How SWOT Analysis Can Help Your Business?

You urgently need to undergo a business SWOT analysis, if any of these situations look familiar:

My business is caught up with regular day-to-day operations and I am looking to break free from its mediocrity
Competition is threatening and taking away my calm
I am neck deep in work and really busy with my business all the time, but somehow my business objectives are met at a snail's pace
I am planning to enter a new business venture or launch a new product/service. But I am not sure

If your business troubles seem never ending, then it's the time to go for a business make over.

SWOT analysis or SWOT matrix is a tows matrix which looks at Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of a particular project or your business in general. It is an appropriate tool for strategic planning. Based on this analysis, you can set objectives and goals for your business and get a clearer and more objective picture to base your decisions on.

4 Components of SWOT Analysis

1. Strengths

This is an internal analysis of your company's/product's/service's strengths. Here you can populate your business's USPs, your resource's strength, major reasons why your clients choose you over the competition, etc. You can add every business element that adds to the strengths of your products, services, and business standing.

2. Weaknesses

This is an essential analysis of your company's weaknesses. You can list all the known issues that are preventing your business from reaching its full potential. Sometimes its advisable to get a third-party opinion or customer feedback to really understand the weaknesses of your business.

3. Opportunities

This is an external analysis of the market you are in, and gauging the opportunities that lie ahead for your business. Tracking down opportunities will immensely help you in setting your growth plans and understand competition, business environment, and economic & political issues.

4. Threats

This involves external as well as internal analysis of the possible and probable threats that your business may have in the face of competition, Government policies, economic conditions, markets, trade unions, resource issues, etc.

Benefits of SWOT Analysis in Businesses

It provides a clear view of your strengths, and allows you to build on them to meet your business objectives
It showcases your weaknesses and provides a chance to reverse them
It gives you a sneak peek into the opportunities that lies ahead. Using this you can draft your strategic growth plans based on your strengths and weaknesses
It helps you analyze possible threats to your business, and make necessary changes to the business policies and growth plans. Additionally, it facilitates making supplementary or alternative plans, contingency plans, and so on
One of the major benefits of conducting SWOT analysis is that helps you create matching and converting strategy
It helps you employ a strategy to match your strengths and opportunities; and employ those strategies for converting your weaknesses and threats into your strengths and opportunities

The entire SWOT analysis process brings to light your resources, and provides motivation and the necessary momentum to get going with your business plans despite all odds.

Limitations of SWOT Analysis

The overall SWOT business plan could be misleading or impractical because of the following factors:

If improper data is used to analyze SWOT, incorrect decisions can be made
External analysis may not be exact, as external factors are not in your control
This process involves lot of resources and cost
The analysis could be biased if internal teams wish to showcase only their team's strengths and not weaknesses

Outsourcing SWOT Analysis to O2I

Due to certain limitations that SWOT analysis has, outsourcing the task to professional vendors who can do a better and non-biased job is an option that businesses have. They would also look into areas that you might overlook. This would also avoid wastage of substantial effort and time of your resources, who may be utilized to do core jobs. There are many SWOT analysis vendors in India like Outsource2india who can help you with professional SWOT analysis reports based on which you can build your goals.