Lesson Details:
February 14, 2020
Video Transcription: Now let's discuss something called SWOT analysis SWOT is an acronym and I'll go over in a second it's really something you do during the business planning or business analysis phase and SWOT stands for strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats and that gives you a holistic look at your business let's go through them one by one first our strengths and any different businesses can have different strengths some examples of them and consider which ones are strengths for you maybe you have certain experience in your field certain types of skills maybe design may be programming may be marketing some skill may be extra productivity skill some skills that really set you apart and give you an advantage over your competitors maybe you have access to resources like some software or some machinery or some tools that others maybe don't have maybe you have some insight or an interesting way to differentiate yourself maybe you have money that other people don't have those can be potential strengths that can give you an immediate advantage in a certain business idea on the other hand you might have weaknesses and they are actually quite opposite of each other a strengths can be having funding a weakness can be having no funding and a weakness can be having a small team whereas a strength can be having a lot of skills on your team and a weakness can be lack of resources like time and money things like that and ironically or interestingly what happens is when you're starting out most of these their weaknesses people have small teams little money little resources but as they choose maybe their little niche and they grow into that little niche and they start generating money.
They maybe get some people working with them they acquire resources and they become stronger and stronger and those weaknesses slowly turn into strengths well then all you can begin to hire you have more experience and so over time your weaknesses can turn into strengths but if you have too many weaknesses in the beginning it might be just quite damaging to your business and it might be hard to grow now to create a path for your business for your weaknesses to become strengths you need to see what are the opportunities to explore maybe you're approaching some big market but there's a market sub segment that is underserved and maybe there's opportunity to get into that some specific niche maybe you have some competitor that is weak at the moment or maybe they're distracted or maybe something's happening to the competitor and you can take their customers so that way if you have an opportunity you can start of course in some air with some weaknesses but then quickly turn them into strengths and grow into a bigger business and you always want to look out for potential threats to your business threats can be if your competitors are strong or if there are many of them if there are some economic downturns coming up if you are in a declining market for example like in the 90s the newspaper market and that decline if you have kind of customers who don't pay readily right there sometimes refer to as low end customers or a low end market I don't like that term low end but that's the term or maybe you are actually targeting at too tiny of a niche because you do have to choose your niche carefully if you target it too tiny there's very little money to be made if you target too big it's hard to promote so that's where you evaluate all of this holistically and and then it gives you a sense of is some business idea viable or are there too many weaknesses are there not enough opportunities are there too many threats or is it opposite is there not that many threats and a lot of opportunities and it's going to be easy to turn weaknesses into strengths or weaknesses won't hinder you that much so this is something you need to do during business planning and every once in a while when your business is up and running when you're analyzing how to move forward.
Write a public review