysis
What is a SWOT analysis?
Let’s start with understanding what we’re actually talking about. This acronym stands for “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.” It’s a segmented analysis where you’ll take the time to understand what can fit in each category. Once you have this basis down, then you see where you can fine tune your business.
How does a SWOT analysis work?
This analysis is all about understanding what’s in and out of your control, where you excel, where you need help, what you haven’t tapped into, who is in your space that is doing well, and more. This SWOT analysis does it for you by helping you understand the distinctions. The first two parts of the analysis – strengths and weaknesses, are things within your company that you can control. Strengths could be resources, what you do well, what your teammates or staff do well or what your business is killing it at right now or in the past. Weaknesses are those things that your competition does better than you, where you fall short, where your team falls short, where you could definitely use some improvement and the like.
Opportunities and threats, the last two elements, are exterior factors that you can’t really control, but you can have a plan for, or account for. You’ll know what kind of opportunities you want to take on and how you could do that, new things that come into fruition, new technology that you could use for your business. Threats could be new competition or even current competition that’s doing really well, money problems or even new technology that you can’t afford or understand, obstacles that get in the way with success that you can’t easily fix.
Benefits of a SWOT analysis
While it seems strange to think about taking the time to put together a full assessment, it is really valuable. It will help you see your business in a “snapshot” so that you can also understand just what it needs to improve, grow and succeed. Seeing an opportunity for growth and potential for weakness or threat is going to be one of the biggest benefits.
Another perk is that this will help you brainstorm new components in each of these categories. A lot of times, it takes writing it down on a piece of paper for you to really understand it. When you make this a team opportunity, it helps promote that brainstorming even further. And this could be great for a team event for so many reasons, many brains are better than 1, especially for brainstorming, coming up with new ideas, challenges that other team members are having, where some team members excel, and etc.
How to get the most out of a SWOT analysis
The more input that you have on your analysis, the better the results are going to be. For this reason, having a business coach on hand can really help support the best outcome. From explaining a SWOT analysis to helping you fill in each of the categories to talking out the results with you, it all is easier with a coach at your side. An outside perspective is usually ideal, they ask the hard questions you might not ask yourself and since they aren’t a competitor and they want to see you excel, it’s super beneficial.
The other thing is that an experienced business coach may be able to catch a weakness that is actually a threat or vice versa. It’s all about having the right viewpoint.
Your business depends on you
No pressure, but it’s true. Your business growth relies on a proper approach to understanding your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in a detailed way. If you have difficulty in pointing those all out and understanding just what to do about them, bring a business coach in to help you gain the right perspective on them and understand how it all can lead to serious growth potential for your business!
Contact Team Stetzel, your business coach team at (281) 217-4951 to help with your business growth needs. We offer individual coaching as well as group coaching and executive coaching. Whatever you need to grow your business, improve your leadership skills and be successful, we have you covered.
