The Swot analysis is a technique to assess the current and actual status of your business and/or entrepreneurship project through 4 concepts:
Internal (factors inside the company, as financial resources, knowledge, products and positioning):
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
External (factors outside the company, as trends, other agent actions and industry characteristics):
- Opportunities
- Threats
Steps to perform a useful Swot:
- Set the goal/s
- Ask yourself why do you want to use the Swot Analysis for: what goals am I trying to achieve?
- Don’t use it just for because others are telling to, but for purposes evaluating the viability of your project, introducing a new product in the market or rebranding your strategy.
- External research
- Search in depth, benchmark and find out what the other competitors’ SWOT. You can use different tools, as:
- Internet
- Industry researches
- Business books
- Benchmarking
- Surveys and interviews with the clients
- Observation
- Internal Research
- Once you have valuable data from around you, ask yourself tricky and difficult questions to go depth in your analysis. Don’t be so optimistic or pessimistic: just be realistic.
- Build a draft
- Now that you have both an external and internal vision, and only after that, scratch your SWOT analysis. With canvanizer you can create it easily and graphically.
- Let an expert criticise
- If you have the chance, expose yourself to a business expert or a critical voice to make your SWOT more real and adapted to the reality.
- Remake it again
- Build your definitive SWOT taking into account the expert opinion
- Do something with the result: CAME
- The SWOT analysis is just the detection phase: after being sure that it represents the reality, design a strategy and then implement it through 4 different lines:
- Correct the Weaknesses
- Adapt to/Adjust to the Threats
- Maintain the Strengths
- Explore the Opportunities
- Remember that you cannot do all at once, neither be the best in each field. Focus on your core business and build a competitive advantage unifying what the market values and what you make best.
- Rebuild the SWOT periodically
- Doing that, it will be easier for you to think of and turn:
- The Threats in Opportunities
- The Weaknesses in Strengths
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