Writing a business plan can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be! This series of articles aims to demystify business plans & give you actionable steps to create your own.
So far, we have covered Step 1: Determining your audience; Step 2: Defining your mission, vision, and core values; Step 3: Writing your company description; and Step 4: Creating a market analysis. Step 5 is performing a SWOT analysis.
A SWOT analysis assesses your practice’s internal and external strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. A SWOT analysis is essential for strategy development. To do a SWOT analysis, you need to list your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats on a 2x2 grid, with one square for each of these four areas.
Use the following questions as a guide for your SWOT analysis:
Strengths
1. What do you do well?
2. What are your internal resources?
3. What do others see as your strengths?
Weaknesses
1. What can you improve?
2. Where do you have fewer resources than others?
3. What do others see as your weaknesses?
Opportunities
1. What opportunities are available to you?
2. What trends can you take advantage of?
3. What strengths can be turned into opportunities?
Threats
1. What threats can harm you?2. What is your competition doing?
3. What threats do your weaknesses expose you to?
References
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/4245-swot-analysis.html
https://hbr.org/2021/02/are-you-doing-the-swot-analysis-backwards
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