NERD! What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your company?

Is your organization equipped with a SWOT analysis? If not, maybe it’s because you’ve never heard of it!

A SWOT analysis is a basic technique often used in strategic planning, improving business success, organizational development, and identifying competitive advantages. Evaluating these four factors will help you make better decisions and keep your business on track for success.

Start by brainstorming with a group of people within your organization who are charged with the same or similar goals. Remember, a good SWOT analysis takes effort and the more you put into it, the better you will understand your business and how it works today.

STRENGTHS: First, write down your company’s strengths. What are you doing well? What makes you better than your competitors? What do you have or do that differentiates you from your competition? Here are some things to consider:

• The size of similar companies in your industry.
• Perception by customers of your products or services
• Perception in the industry of your “brand”
• Advantages you have over your competitors

EXAMPLES:

Accountability, integrity, strong staff loyalty, strong management team, innovative problem solving, flexibility, camaraderie, sense of urgency, communication, constant pursuit of best practices, motivating employees to build on their strengths, respect by customers/each other, high energy, positive environment, high level of customer service and strong reputation in the industry.

WEAKNESSES: Now that you’ve determined how great your company is, it’s time to look for weaknesses. The same questions should be asked when looking for weaknesses. What are you doing wrong, or not so well? What are other companies doing better? What is stopping you from being more successful?

It is important that you do not skip this section. Since a SWOT analysis is a brainstorming effort, don’t dismiss anything that comes to mind and don’t be afraid to point out a weakness because it may hurt someone’s feelings. If a weakness is perceived, list it. The weakness you don’t list could become the reason some aspect of the business goes wrong or fails in the future.

Some areas of weakness to look for:

• Poor perception of your company brand
• Advantages that other companies have
• Lack of management or other employee talent.

EXAMPLES:

Lack of automation, getting bogged down in minutiae/cumbersome processes, managers doing staff level work, micro-management, managers not asking for help until overwhelmed, need to measure employee work i.e. quota system, employees dissatisfied or unhappy.

OPPORTUNITIES: Let’s shift the focus to external factors when looking at opportunities. Try to identify the business areas that you think your company should be evaluating: opportunities to gain market share from competitors and/or grow your market to include new customers.

In addition to external factors, opportunities within your company should also be considered. Can you optimize duplicate costs and/or move employees to different positions to take advantage of your strengths? What kinds of things can you do better?

Some opportunities to look for:

• New service markets
• Financial or legal problems for competitors.
• New technologies you could adopt
• Internal changes to be more efficient

EXAMPLES: Empowering employees to reach higher, maximizing the use of technologies, streamlining cross-departmental activities, analyzing and repositioning employees to play to their strengths, getting more business from existing customers, continuing to stand out as different in your industry , train employees, build your brand to attract both employees and customers.

THREATS: Finally, consider the threats to your business. Again, threats can be both internal and external. In fact, sometimes internal threats come first, which opens the door for external threats. Therefore, it is very important to do a good threat analysis.

Insider threats are not usually classified as such, which could be a mistake. Any internal issues that are a threat to the well-being of your company should be evaluated alongside external threats.

Some possible threats are:

• internal inefficiencies
• Cash flow
• Competitors
• Technological advances in the industry (are you up to date?)
• Employee/department weaknesses

EXAMPLES:

Leadership splits, falls short of mission statement, managers become territorial, teamwork gives way to individual agendas, managers feel overwhelmed/burned out, take or continue unprofitable businesses They don’t understand the competition, they fall behind in technology, they keep employees who won’t contribute to success, they don’t handle aggressive growth well, and they don’t maintain competitive rates/prices while remaining highly profitable.

After you have completed these exercises, assign a leader within the organization to each category who will be responsible, along with their team, for maintaining it (such as Strengths); repair it (as Weaknesses); acting on it (such as Opportunities); and protect against it (such as threats).

The group should then meet again every six months to analyze the SWOT and revise it according to the reality facing them at the time.

Do you know what the SWOT of your company is? If not, now is the time to find out!