Perform a SWOT Analysis

Benefits of a SWOT Analysis

If you want to move your business forward, you have to dive into the nitty gritty details of your business—and a SWOT analysis can help you do just that. By visualizing your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, you’ll be able to:

• Take advantage of your strengths and opportunities
• Minimize your weaknesses and reduce the impact of any threats
• Fine-tune your business strategy
• Complete a necessary part of your business plan
• Make decisions based on the information you’ve generated
• Explore new ideas for your business

Tip: You don’t need any fancy materials to perform an analysis—just a pen and our free SWOT Analysis Template.

How to Do a SWOT Analysis

The steps to completing a SWOT analysis are simple. However, the more effort and thought you put into your analysis, the more helpful your results will be.

• Define what you’re analyzing. Clearly identify the idea, opportunity or issue you’re analyzing. Whether you’re looking at your business as a whole, assessing a new idea or analyzing a competitor, define it as clearly as you can to better identify relevant factors.
• Work the grid. Analyze your topic using each of the four SWOT criteria. This is not always a linear process and you should feel free to jump around the grid as ideas come to you. For example, as you’re listing strengths, you may realize that a serious risk exists that threatens that particular strength.
• Analyze the results. The idea here is to be brutally honest with yourself. Are there strengths you’re not making the most of, opportunities you’re missing or weaknesses you’re ignoring? Think about each of these factors and how you might take advantage of those that are helpful and fix, mitigate or eliminate those that pose a risk.
• Rinse and repeat. Run a SWOT analysis on a regular basis so that you’re continually fine-tuning your business strategy. Think about doing one each quarter, when you’re assessing a new idea or need assistance making decisions.

Ways to Use Your SWOT Analysis

After you’ve performed a SWOT analysis, you can use it as a reference to help you create a to-do list for your business. You can do this by finding ways to:

• Build on your strengths, such as playing up your great location when marketing.
• Navigate your weaknesses. For example, if you struggle with a lack of expertise, then become more informed or think about hiring someone with experience.
• Explore your opportunities. If there’s a new technology on the market, figure out how it can help your business.
• Protect against and reduce the impact of threats. If rising costs are threatening your business, revisit your pricing strategy or find ways to improve your cash flow.

Tips to Get More Out of Your SWOT Analysis

As you prepare to do a SWOT analysis, consider these tips to help you generate even more ideas:

• Consider doing more than one SWOT analysis—they can be general (covering your whole business) or specific (focusing solely on your customer service, for example).
• Complete the analysis with more than one person—it’s a great idea to have multiple perspectives.
• Do them often to generate even more fresh ideas.

Try the Free SWOT Analysis Template

Our free template will guide you through performing your own SWOT analysis and includes helpful information as you think through your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Download the SWOT Analysis Template.