Business Plan Tips: SWOT Business Analysis

Anyone whose ever been involved in doing business planning has been exposed to doing a SWOT analysis; strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

There are two components, internal and external. Internally, you're looking for strengths and weaknesses specifically those things that what hamper your accomplising the strategy or the direction you have in mind.

External analysis is looking for opportunities and threats. Again, these things specific to where you anticipate that you're going to go. The result of this is a SWOT profile which is where most people stop. Actually that's a mistake. The key next step is to identify what are, which of these are likely to happen, more likelly or less likelly and what impact do they likely to have, low or high. Things that have low probability an low impact, even though they are key issues, they don't affect you should ignore them.

The second category should be those which have high impact but are likely to happen. These things rather than building a strategy around them should be put on a watch list that you have to keep track of.

Third would be things that have a high probability of happening but they have relatively low impact. Rather than making them the core of the strategy or your business plan, create contingecy plans if they shoul happen.

You really build plan around your strategic issues around those things, those SWOT items that have high probability and high impact.


Source: YouTube