1. What is our competitive advantage?
2. What resources do we have?
3. What products are performing well?
Companies may consider performing this step as a "white-boarding" or "sticky note" session. The idea is there is no right or wrong answer; all participants should be encouraged to share whatever thoughts they have. These ideas can later be discarded; in the meantime, the goal should be to come up with as many items as possible to invoke creativity and inspiration in others.
With the list of ideas within each category, it is now time to clean-up the ideas. By refining the thoughts that everyone had, a company can focus on only the best ideas or largest risks to the company. This stage may require substantial debate among analysis participants, including bringing in upper management to help rank priorities.
Armed with the ranked list of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, it is time to convert the SWOT analysis into a strategic plan. Members of the analysis team take the bulleted list of items within each category and create a synthesized plan that provides guidance on the original objective.
For example, the company debating whether to release a new product may have identified that it is the market leader for its existing product and there is the opportunity to expand to new markets. However, increased material costs, strained distribution lines, the need for additional staff, and unpredictable product demand may outweigh the strengths and opportunities. The analysis team develops the strategy to revisit the decision in six months in hopes of costs declining and market demand becoming more transparent.
Use a SWOT analysis to identify challenges affecting your business and opportunities that can enhance it. However, note that it is one of many techniques, not a prescription.
When preparing a SWOT analysis, several common mistakes can undermine its effectiveness. Let's take a look at some ways your SWOT analysis may go awry.
One easy error to make when preparing a SWOT analysis is failing to be objective and honest in the assessment. Companies often tend to overemphasize their strengths while downplaying weaknesses, resulting in an overly optimistic and unrealistic analysis. This bias can lead to missed opportunities for improvement and leave the organization vulnerable to unforeseen threats. As difficult as it may be to be honest in your analysis, the validity of underlying assumptions is the cornerstone of how useful the SWOT analysis will be.
Another significant mistake is conducting the analysis in isolation, without input from diverse key stakeholders . You should try get to input from employees at various levels, customers, suppliers, and industry experts. Each may have a unique view of your company, and each may come up with different items to be listed in each quadrant based on how they specifically interact with the company.
Yet another common pitfall is neglecting to prioritize or weight the factors identified in the SWOT analysis. Not all strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are equally important or impactful. Failing to distinguish between major and minor factors can lead to misallocation of resources and misguided strategic decisions. It can be easy for the important items to be buried if too many non-material items are identified.
Another frequent error is treating the SWOT analysis as a one-time exercise. You should be prepared to do a SWOT analysis periodically, The business environment is constantly changing, and a SWOT analysis should be regularly updated to remain relevant. In addition, the analysis itself is just the beginning; its true value lies in using the findings to develop and implement strategic actions. You can then check future SWOT analysis to make sure the company is addressing the major points.
A SWOT analysis won't solve every major question a company has. However, there's a number of benefits to a SWOT analysis that make strategic decision-making easier.
Let's perform a SWOT analysis together by analyzing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of Tesla.
The four steps of SWOT analysis comprise the acronym SWOT: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. These four aspects can be broken into two analytical steps. First, a company assesses its internal capabilities and determines its strengths and weaknesses. Then, a company looks outward and evaluates external factors that impact its business. These external factors may create opportunities or threaten existing operations.
Creating a SWOT analysis involves identifying and analyzing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a company. It is recommended to first create a list of questions to answer for each element. The questions serve as a guide for completing the SWOT analysis and creating a balanced list. The SWOT framework can be constructed in list format, as free text, or, most commonly, as a 4-cell table, with quadrants dedicated to each element. Strengths and weaknesses are listed first, followed by opportunities and threats.
A SWOT analysis is used to strategically identify areas of improvement or competitive advantages for a company. In addition to analyzing thing that a company does well, SWOT analysis takes a look at more detrimental, negative elements of a business. Using this information, a company can make smarter decisions to preserve what it does well, capitalize on its strengths, mitigate risk regarding weaknesses, and plan for events that may adversely affect the company in the future.
While SWOT analysis is a powerful tool, it does have some limitations. It can sometimes oversimplify complex situations and is susceptible to the subjectivity and bias of participants. The analysis also doesn't provide specific guidance on how to address identified issues and can lead to analysis paralysis if not followed by concrete action.
A SWOT analysis is a great way to guide business-strategy meetings. It's powerful to have everyone in the room discuss the company's core strengths and weaknesses, define the opportunities and threats, and brainstorm ideas. Oftentimes, the SWOT analysis you envision before the session changes throughout to reflect factors you were unaware of and would never have captured if not for the group’s input.
A company can use a SWOT for overall business strategy sessions or for a specific segment such as marketing, production, or sales. This way, you can see how the overall strategy developed from the SWOT analysis will filter down to the segments below before committing to it. You can also work in reverse with a segment-specific SWOT analysis that feeds into an overall SWOT analysis.
Although a useful planning tool, SWOT has limitations. It is one of several business planning techniques to consider and should not be used alone. Also, each point listed within the categories is not prioritized the same. SWOT does not account for the differences in weight. Therefore, a deeper analysis is needed, using another planning technique.
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A SWOT analysis can help a small business owner or business assess a company’s position to determine the most optimal strategy going forward. This business practice can help you identify what you’re doing well, what you want to do better, and what kinds of obstacles you might encounter along the way.
This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about a SWOT analysis: what it is, how it works, and how to do it. We’ll also include an example and a template to help guide you as you perform your own SWOT analysis.
A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning technique that outlines an organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Assessing business competition in this way can help an organization plan strategically and execute more effectively.
Your business’s strengths SWOT section should include anything that your business does differently or better than competitors. Think about your unique value proposition, trends you’ve noticed in positive customer feedback, operational strengths, and company culture. This section is the perfect place to name and celebrate anything you’re already doing well.
Don’t be afraid to toot your own horn (while also remaining objective). Clearly identifying your business’s strengths not only helps you keep your spirits balanced as you address your weaknesses, it will also give you a sense of where to concentrate your resources. It’s easier to build a successful business when you’re working towards something, rather than acting in opposition.
Questions to help you determine your strengths:
Your weaknesses are the areas in which the business has room for improvement. You should include structural weaknesses in this section—those that relate to your systems, procedures, resources, and personnel. This is a great place to look at common feedback from employees (either from exit interviews, anonymous surveys, or other sources) and recurring customer complaints.
Questions to help you determine your weaknesses:
Your opportunities are the positive, external factors that your business might benefit from… but cannot directly control. That might include market opportunities, consumer purchasing trends, legal or regulatory changes, population changes, the cost of raw materials, and more. For example, businesses that provide accessibility for aging seniors might recognize the forthcoming “silver tsunami” of Baby Boomers entering the target demographic. This would be a clear opportunity to expand their customer base.
Questions to help you determine your opportunities:
Your threats are the external factors that have the potential to negatively affect your business. A threat can be specific and competitor-based or more structural. buy clomid online buy clomid online no prescription Examples of structural threats could be supply chain challenges, shifts in market requirements, talent shortages, or changes to social media algorithms (especially if your business heavily relies on social media marketing). You might also face a threat (or threats) from your competitors. This can include the way they operate, how they’re marketing, or the products they offer.
Identifying every external threat your business faces is essential for your business to identify how it must adapt in order to meet and overcome these challenges.
Questions to help you determine threats:
SWOT analyses offer a variety of benefits for businesses and personal brands. Here are some of the most common benefits of a SWOT analysis:
You can approach SWOT analyses in multiple ways. You can conduct a personal SWOT analysis for yourself as an individual, you can perform a marketing SWOT analysis to determine a competitive advantage in your marketing , or you can use a SWOT analysis as a part of broader strategic planning.
Whatever your end goal for a SWOT analysis, follow these steps.
Use a SWOT template or create your own. You can create your SWOT framework on the computer or on a whiteboard—if you choose to do the latter, be sure that someone is in charge of recording the responses so that you don’t lose key insights (you can also take a picture at the end of the SWOT session).
A SWOT analysis is most effective when it collects a variety of perspectives. Gathering key stakeholders with various perspectives will help you see more than you would have seen alone. Marketing leaders might be able to give you a more specific sense of the opportunities and threats related to your content marketing efforts. Your people team is closest to all personnel changes and feedback, so they’ll have the clearest sense of an organization’s strengths and what is driving employee retention (or challenging it). Sales leaders can help translate opportunities into a cohesive business strategy.
It’s simple: when it comes to a SWOT analysis, more heads are better than one.
Go through each field of the SWOT diagram, spending some time with each one. Ask the group the guiding questions to ensure you’re developing a comprehensive picture of the internal and external environment. There are no bad ideas in brainstorming. You’re just trying to get thoughts flowing. Something that feels like a “bad idea” might lead to discovering a potential threat you’d never thought of before or nuanced analysis of how you stack up to your nearest competitor. The key here is to keep the brainstorm going.
As you brainstorm, record points and ideas when they are relevant. At the end of the session, your SWOT analysis should leave you with a clear sense of the organization’s strengths and company’s weaknesses that you can use to guide your strategy formulation.
Revisit the SWOT diagram at a later time and edit it, culling out anything you don’t really need. You can also polish up some of the key insights gleaned in the brainstorming session. This is especially important if you plan to use your SWOT analysis as a more formal document that might be disseminated broadly.
The final step, if you choose to do it, is to take your SWOT takeaways and put them together in a polished document that you can share.
It can be easier to understand how to approach a SWOT analysis if you’ve seen a SWOT analysis example. For the sake of this example, we will imagine a hypothetical company and what its SWOT analysis might look like.
An Instagram-friendly fitness business offering virtual workouts.
Use this template to create your own SWOT analysis.
Weaknesses section: what your company could improve, opportunities section: external factors you could use to your advantage, threats section: external factors that could harm your business, owning the hard truths of a swot analysis.
A SWOT analysis can bring up a lot of hard truths. It’s difficult to confront your company’s weaknesses and sometimes looking at threats can make them feel like the existential kind. Overcome these obstacles and give yourself the fortitude to confront business challenges head on with the Mental Toughness mini-course. The best part? It’s free.
Mary Kate Miller writes about small business, real estate, and finance. In addition to writing for Foundr, her work has been published by The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Bustle, and more. She lives in Chicago.
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A SWOT analysis helps you identify areas of strengths and weaknesses in your business and take advantage of opportunities and mitigate threats. Leaders perform a SWOT analysis before starting a project or implementing a strategy.
With help from our experts, we’ll teach you about a SWOT analysis , provide examples from three different industries , and highlight common mistakes to avoid. We also include a downloadable SWOT analysis starter kit to help you get started.
To perform a SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats) analysis, assemble a matrix and take an objective look at your business. Write down your observations, summarize your findings, and plan your next steps together with your team.
“A SWOT analysis is designed to shed light on four separate aspects of your business and help in strategy formation and project planning. In order to perform this analysis comprehensively, each factor must be examined in equal measure,” explains Max Wesman , the Founder of GoodHire.
We’ve outlined the steps necessary for completing a SWOT analysis:
Download the SWOT Analysis Starter Kit
We’ve created this starter kit to give you the necessary tools to think through and conduct a SWOT analysis for your business. You’ll find SWOT templates in multiple formats, a checklist of actions to take and questions to ask, and a presentation template. All of these templates are fully customizable and can be adapted for personal decision-making. Download each template individually or as a complete kit.
Included in this download, you’ll find:
A SWOT analysis can help a wide variety of businesses identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. We’ve collected some SWOT analysis examples that demonstrate how they’re used in construction, technology, and retail industries.
Download the Simple Colorful Construction Company SWOT Template for Google Docs Download the Simple Colorful Construction Company SWOT Template for Google Docs with Sample Data
This simple but colorful SWOT template includes example data for a construction company concerned about its growth. In the sample, the company has identified the experience of their staff as a strength, as well as their growth as a business over the last 15 years. They know they need to be more open to adopting new technology, and they acknowledge they have no marketing budget and only attract new clients by word-of-mouth. They use this info to focus their opportunities on leveraging their existing staff to train new teams, and creating a specific budget for marketing. Finally, they have identified the rising costs of labor and the chance of public backlash to a project they are working on as threats to their business.
Download the Blank Animated Technology SWOT Analysis for PowerPoint Download the Animated Technology SWOT Analysis Template for PowerPoint with Sample Data
This animated SWOT analysis template is excellent for showing off your SWOT findings in a meeting or presentation setting. It includes animations to reveal each quadrant of your matrix as you speak. This template includes sample data for a large technology company that has recognized its worldwide presence and growing customer base as strengths, and the requirements of localization and employee retention as weaknesses. The organization is looking ahead to the opportunities presented by decreased labor costs in emerging markets, but also paying attention to the threat of cybersecurity and potential backlash in their home country due to their outsourcing of labor and manufacturing.
Download the Blank Horizontal Retail SWOT Template for Microsoft Word Download the Horizontal Retail SWOT Template for Microsoft Word with Sample Data
This horizontal-oriented SWOT template includes example data for a retail store. In the sample version of the template, the store has outlined its strengths but also noted concerns about the rising costs of rent and the abundance of big-box stores and included those in the threats section. They have identified opportunities as participation in local events and the possibility of a second storefront. The store also recognized that it could improve its social media efforts and the difficulty in competing with larger, online retailers.
A SWOT analysis is a strategic assessment tool that weighs strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to aid in decision-making. A SWOT analysis can help guide you to better-informed conclusions that are more likely to produce long-term benefits.
Invented by Albert Humphrey at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, the SWOT analysis framework has been adopted by businesses and individual decision-makers worldwide. Humphrey’s framework prioritizes the analysis of internal strengths and weaknesses; the related TOWS analysis model flips this on its head and focuses on external opportunities and threats. Another external analysis model, the PEST (political, economic, social, and technological) framework, focuses entirely on external factors, namely political, economical, sociocultural, and technological.
“The SWOT analysis is an excellent framework not only for diagnosing issues in your business, but also for identifying strategic opportunities within it. For example, a SWOT analysis can be applied to the launch of a new product, a business partnership under consideration, or a key hire or promotion. While the SWOT is not meant to be an all-inclusive, fully exhaustive analysis, it does provide a solid basis for discussion, much like a resume or CV contributes to the hiring process,” explains Colleti of Colletti Labs.
The strengths section of a SWOT analysis highlights what you do well. These can include your sales and market presence, hiring and retention practices, and products and services, among others. It can also list what you are good at personally.
Some additional examples of strengths you might list in a SWOT analysis include:
Identifying strengths impartially can be challenging. Use this list of questions to help pinpoint your strengths:
Weaknesses in a SWOT analysis are business aspects that are underperforming. These could be low sales, unpopular services, limitations, negative reviews, or others. Consider your weaknesses carefully, as you can often turn them into opportunities.
Here’s a list of common weaknesses businesses might find in a SWOT analysis:
Business owners often struggle to identify their weaknesses impartially. To help identify weaknesses, ask yourself the following questions, and be honest with your answers:
In a SWOT analysis, opportunities refer to situations that offer a chance to improve or expand. These can be factors such as a gap in the market, new products or services, or positive media coverage.
Some examples of opportunities to note in your SWOT analysis are:
To identify opportunities present in your business, ask the following questions:
Threats in a SWOT analysis refer to events or circumstances that pose a risk to your business’s growth or commercial success. These can include competitors, new regulations, negative media or social media coverage, and customer and employee satisfaction.
Opportunities and threats are sometimes considered two sides of the same coin, as many opportunities invite risk if you do not meet them with a solid plan. Opportunities are chances to capitalize on a possibility, but they can often be safely ignored. On the other hand, if you ignore threats for long enough, they often lead to disastrous consequences. Threats vary by industry and location.
We’ve collected some examples of common threats that could appear in a SWOT analysis:
Identifying threats can feel overwhelming and pessimistic, but they are vital for business planning. Ask yourself the following questions to shine light on potential threats in your SWOT analysis:
In a SWOT analysis, strengths and weaknesses are considered internal factors, and opportunities and threats are considered external factors. Internal factors are usually a result of decisions the company has made. External factors often come from a wider environment.
Internal factors tend to be easier to address since they come from decisions made within the company. External factors depend greatly on factors outside of a business and can be harder to identify and track. As a result, most organizations find it easier to bolster strengths and shore up weaknesses than to take advantage of opportunities and avoid threats.
To write a SWOT analysis for your business, take an objective look at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Keep it organized and concise, and create a specific and actionable list.
We’ve outlined these and other tips:
When performing a SWOT analysis, avoid being vague or too verbose. Be sure to follow up on the findings and create an action plan.
We’ve outlined these and other potential mistakes to avoid in your SWOT analysis:
A SWOT analysis can provide insight into your business’s overall performance, highlight places to improve, and even act as a team-building exercise.
We’ve outlined these and more benefits of performing a SWOT analysis:
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Swot analysis guide: powerful examples and a free template.
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For example, a dip in profit margins for a business can be scrutinized using a SWOT analysis. This tool helps identify internal factors, such as inefficient practices or inflated costs, that might be causing this dip. Using the SWOT pillars – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats – one can derive strategies to rectify the problem and enhance profit margins.
A SWOT analysis serves as a cornerstone for strategic planning, enabling businesses to align their goals with internal capabilities and market realities. Strengths and Weaknesses are introspective elements, helping businesses to capitalize on their unique competencies and address internal shortcomings.
Be sure to watch SmartDraw’s insightful video, ‘What is SWOT? Definition, Examples and How to Do a SWOT Analysis.’ It’s a great addition to our comprehensive SWOT Analysis Guide, reinforcing key concepts and showcasing practical examples. This video enhances your understanding and makes the whole process of performing a SWOT analysis more digestible and engaging.
By understanding the internal and external factors that impact the business, organizations can make informed decisions about allocating resources, pursuing growth opportunities, and minimizing risks.
Cons of swot analysis, breaking down a swot analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats).
Writing a good SWOT analysis is crucial for small businesses looking to expand quickly and maintain a competitive edge over emerging competitors. It serves as a strategic planning tool that enables businesses to assess their internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats.
This could include external environment factors such as pricing, competition, lowered demand, and more. It can also include internal weaknesses that negatively affect the business, such as a lack of budget, small teams, etc.
The threats part of SWOT analyses can also scare off many. Essentially, the goal here is to look at potential threats that could negatively impact your business. Again, this can include internal issues and external threats that you identify.
By methodically examining these elements, a business can develop strategies that leverage their strong points, improve weaknesses, reinforce opportunities, and guard against external threats.
Internal factors.
It is essential to understand your strengths and weaknesses in these areas to make strategic decisions and strengthen your competitive position.
It enables you to make informed financial decisions, such as allocating funds for research and development, marketing campaigns, or infrastructure improvements.
External factors can present opportunities or threats to your business. For example, a growing market or favorable economic conditions can create opportunities for expansion and increased demand for your products or services.
Home Depot identified several noteworthy strengths, including high-quality customer service, strong brand recognition, and positive supplier relationships. Conversely, its weaknesses were identified as a constrained supply chain, reliance on the U.S. market, and a business model that could be easily replicated.
The following table breaks down the SWOT analysis that follows into simple steps, making it easy to understand and follow. It serves as a concise, clear guide, making the process less overwhelming and more manageable.
Steps for SWOT Analysis | Description |
---|---|
Step 1: Gather Data | Gather internal and external data about your company or yourself. This data, which includes financial statements, customer feedback, and industry trends, will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and potential opportunities and threats. |
Step 2: Brainstorm | Brainstorm around the data, breaking it down into categories of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Be open to all ideas and make an exhaustive list as a foundation for further exploration. |
Step 3: Analyze Strengths | Objectively analyze the strengths, asking questions about your main advantages, resources, and unique features. The goal is to gain insight into what makes you or your business successful. |
Step 4: Analyze Weaknesses | After analyzing strengths, move on to weaknesses. Identify areas that could be improved and aspects that require more information for better decision-making. |
Step 5: Identify Opportunities | Look towards external factors to find potential opportunities for change and growth. Keep up with current events and developments to open your mind to alternative options. |
Step 6: Analyze Threats | Identify possible external threats such as competition and disruptions. Regular monitoring of outside forces is essential to make informed decisions quickly when needed. |
Step 7: Construct an Action Plan + Implement Solutions | Using insights from the above steps, construct an action plan with set goals, responsibilities, and timelines. Implement the solutions within your organization to meet your targets efficiently. |
Financial statements, employee feedback.
Employee feedback is an essential resource for any company looking to conduct an effective SWOT Analysis. This data can provide insight into the issues facing your business, as well as potential solutions that could be beneficial for the company.
As an illustration, let’s consider a hedge fund that has devised an exclusive trading strategy generating exceptional returns that outperform the market. The fund now faces the task of determining the most effective approach to utilize these outcomes in order to appeal to prospective investors and expand its investor base.
The next step is analyzing the strength category by asking questions such as what are your main advantages, what resources do you have access to, or what makes your company stand out in the market. Looking at these inquiries objectively will allow you to gain insight into what makes you or your company successful.
Step 4: analyze weaknesses.
Where can decisions be better informed? Allowing yourself and your team time to think about areas that need attention ensures that possible solutions can be discussed further down the line.
Decision-making, step 5: identify opportunities.
In order to find potential opportunities for change and growth look toward external factors such as what new technologies are emerging, what regulations are changing, and whether there are gaps in current products or services providing space for improvement. Keeping up with current events opens your mind up to alternative options.
Step 7: construct an action plan + implement solutions, swot analysis template.
Now that we’ve gone through some examples in different industries, how do you get started on creating a SWOT analysis of your own? Luckily, this kind of analysis is pretty easy to structure. You can create one using your computer or even just divide a piece of paper into four quadrants and start writing.
When trying to come up with a SWOT analysis for your own business, it’s sometimes easier to see what others in your industry are doing. Before conducting a SWOT analysis for your company, you can look at some examples below to get some inspiration.
Marketing swot analysis, 3. company swot analysis example, swot analysis example for a restaurant.
Food service businesses tend to have their own unique challenges, so identifying potential strategies is often difficult. However, using a Restaurant SWOT analysis example, you can build off it and create a SWOT analysis for your business that’s reflective of the market.
Swot analysis tips.
A strong SWOT analysis is about diving deep into your business and collating all the information in an organized way. The more you’re able to tap into what makes your business unique and what needs to improve, the more actionable your SWOT analysis will be.
Ask for feedback, be systematic.
Sometimes, the easiest way to fill out a SWOT analysis is to have a system. That can mean going through internal issues across each quadrant first and then moving to external factors. Or you can choose to do two quadrants at a time, such as strengths and opportunities if that is easier.
Learn business abbreviations and acronyms, the takeaways.
By conducting a thorough SWOT analysis, businesses can gain valuable insights into their current position and make informed decisions to drive success and growth.
6 min. read
Updated October 27, 2023
Conducting a SWOT analysis of your business is a lot more fun than it sounds. It won’t take much time, and doing it forces you to think about your business in a whole new way.
The point of a SWOT analysis is to help you develop a strong business strategy by making sure you’ve considered all of your business’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the opportunities and threats it faces in the marketplace.
S.W.O.T. is an acronym that stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. A SWOT analysis is an organized list of your business’s greatest strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Strengths and weaknesses are internal to the company (think: reputation, patents, location). You can change them over time but not without some work. Opportunities and threats are external (think: suppliers, competitors, prices)—they are out there in the market, happening whether you like it or not. You can’t change them.
Existing businesses can use a SWOT analysis, at any time, to assess a changing environment and respond proactively. In fact, I recommend conducting a strategy review meeting at least once a year that begins with a SWOT analysis.
New businesses should use a SWOT analysis as a part of their planning process. There is no “one size fits all” plan for your business, and thinking about your new business in terms of its unique “SWOTs” will put you on the right track right away, and save you from a lot of headaches later on.
Looking to get started right away? Download our free SWOT Analysis template.
To get the most complete, objective results, a SWOT analysis is best conducted by a group of people with different perspectives and stakes in your company. Management, sales, customer service, and even customers can all contribute valid insight. Moreover, the SWOT analysis process is an opportunity to bring your team together and encourage their participation in and adherence to your company’s resulting strategy.
A SWOT analysis is typically conducted using a four-square SWOT analysis template, but you could also just make lists for each category. Use the method that makes it easiest for you to organize and understand the results.
I recommend holding a brainstorming session to identify the factors in each of the four categories. Alternatively, you could ask team members to individually complete our free SWOT analysis template, and then meet to discuss and compile the results. As you work through each category, don’t be too concerned about elaborating at first; bullet points may be the best way to begin. Just capture the factors you believe are relevant in each of the four areas.
Once you are finished brainstorming, create a final, prioritized version of your SWOT analysis, listing the factors in each category in order of highest priority at the top to lowest priority at the bottom.
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I’ve compiled some questions below to help you develop each section of your SWOT analysis. There are certainly other questions you could ask; these are just meant to get you started.
Strengths describe the positive attributes, tangible and intangible, internal to your organization. They are within your control.
Weaknesses are aspects of your business that detract from the value you offer or place you at a competitive disadvantage. You need to enhance these areas in order to compete with your best competitor.
Opportunities are external attractive factors that represent reasons your business is likely to prosper.
Threats include external factors beyond your control that could place your strategy, or the business itself, at risk. You have no control over these, but you may benefit by having contingency plans to address them if they should occur.
For illustration, here’s a brief SWOT example from a hypothetical, medium-sized computer store in the United States:
See our SWOT analysis examples article for in-depth examples of SWOT analyses for several different industries and business types or download our free SWOT analysis template .
Once you have identified and prioritized your SWOT results, you can use them to develop short-term and long-term strategies for your business. After all, the true value of this exercise is in using the results to maximize the positive influences on your business and minimize the negative ones.
But how do you turn your SWOT results into strategies? One way to do this is to consider how your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats overlap with each other. This is sometimes called a TOWS analysis.
For example, look at the strengths you identified, and then come up with ways to use those strengths to maximize the opportunities (these are strength-opportunity strategies). Then, look at how those same strengths can be used to minimize the threats you identified (these are strength-threats strategies).
Continuing this process, use the opportunities you identified to develop strategies that will minimize the weaknesses (weakness-opportunity strategies) or avoid the threats (weakness-threats strategies).
The following table might help you organize the strategies in each area:
Once you’ve developed strategies and included them in your strategic plan, be sure to schedule regular review meetings. Use these meetings to talk about why the results of your strategies are different from what you’d planned (because they always will be) and decide what your team will do going forward.
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software , a co-founder of Borland International, and a recognized expert in business planning. He has an MBA from Stanford and degrees with honors from the University of Oregon and the University of Notre Dame. Today, Tim dedicates most of his time to blogging, teaching and evangelizing for business planning.
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Ted is a Founder and Managing Partner of ClearPoint Strategy and leads the sales and marketing teams.
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Table of Contents
Historically, corporate planning has always been difficult. Many organizations have failed at trying to get everyone on the same page and agree to the details of a plan—more often than not, their efforts proved to be both ineffective and time consuming. Something had to be done.
Albert Humphrey of the Stanford Research Institute determined in the 1960s to identify why corporate planning consistently failed. Thus the origination of the SWOT analysis. Today, the SWOT analysis is one of the most important concepts in the business world and is widely used by all types of organizations to help build a strategic plan.
So, what is a SWOT analysis, how do you create one, and what do you do with it? In this article, we’ll explain it all (and share some SWOT analysis examples to boot) from start to finish.
A SWOT analysis is a high-level strategic planning model that helps organizations identify where they’re doing well and where they can improve, both from an internal and an external perspective. SWOT is an acronym for “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
SWOT works because it helps you evaluate your business by considering multiple factors:
Organizations use SWOT to plot out a future course that plays on their strengths and minimizes risks. Taking the time to look at your organization from different perspectives and honestly assess your future prospects is a worthwhile activity; the insights you glean as a result you should then use constructively as part of the strategic planning process.
How to do a swot analysis.
To help you get started, we’ve created this step-by-step SWOT analysis template. The examples below are specific to the airline industry (since that’s the example we use in our grid), but the SWOT analysis exercise is applicable to all businesses.
You’ll notice we divided our hypothetical examples for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats based on the four Balanced Scorecard perspectives. You don’t have to use the Balanced Scorecard to be successful with your SWOT analysis, but this method does provide a strong framework for your discussion.
Not using the Balanced Scorecard? Look to the guiding principles of whatever strategic management framework you are using for ways to think about your business. For example, the VRIO framework emphasizes value, rarity, imitability, and organization; you can conduct a SWOT analysis through the lens of these criteria instead.
This is the grid-like matrix that will house the information you gather. As you can see in the SWOT analysis template below, each quadrant features one of the four elements you’ll be focusing on—strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Using a matrix helps present your findings in a clear, easy-to-understand way.
Pull people from all departments to participate in the analysis. Your entire leadership team should be involved because they can provide a broad view of the organization and offer insight into the competitive landscape.
But having lots of different perspectives is beneficial, and that means including leaders from every department—and anyone else you think might have valuable input. The more diverse the group, the better insights you’ll generate.
Not all ideas will make it to the final list, but it’s important to consider them all.
3. list your strengths.
Ask the group: What are we good at? How are we better than our competitors? These are broad questions, but in the beginning stages of your discussion, you should accept all answers.
Examine these questions in relation to the Balanced Scorecard perspectives. For the fictional company Upward Airlines, the discussion might look like this:
Having considered these questions for your own organization, you might come up with multiple responses in some categories. Below is a sample of the strengths portion of the SWOT analysis for Upward Airlines:
TIP: As mentioned above, you can use ClearPoint to simplify this and the remaining information-gathering steps. Rather than asking everyone to brainstorm simultaneously in a conference room, give people time to review relevant data (also housed in ClearPoint) that would help identify strengths and weaknesses, as well as potential opportunities. Participants can then input their thoughts into ClearPoint, link to key supporting metrics, and even add contextual information surrounding their thought process.
Doing your analysis within a single tool not only makes it easier to collect the information but also gives you the visibility to see how the various components that make up your SWOT might be linked. Further, ClearPoint has a discussion feature that allows users to @ mention other users, and thus facilitates conversations about your strengths and weaknesses.
4. list your weaknesses.
Ask the group: What are we not good at? Where can we grow? What are we lacking? The Upward Airlines discussion might look like this:
Ask the group: Where do we see big (and small) possibilities for our organization? What do we see happening in the future?
The Upward Airlines group might discuss the following:
Upward Airlines’ opportunities for the foreseeable future might be:
6. identify your potential threats.
Ask the group: What do we see as a threat? What obstacles do we anticipate? What is changing that could hurt us? As a travel-related company in a tough economy, Upward Airlines might uncover a number of potential threats:
The external threats deemed most imminent for Upward Airlines might be:
In looking at your SWOT matrix, do some of your strengths naturally support the identified opportunities? If you eliminate weaknesses, would that present additional opportunities?
At this point, we recommend running a “brown paper exercise”—print your SWOT matrix in large size, and ask employees to add post-it notes in any or all of the matrix’s four boxes if they feel the leadership team missed something. (You can also ask employees to add their names next to their suggestions so leadership can follow up with them.) Not only is this exercise great for inter-office discussion, but it also gives leaders the chance to consider opinions from staff in the field.
Done correctly, the SWOT analysis is another valuable tool in your toolbox for improving business performance and minimizing threats and weaknesses going forward. It can also prompt organizations to be more innovative with their strategy—new ideas may emerge that leadership would not normally have considered without such a thorough examination of the business from all angles.
Complement your swot with a pest analysis.
A SWOT analysis is a way of understanding and evaluating all facets of your company so you’re in a better position to make decisions about the future. But there are also external factors that will impact your company’s future; these things are beyond your control but still require consideration as you map out your strategy.
That’s why many organizations choose to complement a SWOT analysis with a PEST analysis—together, they provide a complete picture of your business environment for effective strategic planning.
PEST stands for political, economic, social, and technological—the four key areas outside your business that are likely to impact it. These factors tend to play out over long time frames. An economic slowdown, for instance, could take years to resolve, but you can take action to address staff training issues fairly quickly.
Thus, a PEST analysis is more valuable than SWOT when it comes to formulating longer-term plans and business strategies. Our recommendation is to do a SWOT analysis first, followed by a PEST analysis, to get a complete picture of the business landscape.
Congratulations! Hopefully, you understand your business a little better after completing your SWOT analysis; now it’s time to put those insights to good use. Your ideas on how to use your strengths and overcome your weaknesses should inform your strategy.
Developing a strategy is in and of itself a big step. It involves defining objectives for your company to move toward, creating priority initiatives (projects) to help make them a reality, and identifying measures to make sure the strategy is unfolding the way it should.
Our Upward Airlines SWOT analysis example, for instance, lists four weaknesses:
Some of these weaknesses are easier to address than others, such as improving employee satisfaction and your project management practices. Others, like the lack of direct travel routes, may be difficult to address in a time when airlines are still recovering from the COVID-19 fallout and profits are low. Similarly, you want to continue supporting your current strengths.
While you shouldn’t let your excellent training program lapse, it needn’t be a focus if you expect the number of new hires over the next year to be low. However, improving your virtual communication practices will most likely prove to be beneficial moving forward.
Therefore, the Upward Airlines SWOT analysis above might drive strategy in the following ways:
Make sure there is a clear and strong link between your SWOT analysis and your strategy map. For example, if you’re a for-profit organization, your financial perspective will be the top priority—build your analysis into your map in a manner that drives those finances in the right direction.
Maybe your SWOT analysis foretold an opportunity to hit a new line of business or forecast that a line of business would dry up. Your strategy needs to reflect that information.
If you’re using ClearPoint for strategy execution, you can make sure the projects you initiate as a result of your SWOT will actually have an impact by a) creating links within the software to show clear connections between projects and objectives, and b) tracking progress on your goals and initiatives over time.
That way, you’ll be able to see if, for example, your revised capacity plan positively impacted revenue in any substantial way—or if it had a negative effect on the bottom line. If you’re continuously monitoring progress, you’ll be able to adjust your course of action in a timely manner if needed.
Those insights will also be useful for your next SWOT analysis.
Real-world swot analysis examples.
Still uncertain as to how your team can use the information produced by a SWOT analysis? We reached out to the business community to ask about their experiences with SWOT.
Their answers, listed below, show that SWOT can be applied to any number of business activities, from developing a long-term overall strategy to launching campaigns, new products, and more.
"We focus on the opportunity aspect of SWOT. We are always looking to find new ways of growing our company, and we use this analysis to show us areas where our business might thrive. A SWOT analysis showed us how important it would be for us to partner with over 15 different insurance companies, so that we can freely match each client with whichever one is best for them. Most companies like ours only work with one or two companies, but we have seized the opportunity, and we are growing because of it."
—Anthony Martin of Choice Mutual
"We took action to understand that it's not enough to simply have a great product; we need to make sure our customers know how it can help them. By servicing the market, we found ways to add value for our customers and build relationships with them by providing helpful resources on our website and offering free trials. This has helped us to focus on creating and providing value to our customers, rather than just trying to get them to buy our product. As a result, we've created a much more sustainable and successful business."
—Diana Stepanova of Monitask
"One of the most important things that came out of our SWOT analysis was identifying untapped opportunities. After changing the game with our magnetic lashes, we saw a gap in the acrylic nail market. Through a SWOT analysis, we have realized our strength in reimagining highly used beauty products and making them better for the consumer. That has opened up even more opportunities to revolutionize the billion-dollar beauty industry."
—Ann McFerran of Glamnetic
"Our SWOT analysis revealed that we could create additional revenue streams by white-labeling our writing service and marketing it to other agencies. We offered interested parties discounts on our already-competitive rates, which made working with us very attractive and profitable for both sides. This allowed us to effectively double the size of our market. Most of the work we do now is for our agency partners, which means we can spend less time chasing sales and instead focus on ensuring quality in our service."
—Milo Cruz of Freelance Writing Jobs
“The best insight I gained from performing a SWOT analysis of my organization is that we are very good at what we do and have a lot of growth potential. One action that we took because of this insight was to expand our product line. We now offer various [photo] backdrops, including some specifically designed for events. We have also started marketing to new customers, which has helped us grow our business.At first, we didn't think that expanding our product line would help us much, but it has been one of the best things we've done for our business. It's enabled us to attract new customers and grow our sales. Marketing to new customers has also been helpful in terms of growing our business. These actions have made us a more prosperous and well-rounded company. "
—Kate Zhang of Kate Backdrop
"The SWOT analysis helped us identify potential opportunities that were unique to us in terms of reach. This allowed us to focus on key areas and strategies that would allow us to be the go-to choice of a specific market."Knowing where your company stands in relation to its competitors is crucial for developing strategies that will give you a competitive advantage. It also gives you insight into your unique opportunities that your competitors may not have. This is the kind of information that can help you make decisions that will take your company to the next level."
—Linda Shaffer of Checkr
"There are many roofing contractors competing for business, and it can be difficult for customers to understand what sets us apart from the rest. In order to address this issue, we have revamped our marketing materials to better communicate our unique selling points.As a result, potential customers can now see that our company is the best choice for quality roofing services, and we have experienced a significant increase in sales."
—Marty Ford of BulletpRoof Roof Systems Ltd.
“Owners of startups and small businesses need, but cannot find, a system to start, market, operate, or finance a business. Through our SWOT analysis, we noticed that our competitors left important questions and needs unanswered. For example, a competitor might help you set up a corporation, but have nothing for you after that.You started the business, but now need marketing, operational, or finance help. We strive to be the entrepreneur's best friend by giving you the needed tools."
—James Chittenden of One Click Advisor
"SWOT analysis was incredibly helpful when it came to understanding the strengths of my business. I was then able to play to those strengths and build on them.One strength was integrity—my business is always honest—and I’ve built that honesty into our brand."
—Keith Terrell of Backpacks Global
"Overcoming our weaknesses doesn't mean we are not keeping an eye on our existing strengths. If there's one thing SWOT analysis has taught us, it’s that we should treasure the things that keep our company strong by being innovative. Our positive attributes can become a weakness if we refuse to adapt to changes. Consistently monitoring our strengths has allowed us to hit all our targets and go beyond our goals. As a result, we have outperformed our competitors by always bringing something new to the table."
—Adam Garcia of The Stock Dork
"Two of the issues we identified were the great resignation and the recession. Knowing them in advance gave us plenty of time to make the necessary changes (like retaining your best employees by offering new benefits—remote work, PTO, and unlimited growth opportunities). We also changed our inventory strategy and made sure we had enough to counter the price increases, shortages, and demand.These strategy changes helped us limit the adverse effects of the recession, optimize our stocks, and make sure all our orders were fulfilled on time. The changes were also able to help us retain our best employees; thus, we never even had any problems throughout the great resignation."
—Michael Perry of Fitness Fixed Gear
"In our SWOT analysis, we were able to pinpoint areas where our employees may be lacking the skills they needed to succeed in our company. We decided to offer free online learning to our workers to help them add to their skill set.This has helped us not only improve the skill sets of our employees, but it has also increased employee retention. Employees want to stay loyal to a company that helps them grow."
—Mark Daoust of Quiet Light
"Prior to the SWOT analysis, I had always approached marketing from a product-centric perspective; however, the SWOT analysis made me realize that we needed to focus more on customer-centric marketing. We needed to connect with our target audience and build relationships with them.As a result, we've made some changes to our marketing approach, and I believe that these changes will help us to be more successful in the long run."
—Jacob Villa of Authority
"We have always prided ourselves on having good client relationships, but this exercise showed us that we needed to have strong client relationships. We have studied our weakness (why we have monthly policy cancellations or non-renewals) and the results showed that we need to focus on building and maintaining client relationships. After doing that, we have seen a significant increase in the average tenure of our clients and customer satisfaction scores."
—Loran Marmes of Medicare Solutions Team
"One threat we encountered in our business was the sudden and huge dip in our customer satisfaction score, which has never happened in the past five years. To resolve this issue and ensure we eliminate the threat that's harming our relationship with customers, we allocated time to engage with our employees and immediately gave them intensive customer service training.Our urgent action to eradicate this threat has helped our business bounce back and we’ve regained the trust of our customers. It has also taught us to listen to customer feedback seriously and do our best to live up to their expectations."
—Jake Smith of Absolute Reg LTD
"A successful SWOT analysis encourages discussion from employees of different levels, from operational, to managerial, to administrative level. By doing this, everyone contributes their thoughts on the status and standing of the company—it’s not just about how one person sees it. This way, all aspects of the business are considered and addressed from all levels."
—Corey Morgan of Kind Home Painting
Swot analysis best practices.
To create the most accurate and effective SWOT analysis, we recommend the following best practices:
If you need some guidance with this process, download our free strategic planning booklet. It includes eight of the most popular templates to build strategic plans, including a SWOT analysis template.
The strategic plan you develop from your SWOT analysis is powerful, so once you’ve created it, don’t let it sit! Use strategy execution software like ClearPoint to track your progress over time.
Undertaking a SWOT analysis requires planning and organization; it can also be a lengthy process. For those reasons, we recommend treating it like a project. If you already have project management (PM) software, by all means use it.
If you don’t have software (or if you’re considering making a change), we encourage you to take a look at ClearPoint. It’s ideal for keeping individual projects on track, but it also does much more than that— it shows you how important projects impact your organization’s overall strategy. Are your projects moving the needle when it comes to your larger goals? That’s an important aspect of project management you can’t get with any other PM tool.
Viewing your SWOT analysis as a project within ClearPoint has multiple benefits:
Another benefit of treating your SWOT analysis as a project in ClearPoint: You won’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you repeat the process. You can just duplicate the framework, make any necessary adjustments, and then repeat the process as before, even comparing your newest SWOT to the previous analysis if necessary.
Below is a screenshot of what it might look like to set up a SWOT analysis as a project within ClearPoint, with some sample milestones shown.
Ready to streamline your SWOT analysis and take your strategic planning to the next level? ClearPoint Strategy is here to guide you. Our comprehensive software solution simplifies the SWOT analysis process, ensuring you gain valuable insights and effectively integrate them into your strategic plan.
Book a personalized demo with our experts and see how our software can help you efficiently conduct SWOT analyses, track progress, and achieve your strategic goals.
What are the 4 dimensions of swot analysis.
The four dimensions areL strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
You need a few uninterrupted hours to conduct a strong SWOT analysis. You should conduct a SWOT analysis around the same time of your strategy refresh. Include key leaders within the company to get comprehensive insights on the current state of your business.
Use your SWOT analysis to influence your strategic plan! Don't let the insights from your SWOT analysis just sit in a shelf. Learn how to utilize your strengths to achieve your long-term goals, and make plans to strengthen your weaknesses.
A SWOT analysis offers many benefits for your organization. It allows you to better understand your business. By taking the time to identify where your company succeeds, and where they struggle, you can create plans to leverage your strengths and mitigate risks in your weaknesses.
A SWOT analysis is conducted to assess internal factors that affect your business. A PESTEL analysis focuses solely on external factors .
The benefits of using SWOT analysis include:
SWOT analysis can help your business by:
Common mistakes to avoid when conducting a SWOT analysis include:
You should conduct a SWOT analysis:
Tips for getting the most out of a SWOT analysis include:
SWOT analysis stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This exercise helps teams develop strategic plans for innovation and investment.
A SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis is a visual framework used for strategic planning across all types of businesses and organizations. SWOT analyses are made up of four components that will help you determine the output of your team’s analysis.
Opportunities, how do i do a swot analysis.
A SWOT analysis is a qualitative assessment of a company’s SWOT components. Individuals responsible for the assessment fill out a visual template similar to the figure above, which is usually laid out in a two-by-two matrix. This template helps visualize all the SWOT elements together in their entirety.
To understand in more detail the elements of this template, let’s dive into each component individually.
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Your strengths are organizational features that provide a competitive and strategic advantage relative to the market and competition.
Your weaknesses include organizational features that are lacking relative to market competition, or that hinder the organization’s overall effectiveness to compete, grow, and strive for optimal business performance.
These are favorable market conditions or external developments that represent an opportunity for unlocking or improving the organization’s competitive positioning and business performance. Opportunities can be related to present market conditions, but can also be forward-looking.
These are unfavorable market conditions or external developments that pose a risk to the organization’s performance or the entire viability of the current market. Threats can be related to present market conditions, but can also be forward-looking. (e.g. near-term competitive threats or geopolitical risks would be good examples to feature in this bucket)
During the process of filling in this template, you’ll consider all four elements individually. Once you complete the template, through brainstorming sessions and workshops, you can start putting together an actionable plan to capitalize on your strengths and opportunities while countering your weaknesses and threats.
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Let’s take, for example, a smartphone-producing company in the technology industry. Your example SWOT table may include the following.
Strengths :
Weaknesses:
Opportunities:
As a result and potential plan of action, the company in question may decide to focus on mitigating the risks caused by its weaknesses (for example by increasing production in key regions close to the ones suffering bottlenecks in addition to selecting an experienced interim CEO as soon as possible) while seizing market opportunities that may not come about again (i.e. gaining market share in the short term by exploiting the competitor’s bankruptcy).
Overall, resource allocation should flow to:
The results of a SWOT analysis inform your company’s strategic plan and help you make decisions about how to allocate future resources. As a result of a SWOT analysis your team might decide on the following:
The SWOT analysis as a framework for strategic planning has received its fair share of critique and scrutiny. Let’s review some of the pros and cons.
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Use a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis to grow your business.
A SWOT analysis is a planning process that helps your company overcome challenges and determine which new leads to pursue. “SWOT” stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You should perform a SWOT analysis before you commit to any sort of company action, whether you are exploring new initiatives, revamping internal policies, considering opportunities to pivot or altering a plan midway through its execution.
While there are numerous ways to assess your company, one of the most effective is to conduct a SWOT analysis. Learn all about this approach below.
The primary objective of a SWOT analysis is to help organizations develop a full awareness of all the factors involved in making a business decision . Albert Humphrey of the Stanford Research Institute created this method in the 1960s during a study conducted to identify why corporate planning consistently failed. Since its creation, the SWOT analysis has become one of the most useful tools for business owners to start and grow their companies.
“It is impossible to accurately map out a small business’s future without first evaluating it from all angles, which includes an exhaustive look at all internal and external resources and threats,” Bonnie Taylor, chief marketing officer at CCS Innovations, told Business News Daily. “A SWOT accomplishes this in four straightforward steps that even rookie business owners can understand and embrace.”
Employ a SWOT analysis before you commit to any company action, whether that’s exploring new initiatives, revamping internal policies, considering opportunities to pivot or altering a plan midway through its execution. Sometimes it’s wise to perform a general SWOT analysis to check on the current landscape of your business and improve operations as needed. The analysis can show you key areas where your organization is performing optimally and areas where operations need adjustment.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking about your business operations informally, in hopes that they will all come together on their own. If you take the time to put together a formal SWOT analysis, you’ll be able to see the whole picture of your business. From there, you can discover ways to improve or eliminate your company’s weaknesses and capitalize on its strengths.
While the business owner should certainly be involved in creating a SWOT analysis, it is often helpful to include other team members in the process. Ask for input from a variety of team members and openly discuss any contributions made. The collective knowledge of the team will allow you to adequately analyze your business from all sides.
You can also conduct a personal SWOT analysis in your own life, whether for professional or other purposes.
A SWOT analysis focuses on the four elements of the acronym, allowing companies to identify the forces influencing a strategy, action or initiative. Knowing these positive and negative elements can help companies more effectively communicate what parts of a plan need to be recognized.
When drafting a SWOT analysis, individuals typically create a table split into four columns to list each impacting element side by side for comparison. Strengths and weaknesses won’t typically match listed opportunities and threats verbatim, although they should correlate, since they are tied together.
Billy Bauer, owner of ROYCE New York, noted that pairing external threats with internal weaknesses can highlight the most serious issues a company faces.
“Once you’ve identified your risks, you can then decide whether it is most appropriate to eliminate the internal weakness by assigning company resources to fix the problems, or to reduce the external threat by abandoning the threatened area of business and meeting it after strengthening your business,” said Bauer.
Strengths (S) and weaknesses (W) refer to internal factors, which are the resources and experience readily available to you.
These are some common internal factors:
External forces influence and affect every company, organization and individual. Whether these factors are connected directly or indirectly to opportunities (O) or threats (T), it is important to note and document each one.
External factors are typically things you or your company do not control, such as the following:
After you create your SWOT framework and fill out your SWOT analysis, you will need to come up with some recommendations and strategies based on the results. Linda Pophal, strategic marketing communication consultant and content marketer at Strategic Communications, said these strategies should focus on leveraging strengths and opportunities to overcome weaknesses and threats.
“This is actually the area of strategy development where organizations have an opportunity to be most creative and where innovative ideas can emerge, but only if the analysis has been appropriately prepared in the first place,” said Pophal.
Bryan Weaver, an in-house advisor to Scholefield Construction Attorneys, was heavily involved in creating a SWOT analysis for his firm. He provided Business News Daily with a sample SWOT analysis template and example that was used in the firm’s decision to expand its practice to include dispute mediation services. His SWOT matrix included the following:
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Construction law firm with staff members who are trained in both law and professional engineering/general contracting. Their experience gives a unique advantage. Small (three employees) — can change and adapt quickly. | No one has been a mediator before or been through any formal mediation training programs. One staff member has been a part of mediations, but not as a neutral party. |
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Most commercial construction contracts require mediation. Despite hundreds of mediators in the marketplace, only a few have actual construction experience. For smaller disputes, mediators don’t work as a team, only as individuals; Scholefield staff can offer anyone the advantage of a group of neutrals to evaluate a dispute. | Anyone can become a mediator, so other construction law firms could open up their own mediation service as well. Most potential clients have a negative impression of mediation, because they feel mediators don’t understand or care to understand the problem, and rush to resolve it. |
Resulting strategy: Take mediation courses to eliminate weaknesses and launch Scholefield Mediation, which uses name recognition with the law firm, and highlights that the firm’s construction and construction law experience makes it different.
“Our SWOT analysis forced us to methodically and objectively look at what we had to work with and what the marketplace was offering,” Weaver said. “We then crafted our business plan to emphasize the advantages of our strongest features while exploiting opportunities based on marketplace weaknesses.”
The SWOT analysis is a simple but comprehensive strategy for identifying not only the weaknesses and threats of an action plan, but also the strengths and opportunities it makes possible. However, a SWOT analysis is just one tool in your business strategy. Additional analytic tools to consider include the PEST analysis (political, economic, social and technological), MOST analysis (mission, objective, strategies and tactics) and SCRS analysis (strategy, current state, requirements and solution).
Consistent business analysis and strategic planning is the best way to keep track of growth, strengths and weaknesses. Use a series of analysis strategies, like SWOT, in your decision-making process to examine and execute strategies in a more balanced, in-depth way.
Max Freedman and Nicole Fallon contributed to this article. Some source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.
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Swot analysis: the most overlooked business tool, and how to use it.
Alisha M Pennington is the owner of ATvantage Athletic Training and a business development mentor.
For those of us who never went to business school but found our way into entrepreneurship, it takes practical experience to determine which tools best serve us in the real world. After 10 years of starting and scaling multiple businesses, I can unequivocally state that SWOT analysis is one of the most efficient tools for quickly auditing a business at any stage and determining necessary next steps.
Having its origins date back to the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, SWOT analysis has been used across corporate planning for decades; however, it is equally applicable for businesses in any industry that are in the infant and scaling stages. It represents an opportunity to objectively approach the planning process in business while also providing accountability within each section so as not to lean too heavily into either strengths and opportunities or weaknesses and threats. For better or worse, it visually offers a snapshot of the current state of a business and market in a simple four-quadrant table.
Admittedly though, the exercise of conducting a SWOT can feel stale and/or incredibly daunting. With new techniques popping up regularly, it can be tempting to step away from the traditional approach and test out an alternative. But it isn’t called “trusty dusty” for no reason — it is tried and true! So, how does one go about utilizing this tool in their business? Here are three easy steps:
1. Conduct A Business Brain Dump
To effectively evaluate your business, you must be thorough in what is being considered. Whether you enlist heads of departments or you're a sole proprietor, it is important to look at the primary areas of your business and brain dump your inner workings associated with them. These can include, but are not limited to:
• Legalities: This includes business entity formation, compliance, contracts/agreements, insurances, trademarks, licenses, governing oversight and contractors versus employees.
• Accounting: This includes taxes, accounting software, accounts payable and receivable, tracking income and expenses, projections, profit margins, budgeting, procedures for payment processing and cash flow.
• Quality control: This includes customer journey, onboarding/hiring procedures, compliance, customer and product reviews, quality improvement, customer service and processes and automation.
• Marketing: This includes current brand and messaging, public relations, website functionality, social media presence, future growth strategy or customer acquisition plan, scalability of current procedures and future marketing opportunities.
2. Categorize Your Responses
Once you have a full list of what's working and what needs work in your business, categorize it into three primary areas: current markets/strategies, current roadblocks/hurdles and future/long-term aspirations.
Within the current markets/strategies, list out what is going well, the areas you're surpassing the competition and what your market knows you for. In the current roadblocks/hurdles, detail those services you're trying to bring to market, any bottlenecks or systems/procedures that are inefficient or areas within your industry or market that pose a threat. Finally, in the future/long-term aspirations, share the information that is currently in R&D, the future direction of the market/industry and aspirational projections of the business.
3. Create Your SWOT
Use a template, write on a whiteboard or use paper and pen to draw the SWOT and then begin filling it in. This will require your business brain dump and your categorized responses.
Strengths are internal areas within your business that are well taken care of. These could be key personnel, particular characteristics or attributes within the business that give it an advantage or even areas that have been well-developed that put the business ahead of the competition. This could be as simple as strong branding or as exemplary as a nameworthy CEO. Scan your business brain dump and look for areas that stand out as "green" or "very good" or that you could easily respond with because they've been addressed for a long time. In the categorized responses, this will primarily be in the current markets/strategies.
Weaknesses are the internal areas within your business that need to be addressed or that prove to be roadblocks. This might be communication strategy or lack of efficient processes and systems. These might be patterns of behavior you know about your business, areas you purposely avoid because they bring up feelings of dread and may have even been avoided for a lack of knowledge or support to execute. When looking at your brain dump, you may have "redlined" these, let out an audible sigh or cringed at the thought of having to address them. And they're likely in the current roadblocks/hurdles areas of the categorized responses.
Opportunities are external areas in the environment or market that allow us to expand and create growth for the business. Sometimes this is a future version of the industry, known technology that is emerging, an offer/service that is actively being developed or partnerships that will elevate the brand. When looking over the business brain dump, these are the areas that really excite the business owner, probably are front of mind and may have additional resources allocated to them. In the categorized responses, they're either in the current markets/strategies or under the longer-term aspirations.
Threats are the external areas in the environment or market that pose danger to the current state or future of the business. These may have already affected the revenue or profit of the business or could be impending competition or a shift in the market creating concern for the current business model. These items keep the business owner awake at night or dreading opening the email/answering the phone. In the brain dump, these are lingering "in between the lines," likely not explicitly stated but known as the cause for reduced profit margins or limited growth.
Use SWOT analysis not just to determine the next steps for your business but to also help prioritize which areas to focus on. Then strategically detail the opportunity available, being careful to minimize threats and take full advantage of strengths. This can be done as consistently as required but is best served as an annual exercise to evaluate the procedural activity of the business year over year.
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Here is a simple strategic SWOT analysis that you can use as a highly effective method for creating an edge in the market and to insure long term success.
SWOT is an acronym for the Strengths and Weakness of a business and the Opportunities and Threats facing the business. It is used to understand Current and Future, Internal and External factors that may have an effect on a business results and success.
The Strengths and weaknesses are focused inward to analyze what your company does well and where it could be better. Opportunities and Threats are focused externally towards the industry, which analyze any potential negative effect on the business.
To carry out a SWOT analysis for your business, summarize the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your business relative to competitors. A SWOT analysis is a simple, yet highly effective method for conducting an analysis on a business, product or service. Before you try writing a business or marketing plan, it is highly recommended that you first complete a SWOT analysis.
A SWOT approach to planning requires owners to look very closely and analytically at every aspect of their operation, so that objectives can be evaluated as achievable, while also building up a clear picture of the strategies that need to be adopted under the constraints that have been recognized.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
- Sun Tzu, The Art Of War -
When completing a SWOT analysis, the aim is to reflect on all aspects of your business’s operations. You may wish to do this exercise alone or include your staff, spouse or business advisor. Whether you choose to do it alone or with others, make sure you allow a solid chunk of time to complete the analysis without being interrupted.
A SWOT analysis is a brainstorming exercise and to get the best results I suggest you allow yourself at least thirty minutes, or preferably an hour. This allows your mind to free itself of the multitude of thoughts and minor details of day to- day living. It takes time to get a flow of ideas going, so be patient and allow yourself time. Once you have allotted sufficient time to focus on this exercise it is time to get started.
SWOT Analysis
This link will open as an Excel spreadsheet and is ready, and
easy to use but you can follow these video instructions for more information.
After you have successfully completed the SWOT analysis, take some time to explore ways to consolidate your strengths, minimize your weaknesses, take advantages of the opportunities and be prepared for the threats.
Your priorities should be to:
Download swot analysis pdf.
A SWOT analysis is a simple, yet highly effective method for conducting an analysis on a business, product or service. Before you try writing a business growth or marketing plan, it is highly recommended that you first complete a SWOT analysis.
The first step is to reflect on what you do really well. What is working for you at the moment? Can you consolidate on any of these strengths and make them an even bigger advantage for your business? Try asking yourself the following questions
What are your business’s strengths?
“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
- Sun Tzu, The Art Of War -
Weaknesses need to be understood so you can compensate or improve them. This is not the time to start beating yourself up for being less than perfect. Everyone has weaknesses. Your first task is to identify anything you think you need to improve. These could include:
Make a comprehensive list and start reviewing which ones you could start transferring into strengths. If you find it difficult to be objective, ask someone you trust for his or her feedback on your perceived weaknesses.
“So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.”
The third stage of the analysis process is to look at the opportunities that your business has available. Where could you start gaining an advantage over your competitors? The more you know about what your competitors are doing, the easier it will be for you to see opportunities to create something different and compelling. Another great way to discover possible opportunities is to ask your current customers. They will often have all the answers if you are brave enough to ask the question.
There are always opportunities. Take the time to brainstorm a comprehensive list and don’t sensor your ideas. There will be time to eliminate the most impractical ideas later. For now, just get the ideas down on paper.
“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”
Finally, you need to assess any current or future threats to your business. All potential threats should be brainstormed. It is better to be aware of problems that might arise than to be hit with them out of the blue. This list could include things like changes in legislation, a multinational competitor opening a store or a lack of products due to importing issues. Whatever the possible threats, list them and assess whether they are real or unlikely. Are there any threats to your current market share? When all areas have been plotted and identified, you will be in a much better position to plan your future.
Take the time to complete this exercise thoroughly as the benefits are very real.
“Who wishes to fight must first count the cost”
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An acronym standing for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, a SWOT Analysis is designed to help you analyze your company’s capabilities against the realities of your business environment. Doing so allows you to direct your business toward areas where your abilities are the strongest and your opportunities are abundant. It also allows you to develop short and long-term strategies for your business. A well-developed SWOT analysis will:
When writing your SWOT Analysis, we recommend involving employees with different perspectives and stakes in your company, for example, management, sales, customer service, and customers.
To write a SWOT Analysis for a business plan, we recommend following these four steps. You can use a four-square SWOT Analysis template, or if more manageable, you can make lists for each category.
Example of a four-square template:
After you’ve gathered the right group of employees together, brainstorm your company’s strengths and weaknesses and its opportunities and threats, first individually and then collectively.
Strengths and weaknesses are internal to your company and can change over time with work. Examples of internal factors include:
Opportunities and threats are external, happening whether you want them to or not, and can’t be changed. Examples of external factors include:
Strengths refer to the positive, tangible and intangible attributes internal to your company that are within your control.
To help you determine what your company’s strengths are, ask yourself:
Any aspect of your business that detracts from the value you offer or places you at a competitive disadvantage is a weakness. To determine your company’s weaknesses, ask yourself these questions:
Opportunities
Opportunities are attractive external factors that denote reasons your business is likely to thrive. To identify your business opportunities, ask yourself:
Any external factor beyond your control that could place your strategy, or the business itself, at risk is a threat. Although you have no control over threats, you can benefit by having a contingency plan to address them if and when they occur. To identify threats, ask yourself:
Once you’ve brainstormed your lists of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, we recommend ranking them through a voting process. At the end of this process, you should have a prioritized list of ideas, with one person, usually the CEO, having the final call on priority.
Divide your strengths into two groups:
Divide your weaknesses into two groups:
Continually refer to your lists as you make decisions that contribute to your business, including developing strategies and actions for capitalizing on opportunities. Questions that can guide your decision making include:
Once you have finalized your SWOT Analysis and added it to your business plan, don’t just leave it and forget it. A SWOT Analysis is a crucial element in any business plan and should be revisited regularly, at least annually.
Suppose your business is facing significant changes in the marketplace or competitive conditions, experiencing growth problems, or failing to meet goals. In that case, you may want to revisit your SWOT Analysis more frequently.
It should reflect the world around you as it is, not the way it was. It’s an invaluable tool for leveraging your company’s strengths, minimizing threats, taking advantage of available opportunities, strategic planning, and determining company objectives.
At Bsbcon, we are available to provide support and guidance with your company’s SWOT Analysis, ensuring that it reflects the current state of your business and considers all factors needed to ensure your business’s short and long-term goals and successes. Once your SWOT Analysis is complete, we will work with you to incorporate it seamlessly into your business plan.
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You can better understand your businesses strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats by using a SWOT analysis. Identify what your business is doing well and how you can improve with our SWOT analysis template.
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Download our swot analysis template, complete your swot analysis, use your swot analysis.
A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used to assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your business.
Developing a SWOT analysis can help you look at your business in a new way and from different directions. It can also help you to:
Our template can help you develop your SWOT analysis.
SWOT template
You can start the process by gathering a group of employees or advisors who have different perspectives on your business. If you don’t have employees, you can ask family members, business advisors or mentors. The key is to have different points of view.
Using the prompting questions below as a guide, you can conduct a brainstorming session to discuss ideas about each SWOT category. After brainstorming, create a final prioritised list of points in our SWOT analysis template. List the factors in each category from highest to lowest priority.
Strengths are internal, positive parts of your business. These are things that are within your control. Ask yourself:
Weaknesses are internal, negative factors. These are things that you might need to improve on to be competitive. Ask yourself:
Opportunities are external, positive factors that may give a competitive advantage and contribute to success. Ask yourself:
Threats include external factors beyond your control that may put your business at risk. Consider putting in place contingency plans for dealing with them if they occur. Ask yourself:
Once you have completed your SWOT analysis, it can be used to develop strategies for achieving your business goals. You can create a plan to continue building on your strengths while improving on your weaknesses. When using your SWOT analysis to create a strategy, ask yourself:
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A SWOT analysis helps you make smart, informed business decisions.
Understanding your company’s position within your market or industry and knowing how and where you can grow is critical for any business owner. The knowledge allows you to develop your company strategically rather than wasting your efforts trying to expand into a market that doesn’t align with your business or being steamrolled by a surprise competitor. This is why it is helpful to perform a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis to assess where you are now and how you can improve.
A SWOT analysis is a type of analysis that helps you develop your business strategy by comparing internal factors (strengths and weaknesses) against external factors (opportunities and threats). Examples of internal factors include things that you have control over and can change, such as your staff or your intellectual property. External factors are things that you cannot control, such as consumer trends or competitors.
A SWOT analysis has four quadrants:
The analysis provides you with an accurate picture of what your business is currently doing well and how it can improve.
“[A SWOT analysis] gives you a firm grasp of what is affecting your business internally and externally,” said Lynne Pratt, creative content expert. “By carefully evaluating the analysis, a business can find new ways of progressing and achieving growth .”
Every company, no matter its size, should do a SWOT analysis periodically. It is a crucial strategic tool that will reveal problems that need to be fixed, strengths that need to be capitalized on, potential threats that need to be mitigated and opportunities for growth.
Sometimes, it’s hard to see the big picture when you are involved in the day-to-day operations of a company. A SWOT analysis gives you a detailed, unbiased overview of your business as a whole or a specific product or campaign. By involving a variety of stakeholders, you get a perspective that you might not have gotten as an individual or small group of executives.
It can also help train your brain to consider every factor that could affect your project or business. When you’re facing a tough issue or if you’re just unsure of your current strategy, a SWOT analysis illuminates details so you can formulate actionable plans based on each of the four quadrants.
For example, if you were considering opening a new location for your business, you could run a SWOT analysis to see if you are in a good position to do so. You could also use it to identify outside factors that you will need to plan for.
The threats portions, in particular, can help you see and overcome any possible problems, either competitive or market-based, so that you can prepare a proactive initiative. For example, if you find out that a competitor has improved its technology, you can work on similarly upgrading your own. In the early stages of the pandemic, restaurants that did a SWOT analysis could identify the threat of fewer customers opting to dine in and change their strategy to focus on takeout and delivery sooner.
“A SWOT analysis is useful so that you don’t get caught entirely off-guard,” said David LaVine, founder of RocLogic Marketing. “You [should] do a SWOT analysis for each application area you’re considering operating in.”
“We conduct [analyses] every six months as a rule in our business,” said Alistair Dodds, marketing director and co-founder of Ever Increasing Circles. “They act as a great check on how the competition has evolved in that time period.” [Discover seven effective ways to differentiate your product .]
Although many of your company’s strengths should be known, you may discover one you hadn’t considered before or even something that might be new. Perhaps you have reached some threshold in revenue, sales, five-star reviews or customers that you can now use in your sales and marketing efforts. For example, a customer threshold might result in a marketing campaign with a headline of, “1 million customers have trusted Company X. Won’t you?”
A SWOT analysis should be a collaborative effort between several levels of employment within your company. Founders and leaders should be the most closely involved but, to gain a true picture of your business, gather input from a group of people that can contribute several perspectives.
“It’s vital to go through your analysis with key stakeholders,” said Dodds. “When you identify weaknesses, it’s a great time to get other department heads and staff to suggest solutions — you’ll be amazed at the creativity and problem-solving inherent in your team if they are given the opportunity [for] input.”
If you’re a solo operation, ask close friends or related professionals, such as your accountant, lawyer or advisor, for input. Having plenty of outside perspectives helps make your analysis as well-rounded and objective as possible.
The first step of a SWOT analysis is to create your grid. Start with strengths in the upper left corner, then weaknesses in the upper right corner, opportunities in the bottom left and threats at the bottom right of the grid.
Next, fill in each quadrant. An easy way to do this is to ask yourself questions that apply to each box. Here are some suggestions.
Here are some additional points to consider as you fill in your quadrants:
Your quadrants do not have to be perfect — you can always create multiple drafts of your analysis, editing what you have filled in as you go. Host a brainstorming meeting to complete your first draft.
After you have filled in the quadrants, review each quadrant and evaluate your results.
In preparation for these conversations, review some of the most important terms for business owners to enhance your ability to assess each area of the SWOT analysis and brainstorm solutions.
Once you complete your SWOT grid, you need to analyze the information you’ve collected. Here are a few things to consider.
To evaluate your SWOT analysis effectively, start with your strengths and don’t brush them off, said Pratt. “You might feel that because you’ve got these nailed down that you don’t need to do anything with them, but this is wrong,” she said. “There is always room for improvement and working on your strengths, as well as [with] the [other quadrants], will help them remain your strengths”:
Next, look at your weaknesses and identify which aspects of your business each weakness is related to. For example, do you need to boost customer retention by better training your staff? Or is location and/or competition the problem? “Identify where the problem is coming from so you can begin to plan to address it,” said Pratt.
You can also see which of your threats are related to your weaknesses and if any of them are caused by something you can change. Try to connect your strengths to ways you can combat threats:
Finally, consider whether there are time constraints that could impact your opportunities. Are any of them short-term or seasonal? If so, make it a priority to hit those opportunities first and create an action plan for taking advantage of them.
Nathan Thompson, e-commerce and growth lead at The Others Beauty Co., said his company splits their business opportunities into short-, mid- and long-term goals. They set deadlines for each goal to ensure it gets done. “SWOT results should be analyzed and evaluated in order of actionability,” he said. “Having deadlines set for each milestone ensures accountability for all parties.”
To see how SWOT analysis works, consider this example:
Soft-Touch makes pads that attach by Velcro to the plastic face mask worn by sleep apnea sufferers to help them breathe while they sleep. The company founder herself has sleep apnea and she developed the product to increase the comfort of wearing the mask and to eliminate the marks it left on her face the following morning.
The company has largely grown its sales through word-of-mouth. A major sleep apnea equipment maker wants Soft-Touch to supply the pads for all of its masks. To satisfy the increased demand, Soft-Touch would have to outsource its manufacturing.
Here is a sample SWOT analysis for Soft-Touch as they consider this opportunity:
Notice that the SWOT analysis doesn’t provide an answer. Instead, it provides a framework to help formulate an answer and allows you to see exactly what the opportunities are (an expanded market share and increased revenue), what weaknesses currently limit the company (lack of funding and marketing expertise, limited manufacturing capacity), its current strengths (unique proposition and trusted brand) and the threats it could face if it takes the opportunity (less control and need for financing).
“Taking time to think strategically will lead to ways you can streamline to get more done as well as take your business into new directions that can benefit (or even save) the company,” said Joshua Ladick, president and founder of GSA Focus.
Remember that your SWOT analysis is only a starting point, not an actionable plan. “Don’t confuse SWOT for strategy,” said Greg Githens, executive and leadership coach at Catalyst & Cadre. You are still responsible for developing a strategy that will take you from where you are to where you want to be, and SWOT provides a roadmap for that strategy.
Jennifer Dublino and Sean Peek contributed to this article. Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.
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Arrange each section into a table with four quadrants. Whether you use the template above or create your own, a table format can help you visualize your SWOT analysis. In my experience, this can be done by arranging each of the four sections into separate quadrants. 3. Identify your objective.
Getty. A SWOT analysis is a framework used in a business's strategic planning to evaluate its competitive positioning in the marketplace. The analysis looks at four key characteristics that are ...
A SWOT analysis is a technique used to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in order to develop a strategic plan or roadmap for your business. While it may sound difficult, it's actually quite simple. Whether you're looking for external opportunities or internal strengths, we'll walk you through how to perform your ...
Plan a grand opening. A key piece of that marketing plan will be the store's grand opening, and the promotional strategies necessary to get UPer Crust Pies' target market in the door. Next steps with your SWOT Analysis. With your goals and actions in hand, you'll be a long way toward completing a strategic plan for your business.
Here's how to effectively write a strength in a SWOT analysis: Identify Internal Positive Attributes: Focus on internal factors that are within the control of the business. These can include resources, skills, or other advantages relative to competitors. Consider areas like strong brand reputation, proprietary technology, skilled workforce ...
Key Takeaways: SWOT stands for S trengths, W eaknesses, O pportunities, and T hreats. A "SWOT analysis" involves carefully assessing these four factors in order to make clear and effective plans. A SWOT analysis can help you to challenge risky assumptions, uncover dangerous blindspots, and reveal important new insights.
Step 6: Draw the SWOT Analysis Table. The final step is crafting a swot analysis table. This involves creating a matrix and dividing it into four sections. The internal factors (strengths and weaknesses) are listed above, with the strengths on the left and the weaknesses on the right. On the other hand, the external factors (opportunities and ...
SWOT analysis is a technique for assessing the performance, competition, risk, and potential of a business, as well as part of a business such as a product line or division, an industry, or other ...
A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning technique that outlines an organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Assessing business competition in this way can help an organization plan strategically and execute more effectively. The 4 Parts of a SWOT Analysis Strengths
To perform a SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats) analysis, assemble a matrix and take an objective look at your business. Write down your observations, summarize your findings, and plan your next steps together with your team. "A SWOT analysis is designed to shed light on four separate aspects of your business and help in ...
A SWOT analysis is a powerful tool for understanding the internal and external factors that are impacting your business and is useful for startups, along with a proper business plan. It's important to use the results of the analysis to create actionable steps and set realistic timelines for reaching your goals.
See our SWOT analysis examples article for in-depth examples of SWOT analyses for several different industries and business types or download our free SWOT analysis template.. TOWS analysis: Developing strategies from your SWOT analysis. Once you have identified and prioritized your SWOT results, you can use them to develop short-term and long-term strategies for your business.
A SWOT analysis is a high-level strategic planning model that helps organizations identify where they're doing well and where they can improve, both from an internal and an external perspective. SWOT is an acronym for "Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. SWOT works because it helps you evaluate your business by considering ...
Published on Dec. 13, 2022. Image: Shutterstock / Built In. A SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis is a visual framework used for strategic planning across all types of businesses and organizations. SWOT analyses are made up of four components that will help you determine the output of your team's analysis.
The SWOT analysis is a simple but comprehensive strategy for identifying not only the weaknesses and threats of an action plan, but also the strengths and opportunities it makes possible. However ...
SWOT analyses can be applied to an entire company or organization, or individual projects within a single department. Most commonly, SWOT analyses are used at the organizational level to determine how closely a business is aligned with its growth trajectories and success benchmarks, but they can also be used to ascertain how well a particular project - such as an online advertising campaign ...
3. Create Your SWOT. Use a template, write on a whiteboard or use paper and pen to draw the SWOT and then begin filling it in. This will require your business brain dump and your categorized ...
opportunities and threats of your business relative to competitors. A SWOT analysis is a simple, yet highly effective method for conducting an analysis on a business, product or service. Before you try writing a business or marketing plan, it is highly recommended that you first complete a SWOT analysis.
A SWOT analysis is essential for developing a business plan that maximizes a company's strengths, minimizes its weaknesses, and takes advantage of opportunities while mitigating threats. Here are some of the reasons why a SWOT analysis is important for businesses: Identifies key areas for improvement. By conducting the SWOT analysis, businesses ...
Step #3. Divide your weaknesses into two groups: Group 1: Weaknesses that require improvement before you can take advantage of opportunities. Group 2: Weaknesses that you need to completely and quickly overhaul and convert into strengths to avert potential threats to your business. Step #4.
A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used to assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your business. Developing a SWOT analysis can help you look at your business in a new way and from different directions. It can also help you to: create or fine tune your business strategy. prioritise areas for business growth to ...
A SWOT analysis has four quadrants: The analysis provides you with an accurate picture of what your business is currently doing well and how it can improve. " [A SWOT analysis] gives you a firm grasp of what is affecting your business internally and externally," said Lynne Pratt, creative content expert. "By carefully evaluating the ...
The SWOT analysis is a key tool for your strategic planning. Strategic planning is essential for realizing your company's potential. Essential to that plan is an awareness of your company's strengths and weaknesses, as well as understanding opportunities and threats facing your business. A SWOT analysis takes a global view of your company but ...