A SWOT analysis is a way for you to determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that exist for your business. Performing this process is an essential element for your business success. It should be completed before you start your business and periodically while running your business based on the specific purpose of the analysis.
You can do a SWOT analysis for almost any objective you have for your business in order to help you make good decisions, but it’s beneficial as you work toward building resilience into your business. It will help you identify places you can add redundancy, modularity, and contingencies depending on what is impacted.
To perform a SWOT analysis, you’ll want to create four documents with the labels, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Within each document, you’ll want to divide the document into two parts, internal and external. Label each part. As you consider your objective write down the information you gather on each document. Now you’ll just fill in the information as you gather it.
You want to consider all aspects that can affect that particular situation, such as the political, economic, sociocultural, and technological issues that you may face in the future with your industry. Because this is your own business that you are starting at home online, you may also want to include personal issues that may affect your business continuity. For example, being a single mom of two includes factors that might affect your business or your ability to do your business.
Once you write down all the factors you can think about in each document, you’ll want to look it over and consider it. For example, how do your strengths affect your opportunities? How do your threats affect your opportunities?
For example, every year, you likely have the opportunity to buy software for an entire year at a less expensive cost, but you will miss out if you don’t have savings. That’s a small thing you may notice, but this process will reveal many more issues you can mitigate to avoid business failure.
Can you convert some of your weaknesses into strengths by outsourcing or educating yourself, or buying technology? Are there any threats to the continuity of your business that you can eliminate through planning? Since you are creating this particular SWOT analysis to help you mitigate disruption to your business, you will focus the entire analysis on that Purpose.
For example, if you identified that you use particular software for a large portion of your business activity during your research, what would happen if that software were no longer available to you? This is a chance to identify options before having the problem so that you can seamlessly change if needed. Another option is that you notice you have bottlenecks when it comes to getting projects done. This will only worsen if a disaster happens, so fixing it will mitigate that problem now and in the future. It will help you go through your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly processes to fully identify any strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities related to continuity so that you automatically build in resilience to your business.
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