Identify your business strengths
How can you identify your strengths and weaknesses?
Like every business, your company does some things really well and may occasionally fall short in other areas.
Whatever the situation, every business should thoroughly grasp the full spectrum of its strengths and weaknesses—or risk falling victim to unrealised opportunities or being outsmarted by the competition.
How should you go about identifying these strengths and weaknesses?
Conduct a SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis studies internal and external factors that are helpful or harmful to your business and the way it’s run. This approach focuses on identifying factors in the following 4 categories:
Strengths – The strongest parts of your business model and your most effective selling points. The core competencies of your team and your investments.
Weaknesses – The weakest parts of your business model and weak spots in the sales funnel. What’s lacking in your team and missing from your investments.
Opportunities – Potential leads, investors, events, and even new target markets.
Threats – Potential competitors, reasons investors would cut funding, or negative market developments.
When conducting a SWOT analysis on your own business it is essential to SWOT your competitors at the same time to highlight different practices and where you brand sits in the perception of the customer in relation to your competitors.
At We Need To Talk we consider the following when completing any analysis:
What concerns the CEO or board the most?
What attributes can or should be examined?
What criteria will allow us to accurately evaluate the company’s strengths and weaknesses?
Consult, Question and ask for Feedback
Of course, you’re the expert on your business. But potentially valuable information is possible if you take time to consult with different stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, and employees.
Through formal or informal methods, seek their input into the company’s perceived strengths and weaknesses. There’s a strong likelihood you’ll garner insights into everything from pricing strategy to customer service that you may not otherwise have considered. All of that can be factored into a comprehensive look at what your company does best, and where its efforts might be improved.
Market Analysis
To operate successfully in a changing market, companies should plan their objectives and strategies around their strengths and downplay their weaknesses. This is something that you should continual processes as today’s strengths could turn into tomorrow’s weaknesses as changes occur. Never have we seen that more than in 2020-2021 where many companies have had to pivot hugely to adapt to overnight changes caused by the pandemic.
What could your strengths be?
So many things contribute to the strengths of you business including great employee attitudes, excellent customer service, strong established relationships with customers past and present, leadership in innovation and great integrity or authority in your expert field.
What are your weaknesses?
Weaknesses are the constraints that impede a company’s success in a certain strategic direction. Typical company weaknesses might include inadequate definition of customer for product/market development, confusing policies, poor organisational structure, lack of management involvement, lack of quantitative goals and poor strategic direction.
We Need To Talk can help you with all of this.